For the past three decades, Thomas has researched his family’s Jewish heritage. A laicized Catholic priest in good standing with the Church, he began by exploring how his Jewish grandparents and aunt—categorized as a “non-privileged Mischling”—survived the war while living in the heart of Berlin. This personal inquiry led him to investigate Adolf Hitler’s own fear of having partial Jewish ancestry, which expanded into a broader study of how that same fear shaped Hitler’s view of the Jewish identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the later Nuremberg laws.

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Tracing this trajectory, Thomas unravels the political ideology of the Roman Catholic Church during the Shoah, demonstrating how Church authorities employed Marian dogmatic theology—a form of Christology—to protect Catholics. This theological framework was used to dissociate the Jewish roots of the Catholic faith from any significant biological connection with post-biblical Judaism, an unfortunate strategic move for survival. Once the genocides began, it was too late to reverse the rapprochement that had formed Church-State policy; by accommodating and effectively signing off on the “Jewish question,” the Church maintained this stance throughout the war, leaving Jews to fend for themselves, only altering their course in the late summer of 1941 while maintaining their position as articulated in those areas under the Concordat of 1933.

In light of these realities Thomas further examines how Marian dogma culminated the Church’s centuries-long effort to define the time of ensoulment, formalized in the 1854 papal document Ineffabilis Deus. This occurred twenty-seven years after Karl Ernst von Baer’s 1827 discovery of the human ovum. After Darwin and amid the rise of Nazi racial ideology, some anti-Christian Christians sought to invert Christianity’s core message of salvation toward biological ends. The Roman authorities, however, consistently upheld throughout the Shoah that faith concerns salvation, not biology.

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Thomas holds multiple degrees: an Honors BA in Sociology, a B.Th. in Theology, a MA in Pastoral Sciences, a MA in Philosophy, and a STM in Systematic Theology. He has completed extensive studies at the Summer Institute for Holocaust Studies for Educators in Jerusalem under the auspices of the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education. From here he continued his formation in Israel through the Sisters of Zion—an order committed to Catholic-Jewish dialogue since 1857—studying at both “Ecce Homo” and “Bat Kol.” After serving as a parish priest and overseeing the construction of a new church, Thomas completed a course in praxis theology within the Doctor of Ministry program at Catholic Theological Union. Since then, Thomas has been engaged in hospital ministry at several Catholic institutions.

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Thomas has presented papers at scholarly conferences, including “The Virgin Mary’s Image at the Time of the Shoah” at the 30th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches at Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia (2000), as well as “The Christian Churches and the De-Judaization of Jesus of Nazareth at the Time of the Shoah” at the Ra’anana Institute for Second Temple Studies in Israel (2015).

His thesis, “Following the Virgin Mary through Auschwitz: Emergent Anti-Semitism within Pre-Shoah Marian Dogma” (University of Winnipeg, 2007), was followed by a publication in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History (Winter 2008). His latest book is 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).