The Christian Rejection of Christian Antisemitism

As Antisemitism: History and Myth shows in detail, Christian antisemitism has a long and shameful history. Yet at the same time, Christianity is alone among the four major sources of present-day antisemitism (the others are Islam, National Socialism, and international socialism) in having rejected antisemitism on a large scale.

This rejection goes back farther than many people realize. Remarkably, in 1566, the Catechism of the Council of Trent struck a massive blow against Catholic antisemitism by denying its central claim, that Jews collectively bore the guilt for Christ’s death. Christ, it explained, died even for the Jews themselves: he “not only suffered for sinners, but even for those who were the very authors and ministers of all the torments He endured.” As he died to redeem mankind from sin, the guilt for his death was something that all sinners shared: “In this guilt are involved all those who fall frequently into sin; for, as our sins consigned Christ the Lord to the death of the cross.”

In fact, Christians bore even greater guilt than the Jews, because they had the benefit of knowing the fullness of the divine plan: “This guilt seems more enormous in us than in the Jews, since according to the testimony of the same apostle: If they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; while we, on the contrary, professing to know Him, yet denying Him by our actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on Him.” Nor could the guilt for his death be laid at the feet of the Jews even if Christ had been an ordinary man whose death had no greater significance than the death of any other man, for “men of all ranks and conditions were gathered together against the Lord, and against His Christ. Gentiles and Jews were the advisers, the authors, the ministers of His Passion: Judas betrayed Him, Peter denied Him, all the rest deserted Him.”

Yet this striking statement had little effect on popular attitudes. The two attitudes — hostility to the Jews for killing Christ and charity toward them in recognition that the “guilt seems more enormous in us than in the Jews” — would continue.

By the late nineteenth century, Catholic antisemitism was alive and well in the Vatican’s two major publications, the daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano and the biweekly La Civiltà Cattolica. In 1880, La Civiltà Cattolica urged governments to place restrictions on the rights of the Jews, calling for “exceptional laws for a race that is so exceptionally and profoundly perverse.” Eighteen years later, L’Osservatore Romano appeared nostalgic for the days when European countries were expelling the Jews en masse, warning that they “cannot and must not live among others as any other people in the world…do.”

The ambiguity of the Roman Catholic Church’s stance toward the Jews was summed up in the mid-twentieth century figure of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1939-58), whom some revere for saving thousands of Jews from the National Socialists, and whom others revile for not doing enough and even, they contend, silently approving of the Germans’ genocidal activities.

Pacelli and the National Socialist regime even negotiated an agreement, officially called the “Concordat between the Holy See and the German Reich.” In his capacity as Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli signed this agreement in July 1933. While it lessened the National Socialists’ hostility to the Roman Catholic Church, as Catholic leaders had hoped it would do, it also restrained the Church from speaking out against Hitler’s race theories and hatred of the Jews.

Despite the Church’s Concordat with the National Socialist German Reich, in 1937, Pius XII’s predecessor, Pope Pius XI, took the unusual step of issuing an encyclical letter in German rather than the customary Latin. Entitled Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Sorrow), the encyclical was a strong condemnation of National Socialist antisemitism, declaring: “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.”

The National Socialists were furious, forbade distribution of the encyclical in Germany, and even claimed that Pius XI was half-Jewish. Yet although it bore his name, Pius XI was not actually the author of Mit Brennender Sorge; it was the work of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the paradoxical future Pope Pius XII.

Mit Brennender Sorge, for all its ringing words against the idolatry of race and blood, had no effect on National Socialist antisemitism. Yet there wouldn’t have been as many National Socialists in Germany had it not been for centuries of Christian antisemitism that ensured that Hitler’s scapegoating and demonizing of the Jews would find a receptive audience. There were no doubt numerous professing Christians who took part in various ways in the Holocaust, and the Christians who objected to the treatment of the Jews in National Socialist Germany were few.

The horrors of the Holocaust moved the Roman Catholic Church to repudiate the fundamental basis for Christian antisemitism once again. The Second Vatican Council, which the Roman Catholic Church holds to be the twenty-first ecumenical council, reiterated the Catechism of the Council of Trent’s rejection of the idea that the Jews bore collective guilt for the crucifixion of Christ:

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.

Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

This Vatican II statement heralded a new era in relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews. In 2000, Pope John Paul II issued an appeal to the Jews for reconciliation: “We hope that the Jewish people will acknowledge that the Church utterly condemns anti-Semitism and every form of racism as being altogether opposed to the principles of Christianity. We must work together to build a future in which there will be no more anti-Judaism among Christians or anti-Christian sentiment among Jews.” His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, in 2005 sent greetings to the Church’s “brothers and sisters of the Jewish people, to whom we are joined by a great spiritual heritage, rooted in God’s irrevocable promises.”

At Easter 2025, Christian antisemitism is resurgent. Christians would do well to revisit the reasons why these Christian authorities so firmly rejected it.