Remembrances of Martin Luther are incomplete without acknowledgement of his antisemitism and its relationship to the Holocaust.
For 1,000 year prior to Martin Luther's posting of his Theses Germany and Austria were dominated by Roman Catholicism.
Tragically Martin Luther failed to reform Roman Catholic antisemitism. Instead he continued it. His writings are filled with vile antisemitism.
Almost 100% of the Germans and Austrians who actively committed the Holocaust or passively enabled it were Christians in good standing with about 50% being Roman Catholics and 50% being Lutherans.
Fourteen hundred years of antisemitic teachings by the Roman Catholic Church together with 400 years of antisemitic teachings by the Lutherans created a very fertile ground for the Nazi ideology of the Holocaust to emerge.
In the 1960s Pope John XXIII made great progress in purging antisemitism from Catholic teachings.
His predecessors have done an extremely poor job of following up as antisemitism remains widespread among Roman Catholics.
With the number of Roman Catholics who actively and passively implemented the Holocaust, ending antisemitism among Roman Catholics should be one of the Roman Catholic Church's highest priorities (along with ending clergy sex abuse).
As an recovering ex-Catholic I am most familiar with Roman Catholicism. I am not familiar what the Lutheran Church has done to purge antisemitism from its teachings and deal with antisemitism among its members.
In my teens among the first times i had questions about the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church was when I learned of the Pope Pius XII's silence in response the Holocaust.
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I was unaware of Luther's antisemitism.
ReplyDeleteMartin Luther advocated the extermination of Christian peasants who had engaged in a revolt. Some scholars suggest that his advocacy of extermination along with antisemitism also created fertile ground for the Nazi ideology of extermination.
DeleteLutheran antisemitism seems to have gotten lost to history with the focus on Catholic antisemitism and papal silence during the Holocaust.
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