Pope John Paul II and the Jews
National Correspondent
Jerusalem, March 26, 2000: Pope John Paul II slowly, haltingly made his way to the Western Wall, the last remaining remnant of the Second Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 CE. A few feet from the Wall, the cardinals accompanying him stepped away, leaving the Pope to proceed shakily alone. John Paul II bowed his head in silent prayer, touched the ancient stones and crossed himself before placing a note in a crack between the giant slabs. It read: "God of our fathers, You chose Abraham and his descendants to bring Your Name to the nations. We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant."
The Pope's visit to the holiest site in Judaism and his plea for forgiveness was immediately and almost universally hailed as one of the most dramatic and important moments of his long pontificate. Many Israelis and Jews around the world were intensely moved. But the pontiff's dramatic and symbolic act perhaps carried an even more important message for Catholics.
For almost two thousand years, the Church had insisted that the Temple had been destroyed as a sign that God had withdrawn His favor from the Jewish people as a punishment for their refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah.
Throughout the centuries, the Church taught its adherents to feel contempt and hatred for Jews and Judaism. The Church was complicit in cruel acts of persecution, up to and including murder. Popes and saints alike preached that the Jews were a cursed and despised people, to be dispersed around the world, condemned to lives of misery and humiliation as witnesses to the truth of the Christian faith. This theology eventually helped lay the groundwork for the Shoah, or Holocaust -- the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.
So entrenched were these ideas that Catholics in their Easter liturgy continued to refer to the "perfidious Jews" well into the 1960s, years after the scope of the tragedy of the Shoah had become abundantly clear.
By stepping reverentially to the Western Wall, the Pope was symbolically repudiating such teachings. He was demonstrating that in his eyes, the spirit of God had not departed from the site of the Temple, and therefore that God's covenant with the Jewish people had never been revoked. Rabbi Michael Melchior, the Israeli cabinet minister who greeted the Pope at the Wall, said after the visit: "It has theological significance -- the recognition of the end of the period of humiliation of the Jewish nation. It is recognition of our right to return to our land and this place."
Father John Pawlikowski, director of Catholic-Jewish Studies at the Catholic Theological Union at the University of Chicago, reflecting the views of many Catholics, called it one of the strongest moments in John Paul's pontificate, the climax of over two decades of steady effort to confront and try to make amends for the "dark side of Catholic history."
Even papal critics, like author and former priest James Carroll, who has argued that John Paul II has been an unmitigated disaster for the Catholic Church, were impressed and moved. "The current pope has done more to heal the breach between Christians and Jews, and in particular between Catholics and Jews, than any previous pope. The culmination of John Paul II's witness was his historic act of repentance in 2000, coupled with his visit to Jerusalem and his reverencing of the Western Wall. This act symbolically reversed 2,000 years of Christian denigration of the Temple and Christian denigration of the rights of Jews to be at home in Jerusalem and Israel. With that simple non-verbal act, the Pope made a major move away from one of the most powerful and poisonous aspects of Christian theology. It is one of the most important things his pontificate has accomplished," he said.
Still, for Carroll and other papal critics, both Jewish and Catholic, the Pope's dramatic actions and utterances on the Jews and Judaism remained partial achievements, marred by his reluctance to accept full responsibility for the sins of the Church. "That repentance was incomplete," Carroll said. "The Pope apologized, yes, but without saying exactly what he was apologizing for. The Pope's act of repentance was incomplete, in the second place, because it omitted or even misrepresented key events in this history. The real horror of Christian anti-Semitism, so public and so constant, has yet to be fully confronted. The sins of anti-Semitism is rooted not in the bad choices of sinful Christians, but in the behavior of saints: St. Ambrose, St. Louis, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, blessed Pope Pius IX, whose contempt for Jews was regarded as holy because it in turn was rooted in the structure and theology of the Church as such."
Pope John Paul's long journey to the Wall began in his home town of Wadowice in Poland. Much has been written about how the young Karol Wojtyla grew up side-by-side with Jews, who at that time formed at least 20 percent of the population. Wojtyla had Jewish friends, including Jerzy Kluger, who was later to play an important role in the quiet contacts that eventually led Pope John Paul II to establish diplomatic relations with Israel in 1994. Wojtyla even occasionally played goalie on a Jewish soccer team. In 1937, he and his father attended a performance by the famed Jewish cantor Moishe Kussawieki in the Wadowice synagogue.
During the years leading to the outbreak of the Second World War, anti-Semitism was rampant in Poland, driven both by right-wing nationalists and the traditional anti-Judaism of the Church. On February 29, 1936, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Augustus Hlond, issued a letter in which he urged Poles to boycott Jewish businesses and attacked Jews as Bolshevik free-thinkers, atheists, usurers and peddlers of pornography and prostitution. "As long as Jews exist, a Jewish problem exists and will continue to exist," the Cardinal declared.
But Wojtyla, inspired by the strong moral example of his father, was never infected with anti-Semitism. A childhood friend, Ginka Beer, later said: "There was only one family who never showed any racial hostility towards us and that was Lolek and his dad."
Kluger recounted how he once rushed excitedly into a church to tell his friend Karol that they would be classmates the following year. He found his friend assisting in a service and sat down to wait until it was finished. A woman, knowing that Kluger was Jewish, asked what he was doing there. After the service, Wojtyla asked Kluger, "By the way, what was that old women saying to you?" Kluger said, "She asked me if I was the son of the president of the Jewish community. I don't think she thought I belonged here. Maybe she was surprised to see a Jew in church."
To which the future Pope said: "Why? Aren't we all God's children?"
When Wojtyla was elected Pope, the initial reaction from world Jewry was far from positive. "There was enormous skepticism. The feeling was, he's a Pole so he's got to be an anti-Semite. The opposite turned out to be true, precisely because of his background, his experience of the Shoah, what he saw with his own eyes. He was the right man for the right time. We will never see his like again," said Rabbi James Rudin, who for many years was in charge of Catholic-Jewish dialogue for the American Jewish Committee. Rudin, who met Pope John Paul II ten times over the years of his pontificate and accompanied him on the pilgrimage to Israel in 2000, particularly recalled one meeting that took place at the Vatican in March 1990.
"I was leading an American Jewish delegation. After the formal speeches, we stayed to chat and one of us mentioned we were going on to Poland the next day. The Pope immediately became very animated and almost rhapsodic. He said, 'Wadowice, Friday afternoon, candles, Psalms, people walking to synagogue.' It was totally genuine. In that moment, in his mind he was back in Wadowice, remembering with affection the Jews walking to synagogue to welcome the Sabbath. He was a living witness to a scene that can never take place again because that community was destroyed in the Shoah and most of those people were murdered," Rudin said.
Pope John Paul expressed these same sentiments in his 1994 book, "Crossing the Threshold of Hope." He wrote: "I would like to return to the synagogue at Wadowice. It was destroyed by the Germans and no longer exists today. A few years ago, Jerzy came to me to say that the place where the synagogue had stood should be honored with a special commemorative plaque. I must admit that in that moment, we both felt a deep emotion. We saw faces of people we knew and cared for, and we recalled those Saturdays of our childhood and adolescence when the Jewish community of Wadowice gathered for prayer."
Though his childhood experiences of Jews remained with him, it was his direct experience of the Shoah that burned a searing memory that was to become a central part of Karol Wojtyla's spiritual identity. There is no evidence that Wojtyla, who spent the war in Krakow, played any part in organized efforts to help or shield Jews from the Nazis, although he may have helped individual Jews. During his visit to Israel, Edith Schiere, an Auschwitz survivor, told of meeting Wojtyla as she was staggering down the road after somehow escaping from the camp. She said he carried her to the train station on his back and brought her something to eat. The Pope did not recall the incident. Still, he could not have avoided knowledge of what was happening to his Wadowice friends and neighbors. For example, on March 13, 1943, Germans shot scores of Jews in Krakow's Zgoda Square, including Rabbi Seltenreich, the Klugers' rabbi from Wadowice.
In his book, Pope John Paul wrote: "Then came the Second World War, with its concentration camps and systematic extermination. First and foremost, the sons and daughters of the Jewish nation were condemned for no other reason than that they were Jewish. Even if indirectly, whoever lived in Poland at that time came into contact with this reality. Therefore this was also a personal experience of mine, an experience I carry with me even today. Auschwitz, perhaps the most meaningful symbol of the Holocaust of the Jewish people, shows to what lengths a system constructed on principles of racial hatred and greed for power can go."
On his first visit to Poland after becoming pope, in June 1979, John Paul II visited Auschwitz, where he declared: "The Shoah has continued to cast a shadow. This terrible tragedy has challenged both Jews and Christians. It has made us reflect not only on those short but horribly evil years of Nazi rule in Germany but on the almost 2000 years of Jewish-Christian relations."
It seems astonishing to think that when Pope John Paul II made a historic visit to the Great Synagogue in Rome on April 13, 1986 - a ten-minute car ride across the River Tiber from the Vatican - it was the first time that any reigning pope had ever set foot in any synagogue. It becomes less surprising after examining traditional Catholic teachings. For example, Saint John Chrysostom, a fourth century Patriarch of Constantinople called the synagogue "a brothel . a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts" and openly called for Jews to be killed. "Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing," he wrote. However, the Church was guided by the writings of Saint Augustine (354-430) who laid down the theology that was to guide the Church in its relations with the Jews up to the 1960s. "Jews are not to be killed," he wrote. "They have killed Christ but Christ, speaking through David, urges the Church to protect the Jews, who nonetheless are the enemy bearing the mark of Cain."
Over the centuries of blood libels, pogroms and massacres, mass expulsions and forced conversions, some popes did try to protect Jews. Innocent IX (1243-54) condemned the widely-circulated and believed libel that held that Jews murdered Christian children and used their blood to bake Passover matzas. Benedict XII (1332-42) tried, without great success, to protect the Jews of Germany from a wave of massacres following accusations that they desecrated the Host. Clement VI (1342-52) issued an edict in 1348 against the myth that Jews were responsible for the Black Death.
But others took a harsher view. Innocent III, (1198-1216) required Jews to wear distinctive clothing, such as the "Jewish hat" or "Jewish badge, a technique later copied by the Nazis. Gregory IX (1227-41) prompted the burnings of sacred Jewish texts that continued off and on for centuries.
Long after the rest of Europe had torn down the walls of their Jewish ghettoes, successive popes kept Jews in the cities under their control locked up in overcrowded, disease-ridden quarters. Pius IX (1846-78), who was beatified by John Paul II in 2000, presided over Europe's last ghetto in Rome itself until 1870. This same pope was complicit in the kidnapping and forced baptism of a Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara.
Cardinal Edward Cassidy, who headed the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews in the 1990s, summed up the Church's record: "There can be no denial of the fact that from the time of the Emperor Constantine on, Jews were isolated and discriminated against in the Christian world. There were expulsions and forced conversions. Literature propagated stereotypes, preaching accused Jews of every age of deicide; the ghetto which came into being in 1555 with a papal bull became in Nazi Germany the antechamber of the extermination."
Many Jewish historians would go further, directly implicating the Church in modern, racial doctrine of anti-Semitism. "As modern anti-Semitic movements took shape at the end of the 19th century, the Church was a major player in them, constantly warning people of the rising 'Jewish peril,'" wrote David I. Kertzer, in a study of the actions and attitudes of 19th and early 20th century popes.
Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) inspired the Vatican's first attempt to escape this bitter legacy. In 1960, he held an important meeting with the French-Jewish historian Jules Isaac who had published a groundbreaking study of Christian attitudes towards Judaism, which he characterized as a "teaching of contempt". The pope's willingness to listen sympathetically to Isaac was a signal that Rome's view was about to change. Two years later, Pope John convened the Second Vatican Council, which eventually produced the milestone declaration, Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) which included the solemn statement: "The Jews should not be presented as repudiated or cursed by God." It also declared: "Jews remain very close to God . since God does not take back the gifts he bestowed or the choice he made."
Wojtyla, then a bishop little known outside of Poland, too part in the heated internal discussions that led up to that declaration, challenging Vatican conservatives who still saw no need to repudiate the traditional teaching that the Jews were guilty of killing Jesus. But in 1968, when the Communist authorities in Poland stirred up a new and vicious anti-Semitic campaign that forced 34,000 Jews to hurriedly pack their bags and flee the country, Catholic leaders, Cardinal Wojtyla among them, again remained silent.
It was only after his election as Pope that Wojtyla began speaking publicly in a series of forceful statements that made it clear he was determined to put Catholic-Jewish relations on a totally new footing. As a key part of this, he began preparing the ground for the Vatican to end its long refusal to recognize the State of Israel as the Jewish homeland. In a homily to Christians at Otranto in 1980, the pontiff recalled that the Jews, who had suffered "tragic experiences connected with the extermination of so many sons and daughters, were driven by a desire for security to set up the state of Israel."
At the conclusion of pastoral visit to Brazil in 1991, the Pope led a special prayer echoing Ezekiel 34:13: "May our Jewish brothers and sisters who have been led out among the peoples and gathered from foreign lands and brought back to their own country to the land of their ancestors be able to live there is peace and security on the 'mountains of Israel' guarded by the protection of God, their true shepherd."
Speaking during a visit to Australia, he declared: "The Catholic faith is rooted in the eternal truths of the Hebrew Scriptures and in the irrevocable covenant made with Abraham. We, too, gratefully hold these same truths of our Jewish heritage and look upon you as our brothers and sisters in the Lord."
In a U.S. television documentary about the Pope's Polish roots, Feliks Tych, director of the Jewish Museum in Warsaw, commented: "In leaving Poland, Wojtyla freed himself to act, to start the re-education program regarding Jews in the Church, to forge diplomatic ties with Israel, to write the document on the Shoah."
If actions speak louder than words, Pope John Paul's actions spoke volumes. "Jews and Catholics all over the world have observed John Paul II meet with leaders of Jewish communities," said Rabbi Michael Signer, a theologian at Notre Dame University. "They have witnessed his kneeling in prayer at Auschwitz. When he visited the synagogue in the city of Rome, people noticed that he did not sit on a platform raised above the Rabbi. He sat on the same platform with the Rabbi."
On that historic occasion, the Pope delivered one of his strongest and clearest theological statements: "The Jewish religion is not extrinsic to us, but in a certain way is intrinsic to our own religion. With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship that we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers," he declared.
In 1994, the Pope hosted an unprecedented and uniquely moving concert at the Vatican to honor the victims of the Shoah. Survivors joined the pontiff to listen as a setting of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was played at the spiritual center of Christianity.
As a result of Pope John Paul's leadership, a major change in Catholic attitudes to Judaism began to take hold throughout the Church. "The textbooks used in Catholic schools have been radically overhauled and improved. You won't find any negative stereotypes of Jews and Judaism in our teaching materials any more," said Eugene Fisher, director of Catholic-Jewish relations at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In October 2000 some 150 Jewish theologians and rabbis issued a statement entitled Dabru Emet (Speaking the Truth), responding to the great progress that had been achieved. The statement recognized a dramatic change in Christianity in recent decades and offered eight precepts for future dialogue. These included the fact that Jews and Christians worshipped the same God, that their two religions were based on common moral principles and that they could and should work together for peace and justice. However, one statement - "Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon" -- provoked considerable debate within the Jewish world, prompting some prominent Jewish figures to refuse to sign the statement.
To be sure, there were stumbles in the relationship. Jews were angered when the Pope formally received Kurt Waldheim at the Vatican in 1987. Other foreign governments had shunned the newly-elected President of Austria, who had been placed on the U.S. Department of Justice's Watch List as a suspected war criminal. Waldheim had covered up his service as a Nazi Party member and German military intelligence office in the Balkans during World War II, where he may have been implicated in atrocities.
The Pope's decision to receive Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat at the Vatican in September 1982 also raised hackles. At the time, Israel regarded Arafat as a terrorist and was in the process of expelling his forces from Beirut to a new exile in Tunis. Israelis saw the Pope's gesture as a one-sided intervention in the Middle East conflict. The Pope, concerned to protest Vatican interests in the Holy Land while maintaining a voice in Middle East negotiations, subsequently met Arafat numerous times and formally established diplomatic relations with the PLO in 1994. In February 2000, on the eve of the Pope's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Vatican and the PLO signed a basic agreement that warned Israel that any unilateral decisions affecting Jerusalem were "morally and legally unacceptable."
However, by far the biggest irritant in Jewish-Catholic relations continued to revolve around history, particularly the meaning of the Shoah.
The tone was set at Pope John Paul's 1979 visit to Auschwitz where he prayed for Edith Stein, a Jewish convert who became a Carmelite nun but was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz as a Jew. Later, in 1998, John Paul II canonized her as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, an act that many Jews found hurtful since it seemed to suggest that the only Jewish victim of the Shoah worthy of being venerated was a convert.
Others suggested that the real message of her canonization was that it allowed the Church to contend that Catholics were just as much targets and victims of Nazism as Jews. "The canonization of Edith Stein revealed the lengths to which the Church was prepared to go to renegotiate its own history during the Holocaust," said James Carroll.
Stein's niece, Suzanne Batzdorff, commented: "For Jews, I believe Edith Stein is a gulf, not a bridge. A convert from Judaism cannot be a role model for Jews. I've talked to many Catholics in the forefront of Jewish-Catholic dialogue who say they need a symbol for the Holocaust. Jews don't need a symbol because for us it's all too real; besides, almost every family has its own victim or victims."
In 1984, a group of Carmelite nuns moved into a building near the gates of Auschwitz where they devoted themselves to offering Christian prayers at a place where 1.1 million people were murdered, 90 percent of them Jewish. Outraged Jews immediately launched an international campaign against efforts to "Christianize the Shoah". Passions and tempers raged for years and the convent became a running sore in Jewish-Catholic relations. Polish nationalists and Catholic zealots planted hundreds of crosses in the biggest Jewish cemetery in the world. Eventually, Pope John Paul intervened, asking the nuns to move to another building a short distance away. Most of the crosses were removed but one giant, 20-feet high cross remains. It was the one erected for the Pope's makeshift altar during that same 1979 mass.
In March 1998, the Vatican published "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" which was supposed to be its definitive word on the meaning of the Holocaust. The Church expressed sorrow for the "failures of her sons and daughters in every age" and put forward the document as an act of teshuva, the Hebrew word for repentance. However, the document tried to draw a distinction between traditional anti-Jewish attitudes preached by the Church and Nazism, which it identified as a pagan ideology unconnected to Christianity. It went on to ask: "Did Christians give every possible assistance to those being persecuted, and in particular to the persecuted Jews? Many did but others did not." Philip Cunningham, director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, called this sentence a "singularly weak and ill-conceived formulation. In reality, some did (help Jews) and most did not." Catholic historian Gary Wills wrote: "Though expressions of sympathy for Jewish suffering are expressed in the new statement, it devotes more energy to exonerating the Church - and excoriating the Nazis for not following Church teachings - than to sympathizing with the Holocaust's victims."
Rabbi Rudin, an admirer of Pope John Paul, noted that the narrative of "We Remember" was part of a battle to write history. "If the Catholic narrative of the Shoah as set down in this document remains the definitive word of the Church, then we have a big problem," he said.
"We Remember" also included a fierce defense of the wartime record of Pope Pius XII (1939-58), dubbed by historian John Cornwell as "Hitler's Pope" in one recent book. Pius, a candidate for beatification and canonization, never once openly denounced the Nazi genocide against the Jews, though he had abundant information as early as 1941 and certainly by 1942 that it was underway. The Vatican document credited Pius XII with working behind the scenes to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews and argued that to have openly spoken out against the Shoah would have merely endangered the lives of millions of Catholics without helping any Jews. Cornwell found this argument not credible.
"That failure to utter a candid word about the Final Solution in progress proclaimed to the world that the Vicar of Christ was not moved to pity and anger. From this point of view, he was the ideal Pope for Hitler's unspeakable plan. He has Hitler's pawn. He was Hitler's Pope," he wrote.
In an effort to clear up the controversy, the Vatican convened a commission of three Jewish and three Catholic historians in 1999 to look at the record. However in July 2001, the commission suspended its activities following the Vatican's refusal to open its wartime archives for their examination. The commission had prepared a preliminary report extremely critical of the role and actions of Pius XII but said it could not reach a definitive answer to 47 key questions without access to original Vatican documents. The Vatican said it had nothing to hide but the archives could not be opened until the long task of reorganizing and cataloging all the documents was complete. That task could take many years.
Though serious problems may remain, it seems certain that the future of Catholic-Jewish relations will be determined more by the actions and priorities of the next Pope than by the outcome of historical disputes. Many involved on both sides of the dialogue believe that the changes he has wrought are largely irreversible and will stand as one of the most enduring monuments to his pontificate. But others warn that the poisonous history of 2,000 years cannot be negated within a single generation. For Jews, the central question about Christians remains, in the words of Rabbi Michael Signer, "Can we trust you, can we trust you now?"
For Pope John Paul II, the answer was a resounding "yes". It will be for his successor to provide an answer for the future.