Catholic Comeback
Its purge of anti-Semitism shows the church can reform
AS a traditional Jew who feels blessed by my heritage, I empathize with my Catholic friends as the Church they revere convulses with scandal. My heart, naturally, hemorrhages with the victims. My head cannot fathom how men of the cloth could be so monstrous. But my soul also aches with the betrayed believers, those who trusted the institution, only to see so many supposed Guardians of the Faith act wickedly — as serial criminals or co-conspirators covering up multiple crimes.
Some might expect me to channel my grandfather with an “I told you so.” Growing up in Poland, he hated the Church for its aggressive, pervasive, often-sadistic antiSemitism. If he were alive, he would connect the sins of the American pederasts with the sins of the European Jew-haters.
Fortunately, the Church evolved. Half-a-century ago, Vatican II sought “mutual respect and understanding” between Catholics and Jews. Today, the state of Israel protects Jews, while the Catholic Church stopped preying on them. The result is Jews like me who see a different side of Catholicism.
When I was growing up in Queens in the 1970s, as the son of teachers, my only non-Jewish friends were Catholic. We, the New York Post Jews, rarely rubbed elbows with the fancy-pants New York Times Jews, or their WASPy peers. Our peers were the kids of those who earned civil servicelevel salaries like my parents, the cops and the garbage men, the foremen and the union workers.
Beyond class, religion bonded us, too. Religious Jews prayed in Hebrew; still “Orthodox” Catholics prayed in Latin. We understood ritualistic mumbo-jumbo — while navigating the gap between the many, many customs we were supposed to follow, and the few we actually did, among our lapses.
The Catholics I knew were unlike the Catholics who tormented my grandfather. Once, the kids from my block — Catholics and Jews — played baseball against our neighbor Charlie’s Catholic school buddies. Those kids threw words at us we never heard before: “kike,” “sheenie.” We didn’t bother mentioning it to our par- ents — we didn’t call those “hate crimes” back then, we called it “life.”
That night, Charlie’s father rang our doorbell. He apologized to my puzzled parents, promising to raise “holy hell” at the kids’ school the next day.
As a Zionist, I also recoil against the delegitimizers, those so quick to generalize, to demonize, the Church overall. The glee with which longtime critics pounce on the sins of what remains a minority of priests to confirm their sweeping rejection of Catholicism is intellectually dishonest. Just like critics of Israel escalate from “I dislike Benjamin Netanyahu” or “I disagree with this Israeli policy” to “Israel shouldn’t exist,” some critics too zealously root these sins in Catholic doctrine, rather than condemning them as unspeakable deviations from the ideal.
As a historian, I won’t define a church that has been around for centuries by a scandal that has been building for decades. Every generation inherits traditions and institutions from our ancestors. What we do with them usually reveals more about who we are than what we received.
So the post modernists, the anti-traditionalists, are celebrating. These no-holds-barred, live-inthe-moment, if-it-feels-good-do-it libertines reject any compasses our ancestors passed on. They disdain the important cultural ballasts the Church and other such institutions have provided our society, our democracy.
Yet if the Church could move beyond an anti-Semitism of centuries, that seemed, in my grandfather’s time, embedded in its DNA, it can heal from its systemic failure to protect its kids, too.
Starting in the 1960s, the Church started purging anti-Semitism theologically — viewing Jews as brothers, not Christ-killers; liturgically — cutting the word “faithless” (perfidis) from the Good Friday Prayer for the Jews; institutionally — creating the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations; and symbolically — with Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II, in particular, blessing Jews, attending synagogues, visiting Auschwitz, belatedly recognizing Israel.
This spiritual root canal was long, spasmodic, controversial and painful — the Church long resisted acknowledging its systemic passivity during the Holocaust. But with leadership and vision, the Church changed then, as it must change now.