BOOK REVIEWS

The Catholic Conversion

by Samuel G. Freedman

From Enemy to Brother: The matter of coincidence or the simple passing of theological overhaul. One of the central fig- Revolution in Catholic Teaching time. What felt like merely an individual expe- ures in the revision and reform of Catholic on the Jews, 1933-1965 rience was actually one facet of an overarching teaching about Jews was the priest Johannes and intentional transformation in Catholic- Oesterreicher, a Jewish convert to Catholi- John Connelly Jewish relations. Jimmy Lyons and Tim Mul- cism, whose parents both died in Nazi camps. Harvard University Press ligan, born like me in the mid-1950s, came of In Connelly's telling, at least a half-dozen oth- 2012, $35, pp. 384 age in the era of the . er Jewish converts played key roles in reshap- In its landmark 1965 document Nostra ing Catholic thought on Jews. Oesterreicher's Sometime in my mid-teens, I asked to intellectual foil, and ultimately his most join the CYO basketball team at the par- important ally, was Karl Thieme, yet an- ish church in my New Jersey hometown. other convert, albeit from Protestantism For the uninitiated, CYO stands for rather than Judaism. Catholic Youth Organization, and it was "The high percentage of Jewish con- the group to which my two best friends verts like Oesterreicher makes sense," belonged. Jimmy Lyons lived across the writes Connelly, a history professor at street from me, and Tim Mulligan was the University of California-Berkley. his buddy from parochial school. Need- "They hoped to resolve a tension within less to say, I was Jewish. themselves between past and present in While we were all incidentally aware the church, returning Catholicism to the of the religious and cultural difference Jewish sources of its heritage, which, as between us, those distinctions vanished St. Paul foresaw, have always in favor of all we shared—sports, Top- been tempted to disown.. jVasftw Aetate 40 songs, endless hours of conversation. emphasized the facts obvious for centu- In the end, I was not permitted onto the ries: the Jewishness of , of the early CYO team, playing instead for the lo- saints, and of holy scripture. The broader cal JCC, but I spent a great deal of time function of the converts, whether from around the religious rituals of the Lyons Jewish or Protestant families, in promot- and Mulligan families, everything from ing tolerance also makes sense." Sunday suppers after Mass to the wakes Connelly telescopes this drama into and funerals for Jimmy's father and 32 years that start with Hitler's ascent Tim's older brother. to power and end with the adoption of Only years later did it occur to me that . In the middle of that time the friendship I enjoyed with my Catholic period, of course, falls the Holocaust. peers stood at a startling remove from the Yet, as Connelly makes clear, it is much experience of previous generations of Ameri- Aetate, the Roman recant- too simple and linear to suggest that the can Jews, including my own nuclear and ex- ed centuries of teaching that the Jews, as a Holocaust alone—as the horrifyingly logi- tended families. My father and several uncles people, had killed Jesus Christ and as a result cal conclusion of anti-Semitism and as an told me stories of their childhood confron- were cursed. Beyond removing the taint of atrocity the Vatican failed to consistently or tations with Catholic kids who called them deicide, Nostra Aetate went even further, call- adequately protest—provoked the Catholic Christ-killers. When my mother, in her early ing Jews "beloved by God" and attesting to change of heart. Rather, internal dissidents twenties, fell deeply in love with a Catholic the Jewish identities of Jesus, his parents and such as Oesterreicher and Thieme took man and announced her intention to marry the disciples. Drawing primarily on three their stand early in the Nazi years against him, my grandmother responded in Yiddish chapters from Paul's , the many "brown Catholics" in the German with words that translated as, "They're the Nostra Aetate continued to proclaim the in- Catholic establishment, and by extension ones who killed my family." She conflated fallibility of the Church while radically alter- against centuries of Church orthodoxy on 1 an Italian-American who had fought against ing what Catholic theology said about Jews. the subject of Jews. fascism in World War II with the Nazis who John Connelly recounts the intricate story The path to Nostra Aetate moved in fits and z slew nearly all her relatives in Poland. behind what he rightly calls a "revolution" in starts and with a good deal of internal discord oZ) This personal trip through the past has a this rigorously researched and deeply impor- among the men and women who collectively X larger point The distinction between my ex- tant book; in fact, he does even more than served as the Church's conscience. It was one perience of Catholics and that of my parents' parse the events that led to Nostra Aetate. He thing to denounce as "neo-pagan- o and grandparents' generations was not, as I reveals a history in which Jews were impor- ism" and another to specifically decry anti- naively might have assumed years ago, just a tant as the architects as well as the objects of Semitism. One of the leading Catholic voices o

88 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2012 against Nazi racism in the 1930s, John La- and larger-than-life characters who fathered Enemy to Brother brings to mind Jonathan Farge, nonetheless characterized Jews as "this the Vatican's momentous shift. Connelly, Spence's exceptional account of Chinese unhappy people, destroyers of their own na- in contrast, traces the intellectual and theo- intellectuals during the Nationalist and tion, whose misguided leaders had called down logical disputation that took place in obscure Communist revolutions, The Gate of Heav- upon their own heads a divine malediction." venues—religious periodicals, retreat houses, enly Peace. Like that book, Connelly's is not Even in the wake of the Holocaust, Oester- clerical conferences. His focus is what might an easy read, but it is unquestionably an reicher clung for years to his belief that Jews be called the "retail politics" behind Nostra edifying and rewarding one. needed to accept Christ in order to be saved. Aetate, the gradual and granular effort to win Paradoxically, it took the Protestant-born allies, build coalitions and get out the vote. Samuel G. Freedman, a journalism professor at Thieme to finally persuade the Jewish-born As a chronicle of the truly heroic role Columbia University, is the author ofsixbooksand Oesterreicher that Jews could receive divine that scholars can play in public life, From a religion cohmtnist for The New York Times. favor even without adopting Christianity. The efforts of all these men, of course, also depended on the support of John XXIII. He convened the Second Vatican Council with the broad, daring mission of aggioniamento (bringing up to date). And he specifically commissioned a statement to be written about Catholics and Jews. During World War II, Connelly points out, the fu- ture pope had served as the Vatican's nuncio in Turkey, helping 25,000 Jewish survivors and refugees "with clothes, identity papers and money so that they could continue their journeys to safety." As Pope, he was deeply affected by a meeting with a survivor named , who lost his wife, daughter and son-in-law to the Nazis. Pope John XXIII did not live to see the debate and vote on Nostra Aetate, which included statements on Catholic relations with a variety of religious groups, not only Jews. But his efforts helped lay the ground- work for the landslide in favor of the docu- ment: 2,221 bishops for it, only 88 against. Despite the expectation that the document would bitterly divide the prelates, the main opposition ultimately came from those in Arab countries, who claimed Nostra Aetate amounted to the Vatican taking sides in the Israeli-Arab conflict. That fear has hardly been realized in the decades since then. Rather, Arab Christians have been persecuted primarily by Arab Muslims, driving tens if not hundreds of thousands from Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon into exile. It is true, though, that Nostra Aetate paved the road for the most stirring moment in the millennia of Jewish-Catholic relations, Pope John Paul II's visit to Israel, including Yad Vashem and the Western Wall. The lan- guage of Nostra Aetate about Christianity's Jewish roots also anticipated the pope's words to the chief rabbi of Rome on a visit to the synagogue: "I am Joseph, your brother." In the hands of scholars who write in a narrative mode, such as Taylor Branch or Alan Brinkley, From Enemy to Brother would have made great use of the epic moments

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