“Nazi genocide” and its racist ideology could not have gained traction had the cultural ground not been very well prepared “by notions of collective guilt and the blood libel” as well as the marginalisation or expulsion of Jews in Christian society, a Cambridge historian has said.
In his address, “Europe and the Faith”, Professor Richard Rex of Queens’ College, Cambridge said it was difficult for Christians, and in particular for Catholics, “properly to face up to the evil that is anti-Semitism” which had been so pervasive in the last millennium and really only been generally repudiated in Christian culture within our lifetime.
In a talk hosted by the Notre Dame Newman Centre for Faith and Reason in Dublin and the Iona Institute, Prof Rex warned that the blood libel, which originated in England in the twelfth century, still circulates today and betrays in every detail that it is the product of a Christian imagination.
“We can't whistle this away, however much we might properly condemn it in accordance with the Second Vatican Council,” he said.
Considering the Christian legacy and how it has shaped European culture, Prof Rex said it was only in the last two generations that it has looked like succumbing to the fate that has overtaken so many cultures in the past – “a kind of evaporation”.
He said this massive cultural shift could be measured through the decline of adherence to traditional Christian rituals and rites of passage and the complete reshaping of sexual and matrimonial customs.
Baptism, confirmation, marriage and death were giving way to “baby showers and proms, coming out, transitioning, housewarming, breaking up and that most terrifying of euphemisms, assisted dying”.
He argued that Christianity shaped the “heritage of almsgiving and charity” which “still resonates in socialism and in the welfare state”.
It was also the responsible for the idea of conscience and for notions of marital consent, “the fruit of a long tradition of canonical, theological and ethical reflection in the Christian tradition”.
But today, he said, that Christian legacy is challenged by de-Christianisation and the rise of political religions.
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