Word: churches
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...offensive" and "an attempt to appropriate the Holocaust without coming to grips with it." They see it as part of a dissonant motif in Pope John Paul II's otherwise triumphant symphony of Catholic-Jewish brotherhood--a masterwork that is very much part of his grand plan for the church's millennial jubilee...
...church doesn't see it that way. "If she hadn't been 100% Jewish, she wouldn't have been killed," agrees Father Peter Gumpel, a senior Vatican saintmaker. But the roundup that doomed her was an explicitly announced reprisal for a brave Catholic stance: the Dutch bishops' denunciation of the German persecution of Jews in a pastoral letter days before. "It was revenge," says Gumpel, and were it not for the bishops' statement, "she wouldn't have been killed. So we have decided to say she is the victim of the persecution of the Catholic Church in Holland by Nazi...
Pius' story can be seen as the macro to Edith Stein's micro. Devout and ascetic in life, long a favorite of the church's conservative branch, the wartime Pontiff has been sharply criticized both by Jewish leaders and church liberals for his refusal to publicly condemn the Nazis, a "silence" that some suggest may have cost untold Jewish lives. Pius' defenders reply heatedly that his efforts to hide Jews in Italy and elsewhere saved thousands. More important, they insist that silence was the best policy--and here Pius' story intersects Stein's. According to Gumpel, Pius was about...
Abraham Foxman, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, who regards this Pope's outreach to the Jews as unprecedented and courageous, nonetheless says there are those who see Stein's canonization as part of a "strategy," that "if you show that everyone was a victim, then the church has no responsibility [and] no guilt in the Holocaust." Such conspiracy buffs might want to toss in the Stepinac beatification, Pius' prospects, parts of We Remember and the erection of crosses outside Auschwitz by right-wing Polish Catholics...
...stamp out anti-Semitism and promote an honest respect between faiths. In the past year, however, it has become clearer that when such goals collide with the prerogatives and good name of his own house--the naming of saints, the reputations of his predecessors or even of the wartime church as a whole--his enthusiasm may have its limits...