Dear Friends,
I am pleased to let you know that I have been appointed the J.B.
Smallman
Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of History
at the
University of Western Ontario for the first half of the next academic
year.
So Ann and I will be leaving for London, Ontario at the end of
August until
Christmas. Just what the implications for this Newsletter are
as yet unclear.
I shall hope to establish an E-mail connection through the University
of
Western Ontario, and will also try to arrange to have messages
forwarded from
here. But there may be some unavoidable interruptions or delays,
for which I
apologise in advance. But perhaps, in return, there may be a chance
to see
some of you in Ontario or nearby while I am there. That would
be a
welcome opportunity for me. It would also help if I could prepare
Newsletter
material in advance. I therefore repeat my invitation to you all
to send in
comments or contributions. I would also like to ask those who
have books out
for review (Fraser, Bergen, Ericksen, Friedrichs) to let me have
your copy as
soon as possible. In the meanwhile the June issue will come to
you a week
late as I have to be in Munich for a conference on the German
Church Struggle,
on which I will report later. By contrast, I will try and get
the September
issue off to you before I leave Vancouver. JSC
Contents: 1) Pius XII and the Jews 2) The Hidden Encyclical 3)
Conference
proceedings: Amer. Cath.Hist. Ass. 4) Conference announcement
- Holocaust and
Reconciliation 5) Book reviews - Raabe, SED Staat und katholische
Kirche -
Sugate, Japanese Christians
1) Pius XII and the Jews: Considerable comment, with a wide range
of opinion,
not much of it historical, has reached me about the recent Vatican
statement which was reviewed here last month. On the one side,
several Jewish
commentators treated the document sceptically, showing an unwillingness
to
believe that the Catholic Church, after so many centuries, could
really be
changing its doctrinal stance. Others expressed disappointment
that
the statement did not go far enough. But Rabbi Mark Shook of St
Louis,
Missouri is surely right to say that "our expectations must
be focussed on
the possible, not the impossible. No Pope will allow for open
and frank
criticism of a predecessor. There is too much theology and church
history
concerning the role of the pope to allow for critical review of
one pope by
another.. . .This is not the end of the process. We need to give
the church
time and space to allow reflection to continue. In a mere generation,
the
Catholic Church has swept away the shadow of prejudice and ignorance
from its
official pronouncements on Jews and Judaism. How long will it
take before the
sweeping reaches down to the pew?" On the Christian side,
opinion was also
mixed. The leadingU.S. Catholic journal, America, commented that
"the
document reflected two concerns - to defend the Church against
calumny and to
express repentance. The defensive motif predominates. . . .The
horrors of the
Holocaust are attributed not to religious anti-Judaism but to
nationalism and
racism hostile to both Christianity andJudaism alike. This leaves
unsettled
how far religious prejudice nourished secular antisemitism. "John
Paul II has
frequently deplored the Holocaust but has been reticent in speaking
of
the church's responsibility." We shall have to wait for a
further
personal pronouncement expected during the coming jubilee year.
Kenneth
Woodward, writing in Newsweek on this topic "in defence of
Pius XII" claimed
that "No one person, Hitler excepted, was responsible for
the Holocaust. And
no one person, Pius XII included, could have prevented it. It's
time to lay
off this pope." In Britain, the leading church historian
Sir Owen
Chadwick,who has written extensively about the Papacy, believed
the document
was inadequate, since "No one can be convincingly repentant
about someone
else's crimes - or in this case someone else's failure to resist
crime as
bravely as they should. If they cannot be convincing by the nature
of the
exercise, the words will sound hollow, and hollow words are better
not
spoken. . . . Nothing that anyone could ever say in the way of
apology or
sorrow in repentance can ever be adequate; anything that is said
is bound
to be resented. If you wish to avoid resentment (which is a good
thing to
avoid), say nothing. . . History is much too complex to be painted
with a
brush that daubs a few crude red or purple lines. The legends
are a daub,
you cannot refute them with a different daub, they cannot be covered
up by
shovelling on whitewash. The only thing that corrects them is
more history
and that takes time." Whatever the merits or otherwise of
such declarations
of repentance - which are surely more appropriate than the
former triumphalism - they are no substitute for historical research.
But Chadwick is right, that takes time. How many scholars have
in factfully
absorbed the 11 volumes of the Actes et documents relatifs ala
seconde
guerre mondiale? These are an indispensable place to start for
historians of
Pius XII and his diplomacy, even if sometimes, as recently in
the Tablet, a
lady journalist used these in a highly apologetic manner only..
But see also
H.Favre's highly critical analysis of these documents, L'eglise
catholique
face aufascisme et au nazisme - reviewed here in Newsletter no
7,
August1995.JSC
2) Frank Coppa has contributed, in The Catholic Historical
Review, January
1998, vol LXXXIV, no 1, pp 63-72,. a valuable guide to the "reception"
of the
"Hidden Encyclical" of1939 in analysing the various
books and articles which
have recently appeared on this topic.
3) The American Catholic Historical Association held its spring
meeting at
Marian College, Indianapolis on March 27-28th. Of particular relevance
to
members of this list were three panels. The first examined "Priests
and
Pastors in the Third Reich" and included a paper by Doris
Bergen, who asked
whether theWehrmacht chaplains were Christian soldiers or Nazi
priests. Using
two examples, one Protestant and one Catholic, Bergen demonstrated
that
German military chaplains responded to the demands of their tasks
in various
ways, from adopting soldierly ways to identify with their comrades
at the
front to appealing (ultimately in vain) to army officers to prevent
the
killing of Jewish children. Bergen exploited the records of the
Reich Ministry
of Church Affairs to argue that the complex selection process
produced
military chaplains who were generally older, more nationalist
clergymen.
Members of the Confessing Church, other independent-minded clergy
and
aggressive "German Christians" were all screened out.
Bergen concluded that
"the moderate nature of many chaplains" made the service
"an effective vehicle
for legitimization of the Nazi regime". John Delaney contributed
a paper which
examined the role of Catholic priests in "opposing Nazi anti-Polish
racial
policy measures directed at Bavarian peasants". By inviting
Poles,
mainly forced labour recruits on Bavarian farms, to Mass, including
them in
the local spiritual community, giving them small gifts and instructing
parishioners "to treat Polish fellow-Catholics as co-religionists,
not
'sub-human racial threats'", parish priests demonstrated
a high level of
leadership (in the absence of support from the ecclesiastical
leadership). Kyle Jantzen gave a paper on the politics of pastoral
appointments in the German Church Struggle. Arguing that local
church
history often fails to correspond with the high church politics
of the
Naziera, Jantzen used the example of pastoral appointments in
Nauen (Brandenburg) to illustrate how parish patrons, local
political authorities, parish clergy, lay leaders, district synods
and
Land church authorities combined to appoint pastors. As they engaged
in this
process, local clergy and laity enjoyed " a significant range
of freedom in
which to act" and displayed the willingness to articulate
practical and
ideological grievances against potential pastors.The second panel
of note
dealt with the Catholic responses to war, and included a paper
by Frank
Buscher of the Christian Brothers University (and Canadian Department
of
Justice, Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Section). Buscher
detailed
the work of Cardinal Josef Frings in dealing with the German refugees
from 1945-1955, demonstrating the dilemma Frings and others faced
between many
refugees' desire to return to their former homes, their frustration
with a
prolonged existence in temporary camps, and the difficulties of
integrating
them into post-war Germany. A third panel had an interesting contribution
by
Jose M. Sanchez on Pius XII, which took a different approach to
the question
of that pope's response to Nazism and the Holocaust. Rather than
an austere
monarch of the church, Sanchez argued that Pius was infact a shy
but warm
personality, a lonely man in a lonely job, who simply wasn't prepared
for the
crises he faced. Hampered by his diplomatic background and his
habit of
looking at both sides of every problem, Pius did not have the
confidence or
experience to be the pastor that the Roman Catholic Church needed
in World War
Two. (Ed.note: This last sentence should surely be questioned.
Pius had every
confidence, as well as the experience, in his own abilities as
a diplomat.
Whether these were the right qualities at that juncture is still
a matter of
debate.) (Contributed by Kyle Jantzen, Saskatoon)
4) The 5th Biennial Conference on Christianity and the Holocaust
will be held
from October 18-19th at the Princeton Marriott Forrestal Village,
at which
such leading figures as Cardinal Cassidy, Professor Martin Stoehr,
President
of the InternationalCouncil of Christians and Jews, Rabbi Leon
Kienecki, and
Dr John Gager, Princeton, will be the principal speakers. Contact:
Dr H.Kornberg, Rider University, Lawrenceville, New Jersey =HOLCTR@Rider.edu
5a) Thomas Raabe, SED-Staat und katholische Kirche. Politische
Beziehungen
1949-1961. Paderborn: Schoeningh. 294 pp. DM 64.(This review appeared
in
German History, Vol 16, no1, 1998,138-9) Historians of the churches
in the
former German Democratic Republic have usually ignored the fate
of the
Catholics for two reasons: they were only a minority in the predominantly
(at least nominally) Protestant land of Luther, and they kept
a carefully low
profile, adopting a reticence without taking a stance for or against
the
Communist government. Their history seemed therefore uninteresting.
Thomas
Raabe's dissertation makes use of the newly-available documents
of the
unlamented regime to clarify its policies towards the Catholics
during its
first twelve years, when its ideological class warriors attacked
the
"reactionary" remnant of this "mediaeval survival"
as part of its campaign to
overthrow all traces of the past and all institutional links with
the Vatican
or the outer world. At the same time he seeks to outline what
was the Catholic
Church's response to this virulent onslaught. His findings are
elegantly and
scholarly presented, and have therefore been included in the prestigious
series of research studies produced by the Catholic Commission
for
Contemporary History, of which this is now the sixtieth to appear.
The book
is well edited, has full footnotes and bibliography and has been
kept to a
readable length. Raabe's study is essentially one of an embattled
church, which had already undergone severe institutional repression
at
the hands of the Nazis. In fact, German Catholics, ever since
Bismarck's days,
have seen themselves as a threatened minority trying to uphold
the integrity
of their faith and witness when confronted with the challenge
of state power,
whether in the Protestant-led imperial period, the racist-dominated
Nazi era,
or now in the explicitly atheistic-materialist communist G.D.R.
The Catholic
strategy had been to concentrate on the pastoral life of its parishes,
to
strengthen the spiritual resources of its own following against
all heretical
deviations, and to circumvent political confrontations where possible.
This
strategy seemed to have worked well under the Nazis, enabling
the church
leaders after1945 to claim that they had been victimised by the
regime,
and hence to avoid direct responsibility for any Catholic collaboration.
It
was only natural that a similar strategy should be advocated in
the no less
turbulent early years of the G.D.R. Raabe succinctly describes
how, in the
immediate post-war period, the Soviet military authorities adopted
a
benevolent attitude towards all the churches, and their communist
lackeys similarly declared their support for all "anti-fascist
democratic forces". But, even though the new G.D.R.'s constitution
in
1949 enunciated high-sounding principles of religious freedom,
the practice
was very different. In the 1950s the governing party, theSED,
refused to
recognise the legitimacy of the 1933 Concordat, and disallowed
any legal
appeals against its regulations. Catholic social, educational
and welfare
institutions were in great part suppressed, and the regime launched
an
intensive campaign to propagate the "inevitable" victory
of Socialism. All
this is already well known, though Raabe is able to add a particular
Catholic perspective on these campaigns. The novel part of this
book consists
of six case studies of how various Catholic institutions sought
to protect
their autonomy during this repressive period. Raabe make good
and
informative use of the surviving party and church records to show
the
regime's intransigent and belligerent intentions. However, already
by
1953, and largely because of Soviet pressure, this headlong onslaught
was
recognised as counter-productive. More time would be needed to
root out all
ties to the Catholic church, so a more pragmatic tactical approach
was to be
preferred. After 1961, increased efforts were made by the Stasi
to infiltrate
the church's activities, not without some success. But, in the
earlier
period, the atmosphere was one of provocative confrontation, with
numerous but
largely unsuccessful remonstrances by the church authorities.
Because these
aggressive policies were formulated by the highly-centralized
state
apparatus, and responded to by the Catholic bishops acting together
and
forbidding any local initiatives by their priests, Raabe's account
rightly
describes events from the top downwards. We still need additional
accounts of
how matters turned out on the local level. As a coherent strategy,
the Catholic response ensured survival, though with drastically
reduced impact
outside the church's immediate surroundings. Its doctrinal position
was not
undermined by "fellow-travellers" in its own ranks,
except for one lone
maverick priest. The price was however high. The church lost the
battle over
the so-called "Youth Dedication", an increasing proportion
of the population
was alienated, and the church's ranks were steadily reduced. Raabe's
competent study gives a good picture of the SED's convoluted policies,
which
have already been documented in numerous works on the fate of
the Protestant
churches. He rightly notes that the Catholic bishops were always
more
sceptical and reticent than some of their Protestant counterparts.
As
one dignitary trenchantly noted: "We live in a house whose
foundations we did
not build, and whose structures we can only regard as false".
This insight
was however not enough to outweigh the persecution and pressures
of the
totalitarian regime. By the 1980s only a remnant remained. But
in the end the
Catholic church survived to live another day. JSC
5b) Alan Sugate. (with the assistance of Yamano Shigeko), Japanese
Christians
and Society, Bern, New York: Peter Lang,1996 285pp ISBN 3-906755-84-3
This
work represents a break-through in English language book-length
studies of
Japanese Christianity. Apart from a few articles, most works have
dealt with
what be called the official side of Japanese Christianity, the
"political" or
"ideological" record of the movement as seen from the
outside. Here, through
a collaboration between an English and a Japanese scholar, we
are able to
delve more deeply into the record and to see it from the inside.
Thus the
writers are able to identify an element that they admit is a minority,
marginal to the movement as a whole, even looked on with "hostility
. . .in
their struggle for the quality of social life in Japan".
Yet this is a
significant minority which has made a surprising impact on the
society as a
whole, whether by themselves or "in concert with . . non-Christian
compatriots whenever common ground was possible" (13) Japanese
Christianity is
itself a minority - never increasing to more than about one percent
of the
total population - but it is the minority described by Sugate
and Yamano that
gives the overall movement its cutting edge. Following an introductory
chapter which offers an interpretation of Japanese society as
a whole, the
book proceeds to define and describe the important ideological
nature of the
Tenno system. When Japan opened itself to the West in the mid-19th
century, it
developed a constitution centred around the person of its ruler,
a figure who
was seen as both a monarch and a priest. Not only did this monarch
rule by
divine right, as in pre-civil war England, but he was himself
in some sense
divine, the ultimate source of authority and power in the nation.
This divine
nature was expressed in the ruler's title. Tenno, usually translated
as 'Emperor' but used untranslated here because "the term
'Tenno' implies
religious headship, whereas 'Emperor' implies primarily a political
headship"
(8) The various elites which dominated society- bureaucrats, both
civil and
military, industrial and financial concerns and politicians -
drew their
authority from the supremehead, and therefore considered that
their power
could not be challenged. This constitution was abolished after
Japan's defeat
in 1945 and a new constitution established in which the emperor
was seen as
the "symbol" of the people's power. Nevertheless, the
powerful elites, which
continued even after defeat (and whose power has been increased
astronomically by Japan's 'economic miracle') havebeen pushing
steadily and
with some success to restore the pre-war status of the Tenno and
with it,
their own power to run the nation. This book describes the 'machinations'
of
these 'elephants' (13) and the way in which the 'ants' (i.e. the
Christian
minority and their allies in secular society) have struggled to
maintain and
promote a juster and more democratic and humane society. In nine
chapters the
authors describe with detailed documentation the revival of State
Shinto (the
religious foundation of the Tenno system), the oppression of the
workforce, environmental pollution, discrimination against minorities
and
the struggle for peace, all problems exacerbated by the revival
of the Tenno
system. The book ends with a chapter of reflections. The authors
have written
this study, not just to educate but to challenge Christians in
the West.
According to the writers, the latter need to do two things. "First
they
should listen to those Christian voices [which are raising the
challenges in
Japan] and give them understanding and support. . . Secondly,
they should
consider to what extent they are prepared to ask themselves critical
questions about their own societies, and act accordingly."
(250) We in
the West need to reflect on our own record when it comes to questions
like
discrimination and imperialism (particularly as it takes its contemporary
trans-national form). Confronting social problems has led Japanese
Christians to review critically their traditional theology of
"the life,
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and therefore the very
nature of
God" (256). In confronting the "immanental" nature
of the Tenno system, they
have been led to emphasise the transcendence of God,underlining
the crucial
distinction between God's sovereignty and human power. The suffering
of
oppressed minorities like the Koreans and the outcast communities
has given
them a fuller understanding of the Cross: the suffering and self-emptying
of Christ. Thus they strive to go beyond a liberal social-gospel
type of
activism to develop a living theology which will serve to enlighten
the whole
Christian movement, not only in Japan but throughout the world.
A book well
worth reading. Cyril Powles, Vancouver.
With best wishes
John S.Conway