Top Highlights

• Pope John Paul II had asked the Commission to determine what responsibility, if any, the Church bore for the slaughter of millions of European Jews during World War II.
• a public sharply divided between those worried that it might criticize the Church, and those who feared it would not.
• Might there be some link, they asked, between the destruction of Europe’s Jews and “the attitudes down the centuries of Christians toward the Jews”?
• against and used as scapegoats, and, regrettably, certain misguided interpretations of Christian teachings had on occasion nurtured such behavior. But all this regarded an older history, one largely overcome by the beginning of the 1800s.
• Far from supporting these racist ideologies, the Vatican commissioners asserted, the Church had always condemned them.