Pity
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In the statement, "If the time were ever ripe for Christians to finally abandon their age-old obsession with converting Jews, that time is now,"(1, pg14) I felt it was said out of pity, for the Jews in the Holocaust, as if to soothe guilty consciences. For Christians, especially those who claim that the Jews killed Christ, believe that Judaism became a " pernicious and degenerate religion, at best an empty legalism, at worst a house of devils,"(1, pg6) should then accept the claim that Christianity fell to the same fate with its silence during the Holocaust. To support this claim, I will briefly discuss anti-Semitism within Christianity and some reasons for the church's failure to speak out against the Nazis.
Woven into Christian literature is the view that millions of Christians, including myself, have been fed: " Jewish history stands under God's curse for the rejection and crucifixion of the true messiah."(1, pg6) As we have seen throughout history of the common- era., Christians have assumed the role of judge, jury and executioner for God's apparent curse on the Jews. When I remember my early Catholic education, it was portrayed to me that the Pharisees were the evil judges, the Jewish people the jury and the Romans as the executioners of Jesus. This seems to be the root for Christian anti-Semitism. Throughout the next centuries, the Christians assumed these roles in attempts to remove the Jewish people from society. During the fourteenth century there was a Christian held inquisition...