Why Šnipiškės Is the Church’s Responsibility

The Holocaust in Lithuania did not occur at the margins of society. It unfolded inside one of the most deeply Catholic countries in Europe, within a moral order shaped by Catholic authority, and under the eyes of a Church that possessed decisive power and chose not to use it.

Approximately 96.4% of Lithuanian Jewry was systematically murdered. These were not abstract victims. They were men, women, and children taken from their homes, marched through towns in full public display, confined, humiliated, raped, tortured, starved, shot, and thrown like garbage into mass, amorphous death pits.

They were not “lost.” That softening euphemism—favored by Lithuanian state institutions to reduce and negate the horror—suggests uncertainty, disappearance, or the possibility of return. None exists. We know where the slaughtered Jews are, and we know who put them there.

They lie twisted and unresting in the death pits where their Lithuanian neighbors condemned them, not in secrecy and not in chaos, but through deliberate, enthusiastic, local participation. They cannot rest while their murderers are honored as national heroes and while the truth of their annihilation remains suppressed by the Government of Lithuania.¹

The Lithuanian Catholic Church cannot truthfully describe itself as an innocent bystander to this annihilation. Its conduct—silence, accommodation, institutional self-protection, and in some cases direct participation—facilitated and enabled the genocide of Lithuanian Jews by removing moral barriers to participation and by refusing to impose religious consequences on mass murder.

This is not an accusation of collective guilt. It is a statement of institutional responsibility, grounded in authority, proximity, and refusal.

Religious Sanction and the Language of Holy Murder

The murder of Jews in Lithuania did not occur in a secular vacuum. German forces advanced under the inscription “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”), a declaration that fused killing with divine approval. That claim did not stop at the German border.

Most German perpetrators came from a society shaped historically by Lutheran and increasingly secular Protestant culture, in which antisemitism had long been racialized, bureaucratized, and routinized. German killing units generally approached murder as a task to be completed—procedural, industrial, and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)