From C-reuters@clari.net Tue Oct 24 01:44:36 1995 From: C-reuters@clari.net (Reuters) Subject: Dutch Catholic church admits role in Holocaust Newsgroups: clari.news.religion,clari.living.history,clari.news.jews,clari.world.europe.benelux Date: Fri, 20 Oct 1995 8:10:30 PDT Organization: Copyright 1995 by Reuters Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.Stanford.EDU!lll-winken.llnl.gov!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!nntp.sei.cmu.edu!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!netnews.jhuapl.edu!uunet!in2.uu.net!bass!e.news Comment: O:3.2H; Approved: jill@clarinet.com Distribution: clari.reuters Message-ID: Lines: 31 Expires: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 8:10:30 PDT ACategory: international Slugword: DUTCH-HOLOCAUST Threadword: dutch Priority: regular ANPA: Wc: 276/0; Id: a1030; Src: reut; Sel: reute; Adate: 10-20-N/A Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu clari.news.religion:11400 clari.living.history:5563 clari.news.jews:1887 clari.world.europe.benelux:4597 UTRECHT, Netherlands (Reuter) - The Roman Catholic church in the Netherlands admitted Friday it was partly to blame for the mass murder of Jews in World War II. ``A tradition of theological and church anti-Semitism contributed to the climate which allowed the Shoah (Holocaust) to take place,'' the Dutch Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference said in a statement. An estimated 100,000 Jews were deported from the German-occupied Netherlands to Nazi death camps. The Dutch bishops said they now joined their Polish and German counterparts in admitting that the church carried part of the responsibility for the persecution of Jews in the past. ``A so-called catechism of revulsion taught that after the death of Christ, Jews were held to have been rejected as a people,'' the bishops said. ``Partly as a result...Catholics in our country were often reserved toward Jews, sometimes even indifferent or rejecting.'' They added that the church was paying more attention to relations with Jews but more needed to be done. The Dutch bishops' statement marked the 30th anniversary of the ``Nostra Aetate,'' a declaration by the second Vatican Council in 1965 on relations with non-Christian religions. The Dutch are proud of their tradition of tolerance but also harbour a sense of guilt that the Nazis were able to deport and kill 95 percent of the country's Jewish population in World War Two, a higher proportion than in any other occupied country. In a speech marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the war this year, Queen Beatrix reminded her compatriots that resistance to the occupation was by no means universal.