Steps Toward Reconciliation?

The pope's visit to Israel and his strong statements seeking to acknowledge the history of Christian anti-Semitism should gladden the hearts of every person on this planet. For thousands of years, various religious forces have sought to dominate or destroy others who did not share their perspectives on God and salvation. No wonder so many people eventually felt disgust and revulsion at the pettiness and evil of religious communities that desecrated the image of God, seeking to impose their "one correct path" to the sacred.

Christianity has a lot to repent for in this regard. Christian teachings inflamed millions of people to engage in acts of unspeakable cruelty and murder. And Christian institutions gave their blessings to those who used the Bible to justify the genocidal policies of conquistadors and American settlers, the enslavement of blacks, the burnings of women suspected of being witches, and numerous wars against the Muslims.

And then there is the very special history of Church anti-Semitism, which created a mindset in which Christians were always ready to attack, rape, expel, or murder Jews whenever one of their Christian leaders suggested it was appropriate. Jews were particularly vulnerable around Easter, when the masses were focused on Gospel stories of Jews killing their savior. The legacy of hatred laid the foundations for the Holocaust, and the indifference of most Christian institutions to the fate of the Jews made escape or rescue less likely.

One of the standard ways that societies seek to explain the alienation and lack of community their own members feel is to blame some Other who has been undermining what would supposedly have otherwise been a wonderful reality--and anti-Jewish indoctrination by Christianity guaranteed that Jews would become one such demeaned and hated Other for hundreds of millions of people.

I'm delighted that the Church is beginning to recognize its role in all this. But it will take much more than statements from the pope or even messages to the bishops to repair the damage done by nearly 2,000 years of hatred.

There are three steps that are needed to create real reconciliation between Christians and Jews:

1. Every Christian child must be taught the history of Christian distortions in relationship to Jews. This must go beyond an explicit repudiation of now-debunked Gospel teachings about Jews' supposed responsibility for Jesus' crucifixion. It must also include a detailed knowledge of anti-Jewish legislation by the Church, such as the Inquisition, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, Portugal, France, and England, the long history of pogroms in Eastern Europe, and the dismal failure of the Church during the Holocaust.

2. Christian institutions should foster joint Christian-Jewish projects aimed at creating a common struggle to challenge the ethos of selfishness and materialism in the contemporary world, and to challenge the "demeaning of the Other" that frequently accompanies this ethos.

Reconciliation can best be achieved when Christians and Jews find common ground by moving to higher ground: a shared vision of a world based on love and caring. I don't mean resolutions or projects with professional "community relations" people--I mean a true grassroots organization of Christians and Jews actively engaged in struggle against the globalization of capital and supporting, in its place, a Biblical approach to global economics, starting with the Jubilee, the Biblical mandate to periodically eliminate debt to fight poverty.

Continued on page 2: »