The Holocaust, Vatican II, and the Crisis in the Catholic Church

[Stone]

The Holocaust, Vatican II, and the Crisis in the Catholic Church



Rabbi Heschel and Cardinal Bea look at a Yiddish newspaper in the offices of the American Jewish Committee in 1963.

Robert Morrison, Remnant Columnist | April 15, 2025

Appallingly, there are some who still think that the best cure for anti-Semitism is anti-Catholicism. We see this especially from those who insist that we cannot proclaim the Kingship of Christ.

In his Augustin Bea: The Cardinal of Unity, Bea’s longtime secretary, Fr. Stjepan Schmidt, quoted a letter to Bea from Nahum Goldmann in the name of the World Conference of Jewish Organizations:

“Now that the Ecumenical Council is coming to an end and the declaration on relations with the Jewish people has been approved with such a resounding majority, I feel the need to express to you both personally and in the name of the organizations I represent our gratitude for the wise yet also courageous manner in which you and your secretariat have brought this far-from-easy declaration to success. I am sure that Your Eminence knows that we are not happy about several changes in respect to the previous draft, but in this sinful world nobody ever gets everything he wants . . .” (p. 524)

Why did Mr. Goldmann, a prominent Zionist, express his displeasure with the final draft of Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate? His Jewish organizations had not made any concessions in exchange for the Council’s pro-Jewish document, and we do not have any substantiated evidence that those organizations paid Bea to modify Catholic teaching. So what was it that Goldman thought gave the Jewish organizations a right to demand changes from the Catholic Church?

To begin to understand the intriguing dynamic that prompted Mr. Goldmann to scold Cardinal Bea in his letter of appreciation, we can begin with Jules Isaac. Norman Tobias’s 2008 Master’s Thesis helps us appreciate Isaac’s role at Vatican II:

“How ironic that the primary catalyst in connection with the reorientation of the Catholic Church's attitudes toward Jews and Judaism should have been a Jew. Having lost his wife, daughter and son-in-law in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, septuagenarian French Jewish historian Jules Isaac emerged from the Second World War to wage a single-handed campaign, in words and in deeds, for the rectification of Roman Catholic teachings about Jews and Judaism, contemptuous teachings, argued Isaac, that over-reached the bounds of scriptural and historical accuracy, contemptuous teachings, contended Isaac, that had sustained and nourished other varieties of anti-semitism for nearly two millennia. We now know that it did not occur to John XXIII to add to the agenda of Vatican II the relationship between the Church and the Jews until one week after the close of the pre-preparatory phase of Vatican II when John XXIII met one-on-one with Jules Isaac.”

Mr. Tobias subsequently wrote a valuable book on Isaac, Jewish Conscience of the Church, but this brief abstract gets to the heart of the matter: Isaac believed that the Catholic Church had promoted anti-Semitism, which had contributed to the horrors of the Holocaust.

In his Jewish Conscience of the Church, Tobias provided Isaac’s recollections from his June 13,  1960 meeting with John XXIII:

“I then explained my request regarding [Christian] teaching and its historical grounding. But how, in a few minutes, could I explain this spiritual ghetto in which the Church had ultimately confined old Israel — along with the physical ghetto? I described the bookends which sandwiched the Christian epoch, at one end a pagan antisemitism, incoherent and preposterous in its accusations and at the other end, racial antisemitism, Hitlerian, the most virulent of our day, though no less incoherent and preposterous. But between the two, the only variety [of antisemitism] that was coherent and by which one could be taken in, is that which has engendered a certain Christian theology, by force of circumstances, since the Jewish negation constituted the primary impediment to Christian proselytizing in the gentile world.” (p. 187)

There are several important points in this excerpt from Isaac’s description of his discussion with John XXIII: anti-Semitism predated Christianity; Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not Christian in nature; and, according to Isaac, Christian anti-Semitism was in response to the way in which the “Jewish negation” hindered Christian proselytism. By “Jewish negation” Isaac meant the Jewish assertion that Jesus is not the Messiah, God, and King.

In hindsight, John XXIII might have done well to inform Mr. Isaac of an important consideration, which Dr. Joseph Shaw noted in a recent article — that “the sin of antisemetism was defined and condemned by the Holy Office more than a generation before Vatican II, in 1928”:

“Moved by this charity, the Apostlic See has protected the same people [the Jews] against unjust vexations, and just as it reproves all ill-will and animosity among peoples, so also does it condemn, in the strongest possible terms, hatred against the people that was once chosen by God, namely that hatred that is now usually termed ‘Antisemitism’.” (Sacra Congregatio Sancti Officii, Decretum de consociatione vulgo ‘Amici Israël’ abolenda, March 25, 1928, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 20 (1928): 104.)

Several prominent Jewish leaders worked with Cardinal Bea to promote two primary Jewish aims at the Council: the exoneration of the Jewish people from any enduring guilt in connection with the Crucifixion of Jesus, and disavowal of Catholic teaching that the Jewish people should (like all people) be converted to the true Christian Faith.

As it turned out, though, several prominent Jewish leaders worked with Cardinal Bea to promote two primary Jewish aims at the Council: the exoneration of the Jewish people from any enduring guilt in connection with the Crucifixion of Jesus, and disavowal of Catholic teaching that the Jewish people should (like all people) be converted to the true Christian Faith. Because this latter point has received so little attention since Vatican II, it is worth examining it in detail.


The Jewish Interest in Religious Liberty at Vatican II

In his They Have Uncrowned Him, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre asserted that the B’nai B’rith had asked Cardinal Bea to promote religious liberty at Vatican II:

“‘Freemasons, what do you want? What do you ask of us?’ Such is the question that Cardinal Bea went to ask the B’nai B’rith before the beginning of the Council. The interview was announced by all the papers of New York, where it took place. And the Freemasons answered that what they wanted was ‘religious liberty!’ — that is to say, all the religions put on the same footing. The Church must no longer be called the only true religion, the sole path of salvation, the only one accepted by the State. Let us finish with these inadmissible privileges. And so, declare religious liberty. Well, they got it: it was Dignitatis humanae.” (p. 214)

Although the Jewish B’nai B’rith had been founded by Freemasons, there does not appear to be a current connection between B’nai B’rith and Freemasonry. Other than that, though, the substance of Archbishop Lefebvre’s claim appears entirely consistent with the statements below from Cardinal Bea and Jewish sources.

In her study on The Church and the Jews: The Struggle at Vatican Council II, Judith Hershcopf affirmed that the B’nai B’rith lobbied the Vatican on the question of the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae:

“In March 1964 a B'nai B'rith delegation of three met with Pope Paul VI and communicated the ‘profound interest’ of the Jewish community in the proposed declaration on religious freedom and Catholic-Jewish relations.”

As Archbishop Lefebvre observed above, this document (along with others promulgated at the Council) ultimately opposed what the pre-Vatican II popes had taught. Hershcopf noted that conservative Council Fathers (such as Archbishop Lefebvre) opposed Dignitatis Humanae because it undermined the authority of the Church and promoted indifferentism:

“There were prelates indifferent to the Jewish question, but strongly opposed to the statement on religious liberty for fear it would be used to undermine the authority of the church and encourage indifferentism or Communism. The ultra-conservatives were opposed to both.”

This observation is critical because Archbishop Lefebvre and other opponents of Dignitatis Humanae knew during the Council that it would promote precisely the evils that have plagued the Church for the past sixty years: the undermining of the Church’s authority, and encouragement for the religious indifferentism that is so evident both in the widespread apostasy from the Faith as well as the rampant cafeteria Catholicism that dominates everywhere, from diocesan catechism classes to the Vatican. As Archbishop Lefebvre knew, only those who opposed the Catholic Church would benefit from this.

Aside from Jules Isaac, one of the most important Jewish influences at the Council was Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Heschel’s May 22, 1962 memorandum to Bea, On Improving Catholic-Jewish Relations, requested that the Council would respect Jews as Jews rather than try to convert them:

“Thus, it is our sincere hope that the Ecumenical Council would acknowledge the integrity and permanent preciousness of Jews and Judaism.”

How, though, could the Council do this without completely repudiating the Great Commission? In his The Church and the Jewish People, Cardinal Bea explained how the Council attempted to thread the needle in Nostra Aetate:

“Another difficulty I have often encountered in contacts with Jews is the fear that our only desire is to ‘convert’ them — a word which all too often brings back very painful memories, and that whatever the Church does is ultimately directed to this hidden purpose. And by ‘convert’ is understood, if not use of actual force and pressure, at least the intention of seducing men by subtle argument and astute manipulation to betray their own conscience. However, on this count also the Church has nothing to hide. In the conciliar document she explicitly and openly declares that it is both her duty and her desire to preach Christ who is ‘the way, the truth and the life,’ in whom God has reconciled all things to himself. From the beginning it is pointed out that the aim of the document is to investigate all that men have in common and which encourages them to live together and fulfill their common destiny; not, therefore, to dwell upon what divides and differentiates them.” (pp. 19-20)

Thus, according to Bea, the Church must continue to “preach Christ,” but without any real effort to “convert” non-Catholics (including Jews). Bea continued by describing the role of Dignitatis Humanae in further distancing the Church from its Great Commission:

“In addition, in the conciliar document on religious liberty, the Church solemnly declares as her own teaching the duty and the right of every man to pursue truth and justice according to the dictates of his own conscience, unimpeded and untrammeled. In the Declaration with which this commentary deals, she exhorts her own members to recognize, preserve and promote whatever is spiritually, morally, socially or culturally valuable in different religions from their own.” (p. 20)

With these and many other words along the same lines, Bea essentially confirmed Archbishop Lefebvre’s description of Dignitatis Humanae from above: “The Church must no longer be called the only true religion, the sole path of salvation, the only one accepted by the State.”

Although we could add other similar statements to further demonstrate the reality that Jewish leaders and organizations played a significant role in shaping Vatican II’s statements on religious liberty, the last to consider here is from Mr. Tobias, in his prologue to Jewish Conscience of the Church, in which he quotes Gregory Baum at length:

“‘Passages in the New Testament say that those who believe and are baptized will be saved, and those who refuse to believe will be damned. Some passages also say that the hard-heartedness of the Jews leaves them in darkness, deserted by God,’ according to Catholic theologian Gregory Baum, another of those who drafted Nostra aetate (No. 4). ‘They say that salvation is in Jesus and in no other name, and that the Gospel is the single offer of redemption for the sinful world. (Of course, there are also passages with a different message.) On the basis of the exclusivist biblical texts, the Church began to teach extra ecclesiam nulla salus,’ (outside the Church there is no salvation.) After the Holocaust, the Church, recognizing, not without shame, the cultural impact of its anti-Jewish discourse and the implications this discourse had in legitimizing antisemitism, was to read Paul’s letter to the Romans in a new way.” (p. xviii)

Thus, according to Tobias and Baum, the Holocaust nudged the Church at Vatican II to abandon its teaching that there is no salvation outside the Church.

For those who might not know Fr. Gregory Baum’s credentials beyond having helped draft Nostra Aetate, it is worth noting that he was a Jewish convert to Catholicism who had been criticized at the Council as not having sincerely converted. We can perhaps gauge the depth of his conversion from his 2017 obituary:

“He wrote that he considered resigning from the priesthood but did not go through with the formality. He later married a divorced ex-nun who he says ‘did not mind that, when we moved to Montreal in 1986, I met Normand, a former priest, with whom I fell in love.’”

Thus we have a striking emblem of the cause and effect of the crisis in the Church.

There may seem to be little value in dredging up the history of Vatican II at this point but, appallingly, there are some who still think that the best cure for anti-Semitism is anti-Catholicism. We see this especially from those who insist that we cannot proclaim the Kingship of Christ. They seem oblivious to the irrefutable reality that this is precisely the type of anti-Catholic bigotry that has caused hundreds of millions of souls to abandon the religion that they once considered to be the path to salvation. As our Lord told us, we should be willing to suffer anything rather than that catastrophe:

“For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels: and then will He render to every man according to his works.” (Matthew 16: 26-27)

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Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us!