40101111111110110101111010041110011bi.

think it is crucial that we contain the
tendency within the Catholic Church
towards revisionism with regard to
the Nazi holocaust. There are some
signs of this revisionist thinking tak-
ing hold in the Church. While the
pope made an excellent and poignant
statement when he went to
Auschwitz — that the Jewish people,
who brought the world the message
of 'thou shalt not kill' through the
Ten Commandments were themselves
the victims of ineffable killing by the
Nazis — he seemed to reverse that at
Majdanek. He referred to 14 na-
tionalities who suffered there, and
Jews were not mentioned."
"If the revisionist line con-
tinues — that the Church was a vic-
tim to Hitler, a kind of martyr — it
will tell a historical lie. And it will
undercut efforts among German
Catholics today to face that history.
Ironically, in 1975 the German-
Catholic hierarchy issued a statement
in which they confessed that the
Church gave obedience to Hitler as a
form of idolatry, apostasy. They con-
fessed that they abandoned the Jews
to Hitler's persecution. The church,
they said, must face that history, con-
fess its sins, and stand against every
form of fascism and idolatry, and
must stand at the side of the Jewish
people. Now there are signs that some
people in the Church want to move
away from that."
Tanenbaum declines to say
whether the pope's meeting with Kurt
Waldheim represented a particularly
visible expression of this revisionist
tendency. He does make it very clear
that he hopes to use the incident, and
the resulting dialogue with the
highest levels of the Vatican hierar-
chy, to evoke the kind of strong
statements on the Holocaust that
might contain this trend towards a
kind of trivialization of the Holocaust.
Initially, Tanenbaum says, his ef-
forts were met with suspicion by
many other American Jewish leaders.
He was accused of representing the
entire Jewish community without
any official mandate to do so. There
were indirect charges that he was go-
ing to the Vatican on bended knee,
trying to curry favor with the leaders
in Rome. His long involvement with
Catholic-Jewish relations, he admits,
may have reinforced this impression.
He says that the overwhelming
emotions unleashed by the Waldheim
incident were a big part of this
divisive reaction. "You have to
remember that it was very, very emo-
tional," he says. "You're dealing with
2000 years of enmity. So one of the
reasons for the reaction to the Pope-
Waldheim thing was that the event
brought together the embodiments of
the two most hostile images in Jewish
history — the theological anti-
Semitism that characterized the
Church until Vatican II and the

,

,

4 400

Pope John Paul II meets Jewish leader David Gordis, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum and Howard Friedman.

political anti-Semitism of the Nazis,
represented by Kurt Waldheim.
That's lethal stuff."
He maintains that his longstan-
ding involvement in Catholic-Jewish
relations gives him a perspective on
the crisis that other Jewish leaders
lack and enables him to look beyond
the raw emotionalism of the Wald-
heim incident.
"It's very difficult for Jews, and
especially those who have no contact
with the Vatican, as we have had for
25 years, to realize that there are peo-
ple there who are horrified by what
has happened, and who want to
change those patterns. You can't
perceive today's situation as if this
were the same as thirteenth or four-
teenth century relations between
Jews and Catholics. It's not the same
thing.
"The notion that we Jews are
coming with hat in hand, begging for
favors, strikes me as bizarre. Anyone
who sat in our meetings on July 9
would have recognized the firmness,
the toughness, with which we stated
the Jewish position."
The portrait Tanenbaum paints of
the Catholic Church in the wake of
the Waldheim affair is a curiously
divided one. Over and over again, he
describes the revolutionary changes

in the Church since Vatican II,
changes in which he played a small
but intriguing part.
At the same time, he describes an
emotional environment that will con-
tinue to stand in the way of better em-
pathy between Catholics and Jews —
an ugly residue of the Church's in-
volvement in the Holocaust, and its
institutional inability to face up to
the consequences of that act.
And, as his years of interreligious
diplomacy have demonstrated, the
Catholic Church is a massive political
institution, respon.sive to its own
needs in an ever-shifting worldwide
context. The Church may feel a
special moral obligation to the Jews
who have too often been its victims —
but it is also a major actor in worlds
where Jews are a relatively minor fac-
tor.
There is a parallel kind of inter-
nal tension within the Jewish groups
that are coping with the emotional
fallout of the Waldheim affair. On one
hand, there is the distrust and suspi-
cion bred by two millennia of Church
anti-Semitism and the recent memory
of the Nazi nightmare.
There is also the lingering sore of
the Vatican's refusal to recognize
Israel — a factor which Tanenbaum
downplays. "In this case," he says,

"maybe our expectations are too high.
There is a kind of de facto recognition,
even if there hasn't been an official
recognition by the Vatican. To a big
extent, the problem is the Vatican's;
by not recognizing Israel, they have
prevented themselves from becoming
active participants in the peace pro-
cess."
And yet there is a need to believe
that we have moved into a new, more
enlightened age, a kind of group emo-
tional craving that made the insult of
the Pope's meeting with Waldheim all
the more agonizing.
By temperment, Tanenbaum is a
patient man, and he has a heavy per-
sonal investment in Catholic-Jewish
dialogue. "It is very important to
remember that major changes aren't
made in meteoric flashes," he says.
"They don't take place overnight.
Very often it takes crises to nudge
change along. For me, as painful as
the Waldheim crisis was, their
response to the event was another in-
dication of the dramatic changes that
have taken place. What has happen-
ed since the Waldheim audience is a
litmus test of how important the
Jewish-Catholic relationship is to the
Vatican. Now, the challenge - is to
make the most of it, to push beyond
where we are." ❑