Rome — For at least the third time in his papacy, Pope Benedict’s XVI is doing the Jewish dance that takes him one step back, one step forward.
The step back came when Benedict made a move in mid-December to bring Holocaust-era Pope Pius XII a bit closer to sainthood. The step forward will come in mid-January, when Benedict visits Rome’s main synagogue – a trip planned long before Benedict’s move on Pius.
The question is what impact the visit will have on ruffled Catholic-Jewish relations.
“It is an important event, a milestone in the dialogue,” Rome’s chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, told Vatican Radio about the planned synagogue visit. “We have great expectations for what it can mean in terms of the general climate.”
“If we stop at the things that divide us deeply, we won’t get anywhere,” he said. “The differences are important to move forward.”
Benedict’s visit – set to take place Jan. 17, the Catholic Church’s annual Day of Dialogue with Judaism – will come a month after he recognized the religiously defined “heroic virtues” of both John Paul II and Pius XII, putting them one step away from beatification.
The Polish-born John Paul made fostering Catholic-Jewish relations a hallmark of his papacy. But critics have long accused Pius of having turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. The Vatican and other supporters say Pius acted behind the scenes to help Jews. Gary Krupp, a Jew and the head of Pave the Way, a nonsectarian foundation that promotes interfaith dialogue, suggested in a recent Op-Ed in The New York Post that criticism of Pius XII began in the 1960s as part of a Soviet smear campaign against the Catholic Church, which at the time was profoundly anti-Communist. The Anti-Defamation League responded with a call on the pope to disregard Krupp’s “flawed” evidence.
Scholars and Jewish organizations for years have called on the Vatican to fully open its secret archives in order to clarify the issue before Pius is moved any further toward sainthood. Benedict’s decision to green-light Pius’s advance drew widespread criticism from Jewish bodies. While many Jewish organizational leaders said it was up to the Vatican to decide whom to honor with sainthood, they renewed calls for the archives to be opened.
“As long as the archives of Pope Pius about the crucial period 1939 to 1945 remain closed, and until a consensus on his actions – or inaction – concerning the persecution of millions of Jews in the Holocaust is established, a beatification is inopportune and premature,” the World Jewish Congress’ president, Ronald Lauder, said in a statement.
The Vatican responded with a conciliatory statement saying Benedict’s move was in no way “a hostile act towards the Jewish people” and should not be considered “an obstacle on the path of dialogue between Judaism and the Catholic Church.”
The uproar over Pius XII is not the first episode where the Vatican had to backpedal, clarify or explain a Pope Benedict decision that angered Jews.
In 2008, Jewish protests over the reinstatement of a Good Friday Latin prayer that appeared to call for the conversion of the Jews led the Vatican to change some of the prayer’s wording. Still, Italian rabbis were so angry over the issue that they boycotted participation in last year’s January 17 Day of Dialogue with Judaism.
One year ago, the pope’s lifting of a 1988 excommunication order against Richard Williamson, a renegade Bishop who turned out to be a Holocaust denier, sparked outrage among political figures and mainstream Catholics as well as Jews. Williamson was one of four bishops rehabilitated as part of the pope’s effort to bring their ultra-conservative movement, the Society of St. Pius X, back within the mainstream Catholic fold.
The Vatican ordered Williamson to recant and admitted that the pope had not been aware of his views – despite a video of Williamson that was widely circulated on YouTube.
The pope himself issued a strong message of support to a visiting delegation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and announced to the group the plans for his May 2009 visit to Israel, his first to the Jewish state as pontiff.
Analysts said Benedict’s move on Pius is part of the pope’s effort to shore up conservative forces within the church.
“The pope apparently has chosen to balance his unquestionable commitment to the Catholic Church’s good relations with world Judaism with his commitment to recuperating the religious right wing of Catholicism,” said Lisa Palmieri Billig, the American Jewish Committee’s liaison to the Vatican. “Obviously his path is strewn with warring obstacles.”
Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, an expert in interfaith relations and the vice president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, said, “The great struggle of this moment is shoring up the most traditional elements of his church as he fights the growing secularization and Islamification of the European stage, which is right before his eyes.”
Bretton-Granatoor said that the visit to the synagogue in Rome is “far more telling about the state of Catholic-Jewish relations” than the move to elevate Pius.
His visit to the shul in two weeks will mark only the second time that a pope has crossed the Tiber River from the Vatican to visit the synagogue in Rome. As pope, Benedict has visited synagogues in his native Germany and in the United States, and he made the trip to Israel last May.
But the Rome synagogue has particular significance. Rome is said to have the oldest continuous Jewish community in the Diaspora. The visit to the synagogue in 1986 by Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was the first time any pope had set foot in any shul since the time of St. Peter.
Bretton-Granatoor put some of Benedict’s apparent gaffes down to differences in style and substance that set this pope apart from his predecessor.
John Paul “was an actor and a pastor – he understood that every gesture had meaning,” Bretton-Granatoor said. Benedict, on the other hand, “was an academic and was never a pastor – he doesn’t get seem to get it in the same way as his predecessor.”
He added, “This pope is vastly different from his predecessor. He is a German and, therefore, cannot speak about the Shoah in the way that [John Paul], a Pole, could.”
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Angelo: Your comments and, in general, your views are so out of line with genuine Catholic teaching and tradition. Christians should have the authority to issue an anathema against your theology (?).
Check out this show related to this topic of papal apologies, etc!
http://www.israelnewsradio.net/say_sorry_apology.html
Sainthood is a Catholic issue not a Jewish one. The Catholic Church will do want it wants to on this issue and will not listen to the Jews. Until the archives are open we will not know the true story regarding Pope Pius X11. I for one do not believe he did enough to save Jewish lives. We in Judaism do not need Saints we have Tzaddikim. Pope Pius was no Tzaddik.
I definitely agree with the good Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg. If the Catholic Church wants to effectively and successfully move into the 21st Century it must open its' archives for the sake of the record if nothing else. For more than forty years, America's role has been thoroughly debated from all different angles due to the release of government records through the Freedom of Information Act as well as other sources. It is long overdue for the Catholic Church to follow suit and let the facts fall where they may.
Its too bad Catholics cannot speak unless what they say tickles the ears.
Angelo. The problem is that the Catholic Church refuses to speak with the authority of the archives.They have ears but do not listen.
I wonder. Could the Catholic Church today be doing as the Venerable Pius Xll. Using some verbal restraint in order not to reawaken anti-semitism. With all due respect, and with a great love for the Jewish people, I think maybe some Jews are the ones walking a tightrope.
Arrogance is a disease common to all humanity. Anti-semitism is rampant in Europe. The old Jewish stereotypes are resurfacing. The recession is responsible for this and people seek scapegoats. History is repeating itself. We Jews better awaken from our slumber. Regarding the Pope, I do not believe we will ever know the real truth. In my opinion the Vatican will never fully open the archives.I repeat Sainthood is a Catholic issue not a Jewish one. Why are we anatagonizing the Church by demanding that which will not occur.? What benefit is there to the Church to open the archives if the records show Pope Pius was Hitler's Pope. If Pope Pius was helpful to the Jews there are already numerous books which share this view.I would prefer to ask the Catholic Church to help us fight anti-semitism aroud the world.If they feel strongly that Pope Pius should be a Saint that is their business. There is sufficient evidence that many Catholic Priests and Nuns saved Jewish lives and that they too suffered and died in the camps.
Pius was not pious and Innocent was not innocent. I heard those words from Professor Mordechai Wilenski at the Boston Hebrew Teachers College almost sixty years ago. Although pope Benedict has announced the elevation of Pius XII to 'venerable' status, there is little reason to change the assessments of my favorite teacher, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust. The status of 'venerable' is the step before beatification on the road to sainthood in the Catholic church. Not surprisingly, the Jewish community, particularly the Roman one, is aghast at pope Benedict's action. It is particularly infuriating that this action is being taken before the Vatican archives covering the years of World War II have been opened up for scholarly investigation. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The complete version of this newsletter is distributed via e-mail, at no charge. To get your copy, send your e-mail address to chovevai@yahoo.com _______________________________________________________________________ Many rationales have been put forth by apologists for Pius's acquiescence to the Nazis slaughter of the Jews. As Lisa Palmieri-Billig (Jerusalem Post) writes, one school of thought holds, 'Pius XII was first and foremost a diplomat and an intellectual with deep anxieties over his unwanted life and death-making responsibilities during one of the darkest, most chaotic moments of history; a religious and political leader (as head of the Catholic Church as well as the Vatican State) who navigated with equidistance between Hitler, Stalin and the Allies in order to save the Catholic Church and as many lives as possible (including, though not primarily, those of Jews).'
Others see it differently. As Adi Schwartz (Haaretz) reported, 'Isaac Herzog is drawing on first-hand testimonies left by his grandfather, Isaac Halevy Herzog, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine during the period of the Holocaust. A few months after the outbreak of World War II, Isaac Halevy Herzog and his son, Rabbi Jacob Herzog, tried to contact international religious leaders to determine how European Jewry could be aided. Following Herzog's intervention with the Greek-Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, the latter instructed that a declaration to rescue Jews be made in all the churches in the Balkans. A parallel approach by Herzog to the Vatican was unsuccessful.'
Rationalize as you will, there is no way to find any justification for the behavior of Pius toward Jewish children who had been sheltered by Christians during the war. 'Isaac Halevy Herzog did meet with Pius XII after the war, in February and June 1946, in the course of a lengthy sojourn in Europe. The major item on the agenda was the demand for the restoration to the Jewish fold of tens of thousands of children who had been sheltered in convents and Christian orphanages during the war. "The two spoke Latin, English and French in their meeting," Herzog said this week. "My grandfather asked the Pope to solve the problem of the Jewish children. He asked him to issue a pastoral letter instructing the priests and nuns to release the children. But it was not to be. My grandfather had to travel from place to place himself in order to discover which children were Jews.'The 'venerable' Pius behaved abominably.
I am sure the Jewish Nazi collaborators were murdered by the Nazis. Spitting at human beings is disgusting .