I would hope, that you can see the clear difference between the above - anti-Judaism, bigoted, but not anti-semitic - and Martin Luther's ethnic-tinged quasi-genocidal speech. The Pope wanted Jews to convert, by their own freewill. And after conversion, they'd be like every other Christian. This continued into modernity.
In 1916, in the midst of the First World War, American Jews petitioned Pope Benedict XV on behalf of the Polish Jews. To this the pontiff responded in a private letter, also published in the Jesuit journal "Civilta Cattolica", denouncing anti-semitism:
The Supreme Pontiff.... as Head of the Catholic Church, which, faithful to its divine doctrines and its most glorious traditions, considers all men as brothers and teaches them to love one another, he never ceases to indicate among individuals, as well as among peoples, the observance of the principles of the natural law, and to condemn everything that violates them. This law must be observed and respected in the case of the children of Israel, as well as of all others, because it would not be conformable to justice or to religion itself to derogate from it solely on account of divergence of religious confessions
In September 1938 Pope Pius XI stated to a group of Belgian pilgrims:
Anti-Semitism is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible.
On 28 July, 1938, in the papal residence of Castel Gandolfo, addressing the students of the Roman College of Propaganda Fide, Pope Pius XI said:
"The human race is but one and the same universal race of men. There is no place for special races... Human dignity consists in constituting one and the same great family: the human race. This is the thought of the Church".
The words of the Pontiff had been furiously rebuked by the German press, considered contrary to the culture of Nazi Germany, because the address explicitly denied the existence of "
special races" or master races, a keystone of Nazism.
The 1939 issue of B'nai B'rith's National Jewish Monthly features him on the front cover and writes,
"Regardless of their personal beliefs, men and women everywhere who believe in democracy and the rights of man have hailed the firm and uncompromising stand of Pope Pius XI against Fascist brutality, paganism, and racial theories. In his annual Christmas message to the College of Cardinals, the great Pontiff vigorously denounced Fascism...The first international voice in the world to be raised in stern condemnation of the ghastly injustice perpetrated upon the Jewish people by brutal tyrannies was Pope Pius XI".
Yet Pope Pius XI mixed these clear denunciations of racial prejudice against Jews with traditionally disparaging remarks about Judaism:
Humani generis unitas - Wikipedia
Humani generis unitas (Latin; English translation: On the Unity of the Human Race) was a draft for an encyclical planned by Pope Pius XI before his death on February 10, 1939. The draft text condemned antisemitism, racism and the persecution of Jews...
Although the draft clearly condemned racism and anti-Semitism, the document is deeply grounded in anti-Judaism.[2] The draft criticizes the majority of post-Messianic Jews for not acknowledging Jesus Christ as the true Jewish Messiah.[8]
Racism
Humani generis unitas clearly condemns American racial segregation and racism and Nazi German anti-Semitism, though without explicitly naming these countries. Racism is a denial of the unity of human society,[9] a denial of the human personality,[10] and a denial of the true values of religion [11] There is no relation between race and religion,[12] because racism is destructive to any society.[13] Racism is destructive not only for social relations within a society but also for international relations and relations between different races.[14]
Anti-Judaic context
The draft condemns the persecution of Jews. “These persecutions have been censured by the Holy See on more than one occasion, but especially when they have worn the mantle of Christianity".[15] But the text hedges with an anti-Judaic theme
Luther was saying something quite different, and rather more chilling, than anti-Judaism. He seemed to deny that Jews could even be converted - which in Christian terms, is akin to denying one's very humanity. Note that when when the Spanish occupied the Americas and many of the colonialists thought it meet to regard these new lands outside the known world as being frequented by sub-humans, Pope Paul III in 1537, in the bull
Sublimis Dei - encouraged and egged on by Catholic intellectuals at the School of Salamanca - described the colonialists "
as allies of the devil" for denying that the Native Americans were free people with rights who could receive the Catholic Faith.
Pope Paul III wrote:
Sublimus Dei On the Enslavement and Evangelization of Indians
The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God’s word of Salvation to the people…to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.
We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.
As such, Luther's statements are deeply troubling because they infer dehumamization, which was never the case in earlier anti-Jewish statements as from the popes.
Nazi anti-semitism was similarly
essentialist in nature, whereas traditional Christian hostility towards the Jewish faith was
functional: Christians prayed that Jews would convert, as some did - "conversos" (often under compulsion by mobs). In other words, Nazi anti-semitism was hatred of Jews as a people and posited that they were 'innately' inferior. Anti-Judaism was bigotry purely towards their faith, although this did unfortunately peter out into pogroms and so forth among mobs looking for scapegoats in times of crisis, despite official censure from ecclesiastical authorities
Pseudo-scientific racialism - of which anti-semitism, or hatred of Jews as an ethnicity - has been opposed by the Vatican since it first emerged, because it undermines the doctrines of the incarnation and redemption. If Christ became human to save all humans from their sins, his grace can only be efficacious if there is an
a priori common human nature equally shared by all, regardless of their ethnic origins, to "
save". Christ cannot redeem dogs or butterflies, because he didn't incarnate as a dog or butterfly. Racism makes no sense in a Christian doctrinal context. Medieval Christians didn't look at the world in terms of race - they looked at it in terms of believers and unbelievers.
Catholic Christianity, in the middle ages, was (
unfortunately) was anti-Judaic in many respects, in a purely religious sense of hoping, indeed praying for in the liturgy, the conversion of all Jews to Christianity by an act of God.
This derived from interpretation of the Pauline epistles by the earliest Church Fathers, who were also at pains - politically - in the aftermath of the Jewish-Roman War, to stress before the Roman authorities that they were
not Jews but in fact rejected many facets of conventional Judaism, while having to justify why they embraced its scriptures as divinely ordained.
This has been dramatically changed since Vatican II and its positive appraisal of the Hebraic roots of the Christian Faith but the documentary evidence from the past speaks for itself, I don't think I need to quote what St. Thomas Aquinas had to say on the matter (you have surely read it).
In other words, official theology exhibited very real and undeniable
bigotry towards Judaism as a belief system (as we would view it today, although it is perhaps anachronistic to apply modern ideals of impartiality to a uniformly religious age) but not anti-semitism as we know it today.
