From Enemy to Brother

John Connelly

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674068469
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history?The radical shift of Vatican II grew out of a buried history, a theological struggle in Central Europe in the years just before the Holocaust, when a small group of Catholic converts (especially former Jew Johannes Oesterreicher and former Protestant Karl Thieme) fought to keep Nazi racism from entering their newfound church. Through decades of engagement, extending from debates in academic journals, to popular education, to lobbying in the corridors of the Vatican, this unlikely duo overcame the most problematic aspect of Catholic history. Their success came not through appeals to morality but rather from a rediscovery of neglected portions of scripture. From Enemy to Brother illuminates the baffling silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, showing how the ancient teaching of deicide—according to which the Jews were condemned to suffer until they turned to Christ—constituted the Church's only language to talk about the Jews. As he explores the process of theological change, John Connelly moves from the speechless Vatican to those Catholics who endeavored to find a new language to speak to the Jews on the eve of, and in the shadow of, the Holocaust.

1

The Problem of Catholic Racism

To understand how the Catholic Church has dealt with its ancient legacy of anti-Judaism, one must first question the widely held belief that the church—an ostensible “bulwark against the disorders afflicting the age”—opposed all racism, and thus also modern antisemitism. The point is not that Catholicism was especially racist. Indeed, probably no other institution more forcefully insisted on humankind’s unity when racists doubted that unity early in the twentieth century. In the 1920s the institutional church stood farther above race and nation than did international socialism, and formed the strongest bulwark against race improvement—eugenics, a science that was extolled by right-thinking people across the globe.1 The church never ceased welcoming converts throughout the world regardless of ethnicity or race, and from the 1920s, the Vatican began a drive to promote the formation of native clergies.2 In October 1926, Pius XI consecrated the first six Chinese bishops, and between 1922 and 1939 the number of native priests in mission countries went from 2,670 to over 7,000.3 In a move directed against the racism of fascist Italy, Pius XII elevated two black African priests to the episcopacy just after the outbreak of World War II. By that point, Japan had two bishops and over a hundred native priests.4

The point is rather that Catholicism can vary significantly across boundaries, and some national variants proved more open to racism than others. Before World War I, the Vatican had to prod the church in the United States to ordain African American priests, and even sent missionary priests to North America to achieve this purpose.5 Yet this was more an intervention in practice than in teaching: no one questioned the legitimacy of sacraments extended to American blacks, either of baptism or ordination. No one claimed that blacks were excluded from Christ’s promise of everlasting life. In German-speaking Europe, however, Catholicism opened itself to racist theology after World War I, and priests and influential intellectuals told the Catholic faithful that Jews—that region’s “racial other” by common consent—bore a second original sin, an Erbsünde signaling special propensity to evil, transmitted from generation to generation and not erased by baptism. That sacrament was not pointless, but priests had to be careful when dispensing it to a people with an inclination to deceit. Once Jews entered the church, they had be kept from high offices and made to “work hard on themselves” over generations to undo the genetic inheritance of a supposed apostasy that took place hundreds of years earlier. In effect, a Jew could not become a full-fledged Christian in his or her lifetime.

This view will seem strange to contemporary Christians. Did not Christ instruct his followers to go and baptize all nations (Matthew 28)? Can a Christian remain Christian while claiming that Jews should be exempted from this mission?6 Did not Paul write that after baptism there is “neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28)? Yet German theologians of the prewar era believed they faced another “fact”: that human races composed part of the natural order, and that these races consisted of persons having shared characteristics. Given that the church derives its ethics from natural law, the question then became how to adapt moral teaching to what seemed to be the realm of nature. Early church councils had rejected as heretical the claim that nature was a place of evil—this was Manichaeism. Thomas Aquinas later wrote that grace presumed nature. But what was nature? Because the Catholic Church was not a scientific institution, it relied upon scientists for an answer. This continues to be true in our day when opponents of abortion depend on findings from microbiology. Science does not always speak with a clear voice, but the church had learned from disputes about heliocentrism the perils of ignoring scientific findings altogether. Church leaders therefore proceeded with extreme caution during the 1920s when the scientific community declared “race” to be a reality in the world of nature. Especially within Central Europe, Catholics speculated about God’s purpose in creating humans races. If races belonged to nature, which was essentially good, what duties did Catholics have toward them?

In the years before 1945, German-speaking Catholics turned to two priests for answers: the developmental biologist Hermann Muckermann and the anthropologist Wilhelm Schmidt.7 Muckermann was a Jesuit who directed the section for eugenics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin, and Schmidt, a member of the missionary order Society of the Divine Word, was a full professor at the University of Vienna. When Munich’s Cardinal Michael Faulhaber met Adolf Hitler at the Obersalzberg in November 1936, he confessed to having spent many hours in the company of Muckermann in an effort to understand Catholics’ duties to “protect the race.”8 In August 1943, at the height of the Nazis’ racial war, Germany’s bishops met for a yearly conference at Fulda, and decided to ask Hermann Muckermann how they might formulate views about race that were scientifically and theologically accurate.9 Muckermann had also spoken at length on the question of race to Eugenio Pacelli—later Pius XII—during the latter’s time as Nuncio in Germany in the 1920s.10 Schmidt and Muckermann directed powerful institutions showcasing the life sciences to the world in the capital cities of Vienna and Berlin, and Catholic publishers vied for the opportunity to spread their ideas about race. When it came to the Jews, the two agreed with their secular counterparts that baptism did not suddenly erase the Jews’ genetic traits, and for them that included the stain of having killed God.

By 1943 Hermann Muckermann had published over 250 works on topics including eugenics, the environment, healthy mothers and families, the importance of breast-feeding, heredity, survival of the fittest, and “differentiated procreation.” Thirty editions had been printed of his works on race alone. By the time the Nazis ousted him from the directorship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1933 for being insufficiently radical, Muckermann had done more than anyone to introduce Catholics to “moderate eugenics.” But if one scrutinizes his works today, one finds little that seems inspiring, either as science or as Catholicism, assuming that one imagines science as involving the scientific method and Catholicism an appeal to religious ideas. In a popular book of 1928, Muckermann invoked the superiority of the “Nordic race” but made no mention of experiments or other evidence, let alone scripture. Rather than engender respect for the limits of the knowable, his knowledge of science gave him license to speculate. With no discussion of method, he averred that the Nordic race had more “creative initiative” than other races, which was shown in the “creation of states, the taming of nature, in science and in the arts.” Anything of value in world cultures Muckermann credited a priori to Nordic influence. “The blood of the Lombards expressed itself in the Italian Renaissance,” Muckermann wrote. Yet he made no effort to study the phenotypes, let alone the blood, of the “heroes” of that age. “Nordic” blood had not trickled into the Iberian peninsula, he speculated, and therefore the Spaniards had no Renaissance.11

Muckermann accorded to race the power to unlock secrets not only of European but also world history. “Mongolids,” he wrote, were like “deep currents” in the sea, and “violent storms have to be unleashed in order to set them in motion, but once this is accomplished, then the mainland itself is not safe. A yellow danger is to be feared in the European world all the more, because the numeric superiority and the equally instinctual loyalty to nature preserve the primeval character and the power of life. The only really overcrowded country is Japan, which will perhaps unleash the yellow flood.” Blacks were an inferior race with “modest” cultural contributions, more influenced by “direct sensory impulses” than other races.”12

Because race acted as an incubator for things of real value, Muckermann opposed marriage between members of different races “unless a real enriching of the hereditary substance [Erbbestand] may be expected.”13 Although Muckermann claimed Jews represented a “racial mixture of Near Eastern and oriental genetic material,” with “peculiar gifts” including “an ability to empathize with others at a spiritual level,” he opposed marriages between Jews and Germans (the operative category was not “Christians”), because they would erode Germandom.14 He explained why in a book published just as the Nazis were coming to power:

Our first concern is to maintain the untouched, hereditary, elemental nature of the German people … The present age, which desires the renewal of the German people from its deepest biological sources, causes us to direct particular attention to this goal. One cause for concern is without doubt the swelling numbers of persons of Jewish origin in essential branches of our cultural life.15

Like Nazi thinkers, Muckermann assumed that race determined culture. “The bodily determines the spiritual,” he wrote in 1928.16 Until restrained by the Vatican in 1931, Muckermann advocated elements of negative eugenics, including isolation of persons deemed unworthy, that is, those who did not help “bear culture.” Muckermann’s efforts to register innate human quality involved measuring intelligence and also people’s susceptibility to dental cavities. With the human soul a subordinate entity, Catholic sacraments came to seem a nonissue, and Muckermann warned against marriages between Jews and Christians, even if the Jews were baptized. “Let no one defend themselves on the grounds of baptism making a Jew a Christian,” he reasoned, “baptism makes a person a child of God, but never changes his basic hereditary structure.”17

Despite our difficulty finding anything recognizably Christian in such writings, Muckermann traveled easily in the Catholic elite of the interwar years, entertaining top politicians of the Center Party as well as Nuncio Pacelli in a well-appointed villa in the Schlachtensee section of Berlin.18 The Jesuit met Pius XI in 1923 when in Rome to give a major address at a congress on racial hygiene sponsored by Benito Mussolini.19 He secured a second appointment at the Vatican in the 1930s, in a time when Pius XI and state secretary Pacelli were viewed as staunch opponents of racial doctrines.20 Why did they consult Hermann Muckermann to combat racism?

Answers are not easy. In his age, he was not seen as a racist. Far from sympathizing with Nazism, Muckermann had close ties to the anti-Nazi resistance, and he spirited two endangered German Center Party politicians across the border to the Netherlands after Hitler’s seizure of power.21 His brother Friedrich, also a Jesuit, directed Catholic resistance activities from Oldenzaal in the Netherlands. From the closing days of World War I, Hermann Muckermann had been a close friend of the Center Party’s Erwin Respondek, an American agent who later informed the United States of Germany’s plans to invade the Soviet Union.22 Though careful not to get too involved in resistance activities, Muckermann secured contacts with General Franz Halder of the Wehrmacht General Staff for Respondek, from which he learned details of Hitler’s meeting with army officers of July 31, 1940, on the planned attack on Russia.23 A popular speaker on family and marriage, who “sought to define a middle course between Nazis’ theories of racial superiority and traditional Church positions,” Muckermann was considered a dangerous ideological rival by the Nazi regime and was kept under surveillance and forbidden to speak in public after 1936.24

After the war, Hermann Muckermann’s star rose again. In 1948, at the age of seventy-one, he resumed his academic career at Berlin’s Technical University.25 He was charged with rebuilding the Berlin Institute for Anthropology and in 1952 received the Grosses Verdienstkreuz (Cross of the Order of Merit) of the Federal Republic. The popularity in German Catholic circles of this tall priest-professor with dark, piercing eyes lasted until his death in 1962. To historians, he remains an enigma, though he fits perfectly into Catholic discourse on race of the German lands.

The other great Catholic expert on race of that day, Father Wilhelm Schmidt of Vienna, supposedly represented a moderate Austrian approach to human sciences, emphasizing culture and spirit over physics and matter.26 In 1923, Schmidt so impressed Pius XI that the Pontiff subsidized a museum of ethnology for Schmidt at the Vatican, and he gained a reputation as an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1. The Problem of Catholic Racism
• 2. The Race Question
• 3. German Volk and Christian Reich
• 4. Catholics against Racism and Antisemitism
• 5. Conspiring to Make the Vatican Speak
• 6. Conversion in the Shadow of Auschwitz
• 7. Who Are the Jews?
• 8. The Second Vatican Council
• 9. A Particular Mission for the Jews
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index