The 2000 Year Road to the Holocaust: an Interfaith Course
October 20, 2010 – March 9, 2011
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| Henry Silberstern, Survivor Auschwitz-Birkenau | Steven Hess, Survivor Westerbork & Bergen-Belsen | Warren Heilbronner, Survivor Kristallnacht | Helen Levinson, Survivor Majdanek |
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Self-Deception
This homily was preached by Deacon Anthony Sciolino, who will be one of the faculty for “The 2,000-Year Road to the Holocaust,” an upcoming 14-week course. His homily is a persuasive explanation of why Christians need to learn the lessons of the Holocaust.
Jesus said: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” Mt. 7:21
Time and time again, Jesus makes it crystal clear that to be his disciple requires more than lip service. It requires action -- moral and ethical behavior grounded in love of God and neighbor. That’s why in today gospel from Matthew, he says: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” By these words, Jesus warns us against self-deception; deluding ourselves into thinking we’re doing God’s will, when, in fact, we’re doing quite the opposite.
Last month on May 1st, Gloria and I drove to Washington D.C. for a long week-end of rest and relaxation. Yes, retirement too can be stressful! We hadn’t been in D.C. since Kate, our daughter now 26 was a little girl, and we wanted to check out some of the newer attractions and sample local cuisine. The springtime weather was glorious. We went to the National Zoo to see the pandas, to the World War II and Korean War memorials, and because I’m working with a local inter-faith group developing a study course on the causes of the Holocaust, we went to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Walking through the museum, which chronicles the unprecedented tragedy that happened, less than seventy years ago, during the dark days of Nazi Germany was a most sobering experience. The Holocaust, as we all know, was the systematic, state sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews from 21 European countries, including 1.5 million children.
Although Jews were the primary victims of Nazi tyranny, other groups and individuals were targeted as well, including Gypsies, people with disabilities, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, intellectuals, Soviet prisoners-of-war, clergy, political dissidents… totaling another 5 million people intentionally murdered for racial, ethnic, or other reasons.
According to its Visitors’ Guide, the Holocaust Museum’s mission is three-fold - to advance and disseminate knowledge…, to preserve the memory of those who suffered, and to encourage … visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by ... the Holocaust …
A moral and spiritual question that has troubled me and lots of others for a long time is this: how could the worst catastrophe in human history have happened in one of the most Christian countries in Europe, birthplace of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation? My research to date on the subject has uncovered unsettling information.
In the 1930’s and 40’s, Germany’s religious affiliation was 94% Christian; 54% Protestant and 40% Roman Catholic. Organized into 25 dioceses, each with at least one bishop appointed by the pope, the Roman Catholic Church in Germany numbered over 20,000 priests for 20 million Catholics. And there were 16,000 pastors for 40 million Protestants.
Hitler and many of his top henchmen like Heinrich Himmler (SS chief and overseer of death camps in the East), Joseph Goebbels (Nazi propaganda chief), Reinhard Heydrich (principle planner of the “Final Solution”) and Rudolf Hoess (architect and SS Commandant of Auschwitz), were baptized Catholics, as were large numbers of the Third Reich’s security forces, military, civil servants, judiciary, concentration camp personnel and ordinary citizens, like you and me. Those who weren’t Catholic were Protestant.
Catholic and Protestant churches remained official state churches throughout the Nazi regime, which meant that the state collected a church tax and funded church expenses. Religious education remained part of the state education system; chaplains served in the military; and theological faculties remained active within state universities. Article 24 in the Nazi Party Program professed "positive Christianity" as the foundation of the German state.
People in Nazi Germany and, indeed, throughout Europe went about their lives attending religious services, receiving communion, reciting creeds, saying the rosary, wearing crucifixes around their necks, celebrating Christmas and Easter, while huge numbers of their neighbors were being forcibly rounded up, herded off in cattle cars to concentration camps as smoke stacks from crematoria were belching out thick, black smoke. The first concentration camp, Dachau, established in March 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, was located about 10 miles outside of Munich, the approximate distance between Rochester and East View Mall.
Hitler’s rise to dictatorial power from total obscurity (within a republic, no less) was by no means a foregone conclusion. There were plenty of opportunities to stop him along the way, if more people of conscience had been willing to do so. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, (“My Struggle”) published in 1925, eight years before becoming German chancellor in 1933 and nine years before his death camps were at full killing capacity in 1942, Hitler clearly set forth his vision for the Third Reich, including his plan for territorial expansion and the creation of a “racially pure” European society, dominated by a Teutonic “master race.” In Mein Kampf, he minces no words in calling for the elimination of Jews from Europe, referring to them as vermin, parasites, maggots, polluters and destroyers of Aryan humanity, corrupters of society. His virulent anti-Semitism was readily apparent for all to see.
How can history not conclude that Christian self-deception of monumental proportion was taking place in Nazi Germany and Europe? That there was a terrible disconnect between what Christians were preaching and what they doing? Lots of people, in effect, saying “Lord, Lord,” but certainly not doing God’s will. And need I point out that, according to our own bible, it was mostly God’s “chosen people” being exterminated… 95% of Lithuanian Jews; 80% of Polish Jews; 66% of Europe’s Jews!
Obviously, not all Christians of the time were practicing self-deception, as there are many documented cases of people acting heroically, following their consciences, even to risking their lives to protest and protect targeted victims of Nazi terrorism. And it is imperative to recognize and commemorate their deeds …..the type of moral and ethical behavior that Jesus has in mind in today’s gospel.
George Santayana said: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it,” which is why I was pleased to see so many visitors at the museum on that day in May, most of them school age children. We certainly need to teach our children about the Holocaust and we adults need to learn more about it ourselves as well.
If there’s any doubt about the need for such education, consider this. There are those living today, including Iran’s President, Mahoud Ahmadinejad, who deny that the Holocaust happened. Only a few years ago, as we well know, it happened in Bosnia and in Rwanda. Moreover, genocide, now euphemistically termed “ethnic cleansing,” is happening today… in the Darfur region of Sudan. Human nature being what it is, it’s likely to happen again.
Today, more that 60 years after the Holocaust ended, anti-Semitism is not just a fact of history, it is a current event. U.S. embassies worldwide have noted an increase in anti-Semitic incidents, attacks on Jewish people, property, cemetaries, community institutions, and synogogues. Discredited myths about Jews, like their need for the blood of Christian children in religious rituals or a Jewish plot to take over the world, persist, particularly in Middle Eastern countries. And neo-Nazi groups continue to spring up throughout the world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist and Nobel Prize winner wrote: “The line separating good and evil passes through every human heart…and even in the best hearts there remains an unuprooted small corner of evil.” That’s another reason Jesus reminds us in today’s gospel to be vigilant about our behavior, so as not to fall into the trap of self-deception. Obviously, the consequences can be lethal.
Deacon Anthony Sciolino
Church of the Transfiguration
Pittsford, N.Y.
Deuteronomy 11:18, 26-28, 32; Romans 3:21-25, 28; Matthew 7:21-27; 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time. June 1, 2008. (Cycle A),
