Aftermath of the Holocaust

The other day we discussed Christian’s evolution of tolerance for other religions and how it had to change drastically over the 20^th century as the nations of the world began to globalize and atrocities against religions became exposed (mainly the Holocaust). I thought this was a really interesting discussion because I learned a few new things that I hadn’t been aware of. I thought it was really interesting that Dr. Ginther said something along the lines of Hitler also hating Christians (something I was not familiar with) as well as Jews, but most Germans were Christians. This intrigued me because I had never really put the slaughter of the Jews during the Holocaust at the hands of another religion, just blamed it more on Hitler and thought of it more as an ethical issue because of the Germans trying to make the Jews the scapegoat for their problems. But this apparently brought the anti-Semitism of Christians to the forefront of problems facing Catholic Europe. To me, this seemed like a huge turning point in the history of Christianity because they decided to do a complete 180 on how they treated other religions especially the Jewish community. I just thought this was a neat thing to learn because going to a public high school they tend to leave out religious aspects of history, other than a broad context of them. I had never learned of the religious impacts the Holocaust had on Christianity.

To go along with the impacts this had on Christian relations with other religions in the world, I thought the Nostra Aetate was a really interesting read. I had read it in a historical context rather than just reading it and was really intrigued by this as well. The document focused mainly on the religions that Christianity had been rubbing elbows with during the time in which it was written. It focused a lot on relations with Judaism for obvious reasons (the 1500 years or whatever of persecution that has occurred) and on the relations with Islam. There were conflicts between all the religions after WWII because of the creation of the state of Israel for a place for Judaism to flourish. As a history major I read a lot of primary sources to try and get a picture of the culture and for biases and what not, I hadn’t read any contemporary religious documents and this was an interesting change.