Thomas Bluger has spent the past three decades researching his family's Jewish background, a journey that began with a simple question: how did his Jewish grandparents and aunt—the latter defined as a non-privileged Mischling under Nazi racial laws—manage to survive the war while living in the heart of Berlin? This personal inquiry soon expanded into a broader investigation of Hitler's own fear of partial Jewish ancestry and, following that trajectory, into a full-scale study of how Hitler's understanding of the Jewish identity of Jesus of Nazareth was shaped by that same fear. From there, Thomas's research widened further to examine the political ideology of the Roman Catholic Church during the Shoah, revealing how church authorities protected Catholics through their problematic use of Marian dogmatic theology—a form of Christology—to disassociate the Jewish roots of the Catholic faith from any significant biological connection with post-biblical Judaism. In the eyes of church leadership, this was a matter of survival. But once the genocides began, it was too late: the rapprochement that had formed Church-State policy—an accommodation sealed by the Church's implicit signing off on the "Jewish question"—remained intact throughout the entire duration of the war. Jews would have to fend for themselves.

​

Not content to leave matters there, Thomas traces how Marian dogma brought to conclusion the Church's centuries-long journey in defining the moment of ensoulment, culminating in the papal document Ineffabilis Deus, promulgated in 1854—twenty-seven years after Karl Ernst von Baer's discovery of the human ovum in 1827. As Nazi racial ideology gained ascendancy, many anti-Christian Christians attempted to invert Christianity's core message of salvation toward biological ends. This, Thomas shows, the Roman authorities consistently resisted: throughout the entire time of the Shoah, they held firm that faith is about salvation, not biology.

​

Thomas holds an Honours BA in Sociology, a BTh in Theology, an MA in Pastoral Sciences, an MA in Philosophy, and an STM degree in Systematic Theology, as well as accreditation in hospital ministry. He has advanced his studies at the Summer Institute for Holocaust Studies for Educators at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem under the auspices of the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, and completed two periods of formation in Israel with the Sisters of Zion—one at Ecce Homo, the other at Bat Kol. After serving as a parish priest, he undertook a short stint at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, where he completed a course in praxis theology within the Doctor of Ministry program. A laicized Catholic priest in good standing with the Church, Thomas continues to write and present on the intersection of Catholic theology, Holocaust studies, and the enduring question of Jewish-Catholic relations.

​

His works include a master's thesis co-authored with colleagues, "Theoretical and Empirical Investigation of the Phases in Psychotherapy" (Saint Paul University, Ottawa, 1984); a paper presented at the 30th Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, "The Virgin Mary's Image at the Time of the Shoah" (Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, 2000); a master's thesis, "Following the Virgin Mary through Auschwitz: Emergent Anti-Semitism within Pre-Shoah Marian Dogma" (University of Winnipeg, 2007); an article derived from that thesis published in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History (Vol. 14, No. 3, Winter 2008); a paper presented at the Ra'anana Institute for Second Temple Studies in Israel, "The Christian Churches and the De-Judaization of Jesus of Nazareth at the Time of the Shoah" (RISTS, Ra'anana, July 6, 2015); and his book, The De-Judaization of the Image of Jesus of Nazareth (The Virgin Mary) at the Time of the Holocaust: Ensoulment and the Human Ovum (Xlibris, 2021).

​