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Helping Catholics and Jews Hear Each Other By Msgr. George G. Higgins The Yardstick October 25, 1999 Eugene Fisher, the leading American Roman Catholic expert on Christian-Jewish relations, recently published an excellent article in America magazine titled "Catholics and Jews Confront the Holocaust and Each Other" (Sept. 11). Associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Fisher explained why American Jews and Catholics, despite extraordinary post-Vatican Council II progress in Catholic-Jewish relations, look at certain neuralgic problems from different viewpoints. By way of example, Fisher said some American Jews do not understand why American Catholics, for historical reasons, are particularly sensitive about anti-papal rhetoric. "For Catholics with a historical memory," he says, "Jews are fellow immigrants who suffered from much the same set of discriminatory attitudes and systemic exclusions." It's no accident that labor movement leaders "tend to be 'ethnic,' Jewish and Catholic." Thus, he asked why "many Jews seem to miss what is to us the obvious point," that attacking the papacy raises "for us the specter of the nativist bigotry we thought had been left behind after John F. Kennedy's campaign for the presidency?" Despite this, the story of Catholic-Jewish relations in the United States since Vatican II has been largely a success story, although obviously we still have far to go. I am convinced, and so is Fisher, that something uniquely American marks this success. While the various religious organizations before the council were officially "ghettoized," Americans were discovering each other in factories and political parties. Catholics and Jews perhaps were especially involved in this pre-dialogue activity. As Fisher pointed out, the U.S. labor movement's beginnings are largely the fruit of a Catholic-Jewish coalition. Catholics and Jews joined in coalitions to achieve the social and political goals neither community could have won on its own. Here the church learned its theology from the grassroots up. Only later, following Vatican II, did the official dialogue begin. But when it began in the '60s, it had (as it did not have elsewhere) a solid base to build upon, a network of personal and programmatic relationships developed over the years through the hard knocks of American coalition politics. The fact of this realistic and self-aware group activity on all levels of the religious communities involved is, in my view, one of America's greatest contributions to the interfaith movement in the world today. The controversy regarding Pope Pius XII's alleged silence about the Holocaust, which prompted Fisher's America article, is heating up again because of a new book by a British journalist, John Cornwell, titled "Hitler's Pope," which I criticized in an earlier column. Tad Szulc, a Jewish friend and an experienced writer, reviewed Cornwell's book very favorably in the Washington Post. Since I am on record as having written a basically favorable review of Szulc's own basically favorable biography of Pope John Paul II, I felt obliged to tell him in a friendly but frank letter that I felt his review of Cornwell's book was too simplistic and tendentious. I enclosed with my letter several recent articles, including Fisher's America article, hoping it helps my friend understand why, as Fisher said, "in jumping all over the popes, many Jews do not seem to realize that they are by no means 'speaking truth to power,' as they themselves, I feel, sincerely believe. They are triggering the half-buried paranoia of the grandchildren of unwelcomed immigrants.   "If Jews are to communicate with American Catholics, there will need to be a softening of the rhetoric until the volume is turned down enough so that we Catholics can hear what they are saying."  I agree with Fisher in this regard.   Papal Social Encyclicals   Other Catholic Social Teachings General Articles of Interest  Catholic Worker Connection Msgr. George Higgins  Home Page E-Mail: Fr. Sinclair Oubre