​​​For the first time and in one sitting I recently read Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958). It recounts autobiographically the tremendous, incomprehensible horror of the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews. The book poses difficult questions about God from the perspective of a young survivor of the Shoah whose Jewish faith was severely tested amid the inhumanity and slaughter of the death camps. I was prompted to read this work because of Tom Bluger’s The De-Judaization of the Image of Jesus of Nazareth (The Virgin Mary) at the Time of the Holocaust: Ensoulment and the Human Ovum.     Bluger wrestles with a very difficult and painful question that faces Catholics: how did our brothers and sisters in faith, especially those entrusted with spiritual authority and theological learning, come to disassociate the Jews of their day from Jesus, Mary and the Apostles so as to find a modus vivendi with the Nazi regime? Bluger takes the reader on a journey in which the author’s biography contributes to finding the answer. In so doing, the subject never looses its connection with the lives of people who went through (the author’s family) or lived with the consequences of (the author) the Shoah. How does one make sense of evil? Wiesel did not find an adequate answer in Night. Perhaps he came closest when he recounted the execution by hanging of a child; too light to die quickly, suspended between heaven and earth for a half an hour, he slowly suffocated before their eyes. Wiesel remembers someone asking, “For God’s sake, where is God?” and then from within himself he heard an voice, “Where is he? This is where—hanging here from the gallows”. Bluger offers his perspective on this question, drawing from his own Jewish and Catholic resources. ​ He starts his inquiry with the story of his family, giving flesh and blood, names and faces, to the catastrophe that unfolded in Germany and beyond. By telling their stories, he introduces the reader to Nazi attempts to articulate race and identity in its squalid and myriad categorizations (These come into play to clarify the stratagem for the modus vivendi). Then Bluger lays out his tool box of theological, historical and psychological methods, including an informative excursion into Carl Jung’s reflection on the growing importance of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the history of the West. Bluger introduces the reader to Hitler’s deep anxiety over his own possible Jewish ancestry as a prelude to presenting the six typologies of Jesus’ and Mary’s relationship to postbiblical Jews. Having eliminated most of the typologies as unusable for Catholic theologians, Bluger delves more deeply into the influential Tübingen theologian Karl Adam’s 1943’s statement on Jesus’ total separation from postbiblical Jews because Mary’s Immaculate Conception had separated her and her son from other Jews, a claim totally foreign to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and contrary to Catholic teaching. He provides a history of Adam as a theologian in light of the postwar rediscovery of Adam’s claim by Hans Küng (who held the same chair as Adam at Tübingen), which led in part to the Swiss theologian’s rejection of papal infallibility due to its connection with the Immaculate Conception. Bluger moreover situates Adam’s claim within a current of Patristic polemics called adversus Judaeos (“against the Jews”). The declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX as an exercise of papal infallibility and the subsequent declaration of the dogma on papal infallibility at Vatican One show their close interrelationship, which both friend and foe acknowledged. At the heart of Bluger’s presentation is his fascinating historical treatment of the Immaculate Conception as the definitive and conclusive end of the long debate over ensoulment. He argues that the Catholic Church under Pope Pius IX grasped the significance of the still-recent discovery of the mammalian ovum in 1827 (up to that point it was only theorized), and after a relatively short period of time came to the conclusion that Aristotle’s biology (which included claims about delayed ensoulment) could be safely set aside. Pope Pius IX therefore enshrined in the declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception that Mary possessed a rational soul from the first instance of her conception (immediate ensoulment). Thus, any suggestion that there is a gap in time between conception and ensoulment, which would justify the killing of the embryo or foetus because it is only an animal and not yet human, was rejected as unscientific, and such deeds as immoral. Concurrent changes, Bluger notes, were made to canon law to reflect this newly gained clarity about human dignity. Bluger concludes his historical survey when he describes the evolution of the image of Mary up to the eve of the Shoah. In light of theses developments, Bluger takes up and finds wanting the Oslo theologian Katri Børresen’s claim that the new significance of Mary in light of the discoveries of embryology exaggerated her importance and therefore went against the intentions of early conciliar teaching such as Ephesus. ​ Turning to the German bishops, especially Cardinal Faulhaber, he conducts an exhaustive investigation of how they disassociated Jesus and Mary from contemporary Jews. In seeking the how, Bluger proposes a nuanced and empathetic analysis of the German bishops’ actions throughout the war up until their most recent statement in 2020 on the adequacy of their (predecessors’) actions. Whilst one might have wished for greater solidarity with the Jews, it is too easy to dismiss the enormous burdens under which these men were laboring. Bluger’s comprehensive treatment exhibits well the Catholic Church under the Nazi state. The government was not all powerful; it had laws with which it had to contend and it too was divided into factions and parties. The bishops did take actions; sometimes successful, but mostly marginal, and ultimately unable to confront the horror of genocide and war. In the end, no one escaped harm and trauma under these circumstances. Wiesel wrote in the new preface to Night in 2006 that if there is any response to Auschwitz, it is responsibility. Bluger would agree. He sums up his efforts at the end of the book (pp. 684-685) with these words: In this study we have tried to show that the quintessential qualities of the Blessed Virgin Mary are, and always have been, “empathy” and “solidarity” with the marginalized of this world. With thousands of schools, hospitals, orphanages, etc., named after her, Catholics can be proud that they are front and center in love and service to a broken world. True Christianity is about the anawim. To be Catholic is to be in solidarity with the human condition. Certainly, in the past, mistakes were made, but a priceless heritage resides within that same church. We must not loose sight of this. It is for this reason that I advance the de-Judaization of the Image of Jesus of Nazareth (the Virgin Mary) at the Time of the Holocaust. Under these sentences is a photo of the author placing a Stolperstein in Berlin in honor of the Bluger family. Here Stolperstein is rendered as a stepping stone (a cobble stone remembrance of those whom the Nazi regime persecuted and murdered), but it can also translate as a stumbling stone, a skandolon. To some, the Shoah represents one more instance of intolerance, violence and hatred inherent in the Catholic Church. The Shoah is therefore a scandal, an obstacle to faith in Jesus Christ and a reason not to be Christian. Yet, in a very Christ-like way, Bluger demonstrates through his empathy and solidarity with both Jews and Catholics alike, that there is another way to see this. He shows convincingly that assigning blame is not the way forward. Rather his book may be seen as stepping a stone to greater cooperation between Jews and Catholics in their common service to the anawim. Both share a precious heritage in the story of the love between God and Israel. Yes, Jews and Catholics have differed fundamentally on whether Jesus of Nazareth is the fulfilment of this love story. Perhaps this need not always be so. In the meantime, both can at least strive to keep the commandments to love God and to love neighbor. Who knows where this common effort might lead? ​ Father Elias Carr Ph.D. Pontifical University of John Paul II Krakow, Poland