How astonishingly good a read is John Connelly's 2012 FROM ENEMY TO BROTHER: THE REVOLUTION IN CATHOLIC TEACHING ON THE JEWS 1933 - 1965!
The book's title includes two dates: 1933 and 1965.
-- In January 1933 Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany and quickly drew upon centuries of ingrained European feelings about Jews ranging from superiority to hatred.
-- In December 1965 Pope Paul VI closed the three year old Second Vatican Council. Its "Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions NOSTRA AETATE ("In our times") included a brief Chapter Four on the Jews described as "Abraham's Stock." In a few Latin sentences, the Council fathers reversed and intended to end definitively centuries of anti-Jewish preaching by the Roman Catholic Church.
From the days of the New Testament, the earliest followers of Jesus of Nazareth wrestled with such questions as: must a pagan become a Jew before becoming a Christian? Initially, that was a decision only leading Jewish Christians could make. And in the ACTS OF THE APOSTLES we see Christian Jews gathered in Jerusalem laying down conditions allowing pagans to be baptized and enter into fellowship with Jews who followed Jesus. Thus it was rules laid down by Jews that made it possible for Greeks and other heathen to follow Jesus as brothers. Only Jews, initially, had such power in the Church.
According to Professor John Connelly, John the Evangelist, long before he died, stopped considering himself a Jew. By contrast, Paul of Tarsus never ceased being and feeling himself to be Jewish. Indeed, it was the 20th Century re-emphasis on three agonizing chapters (9 - 10 and 11) of Paul's Letter to the Romans that allowed Catholic theologians to replace John's and Matthew's ostensibly anti-Jewish strictures with an astonishingly "new" conception of the divine mission of Jews guaranteed by God independently of any role allotted to Jews within a purely Christian narrative. Admittedly for centuries a Christianity dominated by converted pagans and their offspring acted as if they could push Jews around. And they definitely arrogated to themselves the privilege of telling God how He wanted them to mistreat Jews. But since December 1965, Catholics are required to believe that Jews need no Catholic Christian's "by your leave" either to become Christian or not to.
The author mentions scores of thinkers from the 1840s until 2012 who are relevant to the shift from contempt to love by Catholics for Jews. Leon Bloy (1846 - 1917) is of early importance as are Jacques Maritain, Cardinal Richard Cushing and many more. Connelly builds his narrative around two men of the 20th Century who, more than anyone else, created the ideas that, after many fits and starts, revolutionized the Catholic Church in December 1965. They are Catholic converts Karl Thieme (from Protestantism) and John Oesterreicher (from Judaism).
Despite its complexity and huge canvas, the 300 pages of narrative followed by 84 pages of Notes, Acknowledgments and Index that make up FROM ENEMY TO BROTHER are easy to follow, grasp and summarize. The author's argument is that without Hitler's Holocaust/Shoah, Catholic bishops and the pope would never have bothered at Rome in 1965 radically to redefine the Church's attitude toward Jews. Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century, most Catholic leaders were not in possession of words or conceptual frameworks for thinking of the Jews as had Jesus their brother Jew. But Hitler's slaughter of six million Jews made further Catholic silence and passivity unthinkable. The Scriptural key turned out to be Romans Chs. 9-11. There the Apostle Paul tortured himself with questions about why all Jews did not follow his example and follow Christ. But worth our remembering is that no other Jew had been struck down by God himself on the road to Damascus.
By October 1965 when NOSTRA AETATE was approved by a vote of 2,221 against only 88 bishops, there was a radical new firm consensus: within the Catholic Church the Jews were the root; converted Christians, should they have first been pagans, were humble wild branches elected by the mercy of God for salvation by grafting on to Israel. The Jews have always had and retain today their own unique mission from God: a mission to be accepted but not to be defined or curtailed by Christians. Jews do not need to be baptized in order to do God's covenanted will.
Beyond a sense of Christian guilt and shame for having allowed the Shoah to happen, at the pragmatic/genetic/interpersonal level, NOSTRA AETATE and its fourth chapter on the Jews owes much to the fact that a very large percentage of the thinkers rethinking old negative thoughts were themselves Catholic converts, some from Protestantism (e.g. Jacques Maritain, who, however, boasted that he was now tribally Jewish through marriage to Jewish wife Raissa) but more converted from Judaism (most of them also denying that they thereby ceased to be Jews).
Also of crucial importance was that at some point before October 1965 key church leaders at Vatican II, especially Cardinal Augustin Bea, S.J., began not only reaching out personally to Jews but more importantly listened to Jews. Finally, among Jewish thinkers being listened to were first class students of the Christian New Testament. Prominent Jews paying close attention to Vatican II between 1963 and 1965 included Rabbi Arthur Gilbert (U.S. National Council of Christians and Jews), Joseph Lichten (B'nai B'rith), Rabbis A. James Rudin and Gilbert S. Rosenthal and others (Ch. 8).
Professor Connelly showcases the friendship that sprang up between Cardinal Bea and Abraham Heschel. "... Cardinal Bea found a new language to talk about Jews only after he began talking to Jews" (Ch 8, p. 249). Notably Bea interacted with "the American rabbi of Polish origin Abraham J. Heschel," a theologian, like Bea, trained in Germany. Heschel's message to Bea was, "Jews want to be known, and understood and respected as Jews." No one, not even the Pope whom he met, could forget Heschel's ringing declaration that between forced conversion to Christianity and being gassed at Auschwitz, he would choose Auschwitz (Ch 8, p. 257)!
Echoing Heschel, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich of B'nai B'rith at a crucial point of Vatican II intervened to insist that the Council not distort its own Christian scripture, especially Saint Paul. The Jews would still be with and beloved by God at the end of time. It was also, according to Paul, the Gentiles who had to "come in" to enter fully the "people of God." Consensus emerged among the Council's fathers that the relation of Christians and Jews remained indeed in some respects "a mystery" but it was no longer a permissibly hostile one. The Council in the end tacitly accepted that Catholics cease actively trying to convert Jews. All Jews asked was that Christians treat them as the Jesus of the New Testament would surely treat them: reverently, thankfully, even as "elder brothers" in the Faith of Abraham.
One happy result of Catholic attention to Jews at Vatican II was that in the early 1960s Jews found it to their distinct advantage to know the New Testament -- in some cases better than their Catholic interlocutors. Jews made sure that the Second Vatican Council did not speak of them with language incompatible with the kindest passages of the New Testament.
It is very hard to think of bad things to say about History Professor John Connelly's 2012 FROM ENEMY TO BROTHER: THE REVOLUTION IN CATHOLIC TEACHING ON THE JEWS 1933 - 1965. Beyond three or four typos and an omission or two (e.g. Avery Dulles, S.J.) in the book's Index, I have nothing negative to point to.
Bottom Line: FROM ENEMY TO BROTHER is splendid. It is a first step, not a last one, for readers to understand how Catholic thinking on the Jews changed after Hitler and the Holocaust. Professor John Connelly piles on the anecdotes to make his case. One he may not know of is how much Boston's Cardinal Richard Cushing's ecumenical thinking at Vatican II and elsewhere came from simply knowing, loving and cherishing his favorite sister's Jewish husband -- as a Jew. No dogma or Scripture was going to convince Richard Cushing that his brother-in-law would roast forever in hell simply for being a Jew! And if that brother-in-law died, the Cardinal of Boston would pray that his sister would marry another Jew. Of such anecdotes along with shifts in high theology was the Second Vatican Council made.
-OOO-
