There is an honesty to James Bernauer's book that is often sadly missing in scholarship on German Christians during the Third Reich. As a study of the German Jesuits during the Third Reich, the book seeks neither to condemn nor to praise, but to present an account of Jesuits who accommodated the Nazi regime as well as those who resisted and saved lives.
The culmination of many years of research by Bernauer, the work presents new data and raises fascinating questions. Bernauer, who has just retired after many years serving as director of an important Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, has already edited an important volume examining the history of the relations between the Jesuits and the Jews. Here he combines research with a profound soul-searching of the Jesuit Society that culminates in a statement of repentance intended to generate a new relationship with the Jews.
Not simply offering another contribution to the role of the Catholic Church during the Third Reich, Bernauer wants to understand the particular and peculiar situation of the Jesuits in relation to the Jews, since they were linked for centuries in the European imagination: Jesuits, Jews, Freemasons. “Jesuits are preachers, writers, and teachers,” writes Bernauer, and while their writings about Jews may be influenced by racial antisemitism and theological anti-Judaism, Jesuits have another term, “asemitism” (28), that is distinctive: a separation that is religious, racial, and political between Jews and Christians, a “nonviolent indifference” that blinded Jesuits to the growth of antisemitism. Jews were rendered invisible, but not ignored, and Jesuit teachings, starting with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, do not focus on the negative images of Jews or fantasies of Jewish cruelty toward Jesus that are found in other Christian meditative traditions (47). However, Jesuit asemitism erected a wall against the modern world, intensifying the church's denunciation of the perceived excessive power of Jews. In that way, Bernauer argues, asemitism could easily slide into ugly antisemitism (31).
In some of the most original sections of the book, Bernauer examines the role of misogyny in fostering negative theological attitudes toward Judaism by linking Jews with the feminine. He writes that the renowned Jesuit journal, La Civilta Cattolica, included hideous antisemitic and misogynist articles as well as attacks against antisemitic charges leveled against the Jews, such as host desecration and ritual murder. While some historians have argued that the journal forged a unity of theological and racial antisemitic traditions, Bernauer suggests the journal provided fodder to Der Stürmer, the notorious antisemitic and semi-pornographic Nazi publication (33). What could have been done differently? Bernauer blames the church's disproportionate focus on sexuality: “The broodings of moral theology were all too often isolated from the traditions of Christian spiritual theology, and thus those interrogations of extreme experiences that might have enabled it to cope better with the psychic forces Nazism was evoking” (54).
Indeed, there were strange elective affinities around sexuality between Nazi ideology and Catholic moral teaching, leading some Catholic theologians to view Hitler as a force for moral renewal (60). This meant that Nazism was experienced by some Catholics as offering a revitalization of the church and a way to overcome the dualisms of body and soul—as seen in the writings of the renowned theologian Karl Adam. This was easily translated into antisemitic terms: Jews, carnal and lacking spirit, were viewed as sexual predators, dangerous polluters of Aryan blood, and enemies of the German spirit. As Bernauer notes, “sexualizing” and “Judaizing” were in “an unholy alliance” (63).
1933 was a turning point, a moment of extraordinary exuberance in Germany, celebrating what felt like a religious revival in the midst of a great cultural revolution. Nazi propaganda was translated into Christian language and as long as Hitler's popularity rose from 1933 to 1938, the churches, both Protestant and Catholic, had to strain for positions of relevance. While the Protestants saw the emergence of the “German Christian Movement” that removed the Old Testament from the Bible and dejudaized the New Testament, neither the Confessing Church nor the Catholics followed suit, apart from some individual pastors and priests: doctrine, tradition, and belief in the revealed word of God in text and in Jesus prevented such radical, antisemitic changes. Moreover, Bernauer points to the tradition of Jesuit scholarship that had developed a unique regard for the Jewish roots of Christianity and the unity of the Bible (82–83).
Much of the scholarship on the Catholic Church focuses on its failures during World War II, but Bernauer wants us to be attentive to its Jesuit heroes who save Jewish lives. Indeed, without understanding their motivations, we cannot formulate clear and strong guidance for ourselves and for generations to come. He devotes a chapter to several of the Jesuits who spoke forcefully against the Nazi regime. Already in 1935 and 1936, the Jesuits issued documents stressing the unity of the human race and condemning racism, nationalism, totalitarianism, and militarism (89). Some of this was retained in the encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI that was read from the pulpits of Germany on Palm Sunday in 1937: it included an assertion that the Old Testament is the word of God.
Resistance groups formed, including Jesuits who were frustrated by the failures of church authorities and warning, in the 1941 words of Augustin Rösch, leader of the German Jesuits, that Jesuits would ultimately face the same fate as the Jews, namely, “physical destruction” (91). Imprisoned, Rösch survived the war but died shortly after. His subordinate, Alfred Delp, a member of the Kreisau Circle of resisters, was arrested and executed.
Bernauer wants us to appreciate the role of the Jesuits that “has helped to inaugurate a new age between Christians and Jews” (121). The postwar writings of Jesuits such as Henri de Lubac express a harsh and deserved condemnation of the French bishops, and his work helped shape the extraordinary document, Nostra Aetate, issued by Vatican II just twenty years after the war. Shepherded by the German Jesuit Bible scholar Augustin Cardinal Bea, Bernauer finds in Nostra Aetate the seeds of a remarkable reappraisal and the impetus to reconfigure Jesuit-Jewish relations. Noting that the Society of Jesus has never articulated a statement of regret to the Jewish people, he concludes the book with a statement of repentance that is deeply moving, both a mea culpa kaddish and a tribute to those Jesuits who fought Nazism with great courage and put their own lives at risk for saving Jewish lives.
