Seventy years ago, mobs ran through the streets of Germany and Austria, shattering the glass of Jewish synagogues, stores and houses. It was Kristallnacht – the “portent” and “prelude” of the Holocaust, Mary Boys described to a crowd of more than 120 people at the Holocaust Lecture Series in the Harper Center Ballroom Wednesday night.

Boys, the Skinner and McAlpin professor of practical theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York, spoke about “The Impact of the Holocaust on Christian Theology,” a lecture sponsored by the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society. The talk was in conjunction with this fall’s theology course, “Christianity After the Holocaust,” taught by Dr. Eileen Burke-Sullivan, assistant professor of Theology.

“It’s [the course’s] focus is on Christian doctrine and how it’s been changed by the Holocaust experience,” Burke-Sullivan said. “Dr. Mary Boys is an expert, a specialist, in Catholic-Jewish dialogue and in the project of helping Christian theology rethink the ways that we have taught our doctrine that seem to cast the Jews in a negative light.”

Boys began the lecture by speaking of corporate responsibility and how “we are co-responsible for that which our country has perpetrated and condoned, for sins of commission and omission,” and about the theological implications of the Holocaust for Christians.

“I realized that one of the things that happens to me personally is that it shatters my complacency – my comfort level as a Christian,” Boys said. “It is because our tradition, over generations, has created a fertile seedbed in which the Nazi ideology could take root. We will never mature as Christian people if we can’t face the shadow side of our past.”

Boys explained how, until Vatican II, Christianity blamed the Jewish people as a whole for Jesus’ death, and how early Christian theologians like St. Augustine contributed to the perpetration of anti-Semitism for centuries leading to the Holocaust. She then noted the importance of reading the New Testament in its historical and cultural context, as well as the need for people to develop empathy and recognize the “infinite worth of every human being.”

Dr. Ronald Simkins, professor of theology and classical & Near Eastern Studies and director of the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society, said Boys’ lecture was important because, “Christianity is implicated in the Holocaust indirectly, and therefore we need to take that into account in terms of thinking our theology through.”

Burke-Sullivan said there’s a lot of work being done worldwide in Christian thinking to improve relationships with the Jews and “to alter some of the ways we have described our relationship with God that excludes Jews,” she said.

“I think that in terms of a Jesuit university that focuses not only on the Christian mystery, at the heart of its life, but focuses on justice, it would have to undertake some examination of the injustice that has been perpetrated on the Jews for centuries,” Burke-Sullivan said.