Centering on the Vatican statement We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, this publication includes the full text of the document, with introduction and commentaries. A bibliography is included.

The bishops offer ways to frame Holocaust issues properly and sensitively for Catholic students using historical and theological contexts. Additional resources are provided to aid in developing curricula.

The book contains the full text of the Holy See's document, with its introduction by Pope John Paul II himself, as well as the explanatory address to the American Jewish Committee by Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, the president of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews. It also contains essays by two important theological thinkers, one a Jew and one a Catholic, both deeply concerned with interreligious dialogue. Rabbi Leon Klenicki sums up a number of Jewish perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of the statement, while noted theologian Avery Dulles, S.J., explores the various Catholic responses to the Holocaust in the past and how this document breaks new ground.

Phayer explores the actions of the Catholic Church and the actions of individual Catholics during the crucial period from the emergence of Hitler until the Church's official rejection of antisemitism in 1965. 20 photos.

In this meticulously researched, unflinching, and reasoned study, National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer presents shocking revelations about the role played by the Vatican in the development of modern anti-Semitism. Working in long-sealed Vatican archives, Kertzer unearths startling evidence to undermine the Church’s argument that it played no direct role in the spread of modern anti-Semitism. In doing so, he challenges the Vatican’s recent official statement on the subject, We Remember. Kertzer tells an unsettling story that has stirred up controversy around the world and sheds a much-needed light on the past.

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history? The radical shift of Vatican II grew out of a buried history, a theological struggle in Central Europe in the years just before the Holocaust, when a small group of Catholic converts (especially former Jew Johannes Oesterreicher and former Protestant Karl Thieme) fought to keep Nazi racism from entering their newfound church. Through decades of engagement, extending from debates in academic journals, to popular education, to lobbying in the corridors of the Vatican, this unlikely duo overcame the most problematic aspect of Catholic history. Their success came not through appeals to morality but rather from a rediscovery of neglected portions of scripture. From Enemy to Brother illuminates the baffling silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, showing how the ancient teaching of deicide—according to which the Jews were condemned to suffer until they turned to Christ—constituted the Church’s only language to talk about the Jews. As he explores the process of theological change, John Connelly moves from the speechless Vatican to those Catholics who endeavored to find a new language to speak to the Jews on the eve of, and in the shadow of, the Holocaust.