David Rosen. Israel Affairs. Volume 16, Issue 4, October 2010.
Benedict XVI has had to contend with invidious comparisons to his predecessor from the outset of his pontificate and this has been reflected in Jewish attitudes towards him as well. At the same time a selective loss of memory has occurred in relation to Pope John Paul II. By examining the documents and initiatives of Cardinal Ratzinger, as well as Pope Benedict XVI, this article shows that the idea that Benedict XVI is lacking commitment to the Catholic–Jewish relationship could not be further from the truth.
Benedict XVI has had to contend with invidious comparisons to his predecessor from the outset of his pontificate and this has been reflected in Jewish attitudes towards him as well. John Paul II’s skills as a communicator and his profound intuition for dramatic gestures enabled him to impressively overcome barriers of suspicion and cynicism. Benedict XVI has a very different personality reflective of his cultural and academic background. Moreover his pontificate has not been managed well and has been characterized by failures of internal and external communication that have also had negative consequences as far as relations with Jewry are concerned.
Furthermore, while these have been highlighted and sometimes exaggerated, at the same time a fascinating selective loss of memory has occurred in relation to John Paul II’s pontificate, especially within the Jewish community. The Carmelite convent in Auschwitz; John Paul II’s reception of Yasser Arafat at a time when he was still spurned by world leaders; the reception and even papal decoration of Kurt Waldheim, are just a few of the crises that occurred in relations with the Vatican during that period that have been forgotten.
Even the preparations for the historic visit of John Paul II to the synagogue in Rome in 1986 were fraught with tense negotiations that even descended to the placement and height of chairs. While it may not be a bad thing that the memory of John Paul II’s pontificate has been romanticized, this has also undoubtedly been to Benedict XVI’s detriment. In fact the issues that have clouded Jewish relations with Pope Benedict XVI have virtually all related to matters that were initiated before his pontificate.
One of the major crises concerned Benedict XVI’s permission for the wider use of the Latin Tridentine liturgy which includes a prayer for the conversion of the Jews. While the Pope subsequently amended the text to eliminate any derogatory language, he left in the call for conversion. The Vatican subsequently explained that the Pope sees this as an eschatological prayer and not as any warrant for proselytization of the Jews, to which it is opposed. However the original permit for the reintroduction of this rite had already been given, albeit in a more limited form, by John Paul II in 1988. This meant that those who had been reciting this liturgy with official authorization and praying for the conversion of the Jews at Easter time had been doing so with a far more derogatory text than the one that Benedict XVI authorized. Indeed Pope John Paul II’s permit was part of his initiative to win back those who had rebelled against the changes of the Second Vatican Council, most notably Archbishop Marcel Lefebre and his followers who established the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), and the Pope set up the office of Ecclesia Dei to this end.
Undoubtedly Benedict XVI’s lifting of the excommunication ban on the (illegitimately ordained) bishops of the SSPX that included the Holocaust-denying Richard Williamson, in an attempt to bring them under papal authority, was a fiasco; revealing serious misjudgement and communications failures.
However, pursuant to Benedict XVI taking responsibility for the deplorable lack of consultation and research that could have revealed the true colours of Williamson and the SSPX and prevented the extremely negative fallout, he did remove the cardinal (appointed by John Paul II) who headed Ecclesia Dei, Dario Castrillon Hoyos, and placed the negotiations with the SSPX under far greater scrutiny in the Pontifical Council for Doctrine and Faith.
The fact is that just as with the case of the ’cause’ of Pope Pius XII which was initiated 45 years ago, but was given great attention recently, when Pope Benedict XVI signed the document recognizing Pius XII’s ‘heroic virtues’, Jewry and Judaism were not the object of these initiatives – rather they concerned internal matters of the Church. Nevertheless there certainly was negative fallout as far as Catholic–Jewish relations are concerned. Accordingly while all of these issues were initiated long before Pope Benedict XVI’s pontificate; the public perception, especially in the Jewish community, is that he is responsible; and that Catholic–Jewish relations do not have the same priority for him as his predecessor. This perception, together with Benedict XVI’s lacklustre media image and what has appeared as a propensity for slip-ups, undoubtedly contributed to a rather lukewarm reception in the Israeli press when the Pope visited Israel in 2009.
Despite all this, the idea that Benedict XVI is lacking commitment to the Catholic–Jewish relationship could not be further from the truth. As the cardinal responsible for overseeing the funeral of John Paul II, he issued the first ever invitation to Jewish leaders to attend the funeral of a Pope. Moreover, he was the first Pope to invite rabbis to the celebration of his own ascension to the throne of St Peter in 2005. Little more than a month later he received a delegation of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations. This umbrella body embracing the principal Jewish advocacy organizations as well as the major streams of contemporary Judaism, is the official Jewish partner of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry. Notably he received this Jewish delegation almost immediately after the start of his pontificate, before he had even received delegations from representative bodies of other branches of Christianity, let alone other religions. At this meeting he declared:
In the years following the (Second Vatican Ecumenical) Council, my predecessors Pope Paul VI and in a special way, Pope John Paul II, took significant steps towards improving relations with the Jewish People. It is my intention to continue on this path.
Moreover, the first place of divine worship of another religious community visited by Pope Benedict XVI was the synagogue in Cologne, which he visited in August 2005 during his journey to Germany for World Youth Day. On that occasion he referred to the abovementioned meeting, stating that: ‘Today I wish to reaffirm that I intend to continue with great vigour on the path towards improved relations and friendship with the Jewish People, following the decisive lead given by Pope John Paul II.’
On both occasions he outlined more of his thinking on the nature and purpose of this relationship. While acknowledging the tragic past and deploring resurgent anti-Semitism; he asserted that:
the ‘spiritual patrimony’ treasured by Christians and Jews is itself the source of the wisdom and inspiration capable of guiding us towards a future of hope in accordance with the Divine Plan. At the same time, remembrance of the past remains for both communities a moral imperative and a source of purification in our efforts to pray and work for reconciliation, justice, respect and human dignity, and for that peace which is ultimately a gift from the Lord Himself. Of its very nature this importance must include a continued reflection on the profound historical moral and theological questions posited by the experience of the Shoah.
Still in the first year of his pontificate, Pope Benedict continued to meet with an array of Jewish organizations and leaders including the Chief Rabbi of Israel and the Chief Rabbi of Rome. In receiving the latter he declared ‘The Catholic Church is close and is a friend to you. Yes we love you and we cannot but love you, because of the Fathers: through them you are very dear and beloved brothers to us.’ The Pope also expressed his gratitude for the Divine protection of the Jewish people that has guaranteed its survival over the course of history: ‘The People of Israel have been delivered from the hands of enemies on frequent occasions and in the centuries of anti-Semitism and during the tragic moments of the Shoah, the hand of the Almighty sustained and guided them.’
These ideas have been recurrent in the writings of Joseph Ratzinger. In December 2000 in an article entitled ‘The Heritage of Abraham: The Gift of Christmas’ published in L’Osservatore Romano, he wrote:
Abraham, Father of the People of Israel, Father of Faith, has become the source of blessing, for in him ‘all the families of the earth shall call themselves blessed’. The task of the Chosen People is therefore to make a gift of their God – the One True God – to every other people. In reality, as Christians we are the inheritors of their Faith in the One God. Our gratitude therefore must be extended to our Jewish brothers and sisters who, despite the hardships of their own history, have held on to faith in this God right up to the present and who witness to it.
In this same article, the then Cardinal Ratzinger addressed the question of anti-Semitism and the degree to which Christianity has been associated with it. He stated:
Down through the history of Christianity, already strained relations deteriorated further, even giving birth in many cases to anti-Jewish attitudes which throughout history have led to deplorable acts of violence. Even if the most recent loathsome experience of the Shoah was perpetuated in the name of an anti-Christian ideology which tried to strike the Christian faith at its Abrahamic roots in the People of Israel, it cannot be denied that a certain insufficient resistance to this atrocity on the part of Christians can be explained by an inherited anti-Judaism present in the hearts of not a few Christians.
This condemnation of anti-Semitism includes a description of Nazism that not everyone would share. The Pope repeated this idea when he visited the site of the extermination camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 2006. In describing the intentions of Nazism, he declared:
Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down the principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone – to the men who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world. By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear out the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention.
While many would argue with Pope Benedict XVI’s historical analysis, there can surely be no more powerful argument for Christians to avoid all anti-Semitic prejudice than the one he provides in these statements. It is significant to condemn anti-Semitism as evil and it is remarkable to condemn it as ‘a sin against God and man’ as did Pope John Paul II (words that have been reiterated by Pope Benedict XVI himself). However to describe anti-Semitism as an assault against the very roots of Christianity means that for a Christian to harbour such sentiment is to attack and betray his or her own faith – a message of enormous pedagogical importance in the struggle against hatred directed towards Jews and Judaism.
As already indicated, Benedict XVI sees the Church as having a special – indeed unique – relationship with the Jewish people. This inevitably must take into account the central affirmations of the Jewish faith and of contemporary Jewish identity. In this regard the Pope has a profound understanding of the significance of the State of Israel for the Jewish People. As a cardinal, he was on the Special Committee of the Holy See that reviewed and authorized the establishment of full relations between Israel and the Vatican. Among his close friends in Israel of many years standing (which included the late mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek) is Professor Zwi Werblowsky, one of the Jewish Israeli pioneers of interfaith dialogue. Cardinal Ratzinger phoned Werblowsky in Jerusalem to express his joy over the aforementioned development, describing it as the fruit of the work of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council.
Those fully aware of this were not surprised therefore when Pope Benedict XVI indicated at his meeting in February 2009 with the delegation of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that he intended to visit the State of Israel as part of a papal pilgrimage to the Holy Land following in the footsteps of his predecessor (the official announcement was made on 9 March).
Benedict XVI’s encounters in Israel with the highest civic, political and religious leaders could hardly have been warmer. While inevitably there could not be the same historic significance to his visit to Israel generally and to the Kotel or Yad VaShem in particular as there was when John Paul II visited them as the first Pope ever to do so, Benedict followed in his footsteps, showing the deepest respect towards both Jewish tradition and Jewish suffering. Moreover when still in Jordan and speaking to an Arab audience that was Muslim as well as Christian, he emphasized the unique bond of Christianity with Judaism – something quite amazing considering the sensitivities of the Church’s relationship with the Muslim world. Among his notable speeches during his visit, those he made both on arrival in and departure from Israel were more than admirable in terms of affirming Israel’s integrity, the need to guarantee its secure future and his repeated condemnations of anti-Semitism and all hostility towards the Jewish people. Even when demonstrating sincere compassion for Palestinian suffering and national aspirations, Benedict was at pains to warn strongly against any use of violence.
There was some disappointment over the Pope’s speech at Yad VaShem. Some of that disappointment was based on unrealistic expectations of what he might say there; and in truth if he could have just demonstrated a little more personal emotion his sincere feelings would have come across better. He could even have just added ‘as I said when I was in Auschwitz/Birkenau, to stand here as a German Pope is especially difficult’ and that probably would have placated the critics. Some of the criticism just reflected ignorance. The complaint that Benedict used the term ‘kill’ rather than ‘murder’ reflected unfamiliarity with the English translation in the Bible of the sixth commandment in the Decalogue. The words that Jews translate as ‘you shall not murder’, appear in the vernacular as ‘you shall not kill’! (In fact, in response to this ignorant criticism, in his parting speech Benedict XVI specifically referred to the six million ‘brutally murdered’ during the Shoah.) However, other criticism reflected downright anti-Christian prejudice. Of course there are real historical reasons for this, but the media went out of its way to highlight these, rather than the very significance of the fact that Pope Benedict XVI was there paying his respects to the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah and clearly condemning Holocaust denial.
During the visit, there were two significant aspects where Benedict went further than his predecessor. The first was in the degree of focus on the local Church; and the second was in the focus on interfaith relations. In this regard, the media understandably picked up on how an event at the Notre Dame Center in Jerusalem to support interfaith work in the Holy Land, was hijacked by an extremist Muslim cleric. However, the real interfaith moment during this pilgrimage was in Nazareth where, led by a rabbi singing a song of peace, the Pope held and raised hands in prayer, song and celebration with the other religious leaders on the dais, before hundreds of religious figures from the different faith communities in Israel. This event reflected the real spirit of the papal visit, but most major media outlets did not even report on it.
One also might note that John Paul II’s meeting with the Chief Rabbis in 2000 paved the way for an even warmer encounter when Benedict XVI visited Hechal Shlomo. At John Paul II’s initiative, a special bilateral commission for dialogue of the Chief Rabbinate and the Vatican was established and had held eight annual meetings alternatively in Rome and Jerusalem. This not only provided the basis for warm relations between leadership on both sides, but the final declarations of these meetings served as textual testimony of this bilateral relationship, shared religious values and common concerns for humanity as a whole. These texts were published together on the occasion of Benedict XVI’s visit to Hechal Shlomo and he referred to them in his presentation.
In one respect Benedict XVI’s visit to Israel had a unique significance of its own. John Paul II’s pilgrimage could have been viewed as a personal initiative born out of his own individual life experience and predilections. However in following in his predecessor’s footsteps, Benedict XVI as it were ‘institutionalized’ the papal pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the expectation will inevitably be there for his successors to do likewise, thus highlighting the unique relationship between the Holy See and the Jewish People.