Rota, Olivier

« Dans le clair-obscur de la Croix » - 2010.


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« In the chiaroscuro of the Cross ». Catholic Views on the Holocaust from the mid- 1940s to our daysThe vision of a crucified Jewish people corresponds to one of the paths chosen by the Catholic thinking to comprehend what we nowadays call the Shoah. The Christian understanding of the Jewish genocide swayed between an assimilation of the Jewish sufferance to the Mystery of the Cross and a comprehension of the persecution under the light of the Crucifixion. The purpose of the article is to historicize the Christian call to the Cross in order to think the genocide of the Jews from the 40s to the present day. Starting from Jacques Maritain’s thesis about the Mystery of Israel and the Jewish Passion, the paper follows the subsequent rewritings by Jean-Marie Lustiger and Marcel Dubois. It identifies the context in which the idea of a crucified Jewish people appeared and concludes on the attempts to conciliate the Jewish-Christian dialogue and the Christian theology of the Shoah.