Thomas F Stransky. America. Volume 169, Issue 14, November 1993.
Full diplomatic recognition of Israel by the Vatican is neither a political necessity nor a panacea for centuries of distrust. The wide range of historic, religious and political reasons for the Vatican to continue its trend toward better relations with Israel are analyzed.
As a Catholic theologian and priest, for 36 years I have been in a continuing series of informal conversations and formal dialogues with Jews in North America and Europe, and for six years now in Israel. Some of the Jews would call themselves religious, some would not. Too often a blunt statement interrupts the flow of discourse: “For a qualitative leap in the improvement of Catholic/Jewish relations everywhere, the Vatican must establish diplomatic ties with the State of Israel.” Until such formal relations, “we Jews and Catholics are spinning dialogical wheels,” or “we Jews will never quite trust official Vatican statements or papal discourses on the Jewish people.”
Two years ago at a Jewish/Christian/Muslim conference in Rome, the then Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Goren, had refused to join the other conference participants in an audience with Pope John Patti II. The rabbi’s reason: “The Pope does not recognize the State of Israel, even after the Holocaust.” In much stronger terms last September, Goren publicly judged that the meeting with the Pope of his successor, Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meier Lau, was “a desecration of God’s name,” “making a mockery of us [Jews],” “a blasphemy beyond comparison.” For Rabbi Goren, “an invitation to meet the Pope is meaningless, until he extends de jure and de facto recognition of the State of Israel” (Jerusalem Post, Sept. 21, 1993).
In July 1992 the State of Israel and the Holy See of Rome publicly agreed to set up “a bilateral permanent working committee,” which would “study and define together issues of mutual interest, in view of normalizing relations.” Interested folk have been flashing questions:
- What does that mean, diplomatic relations between the sovereign state for the Jews and a worldwide church that transcends peoples and nations?
- How would the act affect day-to-day relations between the Israeli Government and the Catholic communities in Israel and in the Administered Territories?
- Would the local Catholic hierarchs, clergy and laity be under obediential pressure from Rome to become passive and silent in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and in its resolutions through the “peace process,” and be dissociated from their fellow Christian and Muslim Palestinians?
- Would Israel be pressured to grant a privileged position to the local Catholic Latin and Eastern churches vis-h-vis the other local churches, whether the ancient Eastern Orthodox or the Western Protestant?
- Would the Vatican, by itself and aloof from these others, plead for changes in the official list of dos and don’ts that now govern the interchurch uses of the Holy Sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth? Does the Catholic Church now intend to disrupt that fragile but workable status quo of rights and privileges which the Ottomans had imposed on the established churches in the 1850’s, and which both the British (1922-48) and the Israeli Governments prudently adopted without change?
“Clarifications, please.”
I offer a few.
1. When one speaks of the Holy See of Rome, that means more precisely the residence and governing offices of the pope as head of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. Wherever the pope resides, that is the Holy See, whether sovereign on one of Rome’s seven hills (the Vatican) or elsewhere. According to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the Convention of Vienna in 1961, the Holy See has the right to establish diplomatic relations with another sovereign subject of international law.
2. The absence of diplomatic relations in itself does not mean that the Holy See refuses to recognize a sovereign state in the international community. The Holy See has never questioned the rightful existence of Israel after its 1948 Proclamation of Independence. Pope John Paul II has stressed that the Jewish people has “a right to a homeland, as does any civil nation, according to international law” (September 1987). And for the state of Israel the Pope asks “for its desired security and the due tranquility that is the prerogative of every nation and the condition of life and progress for every society” (Redemptionis Anno [1984]).
All during the decades-long conflict, the Holy See has had diplomatic relations with members of the Arab League—Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Egypt (but not with Jordan and Saudi Arabia). Thus, many Catholics and Jews during the last four decades were arguing that diplomatic ties would reinforce the Holy See’s recognition of Israel. Such a step would have been a clear signal in the international arena that the Catholic Church in no way supports those neighboring nations and the Palestine Liberation Organization that rejected even the right of Israel to exist and insisted that by political and military means Israel should disappear from the Middle East (see Stransky, “The Catholic-Jewish Dialogue,” AMERICA, 2/8/86).
Now, after the Rabin/Arafat Peace Accords of Sept. 13, 1993, Israel-Holy See diplomatic relations are a contribution to peace in the Middle East. Jews, however, would have considered such normal relations a far better contribution when Israel was in dramatic need of that full legitimization which all its neighbors had belligerently denied. So, when not mildly indifferent, Israeli Jews have been voicing opposition to diplomatic relations. Some critics see only a Vatican power play in the Middle East. The Vatican, they think, still has reasons for refusing normal relations with Israel, but conveniently puts them on the back burner. Others see no reason why Israel should go out of its way to accommodate the political power of a church now, after the collapse of Communist systems and the increase of their own political clout in many countries or in the United Nations. (Israel now has diplomatic relations with over 125 nations.)
At present the Catholic Church has little influence in Israel. Catholics are less than one percent of the population. So opponents to diplomatic relations ask in the Israeli press: “Are we Jews sure we want this to change, by having this minority backed by Vatican diplomatic clout? We should carefully consider Catholic treatment of the Jews in the past and Catholic attitudes now before we Jews grant the status that Catholics here and abroad covet in our land.”
Naomi Teasdale, for years the tireless Coordinator of Christian Affairs in the Jerusalem municipality, responds to these critics. She does not see the issue as Israeli currying favor with the Vatican, to gain the Vatican’s diplomatic recognition of Israel. The important question, she has often said, is “whether we [Jews] can prove to ourselves and to the world that we treat members of other religions as we would have liked in our history and still would like to be treated everywhere in the world.”
3. Diplomatic relations, as an official channel of bilateral communications, do not in themselves mean that the two parties approve or condemn the prevailing type of government (democracy, monarchy, military dictatorship), its territorial claims for itself or for its security, or its political, economic and social policy toward its citizens or its neighbors. Egypt, for example, has diplomatic relations with Israel, but that fact in itself does not even begin to imply Egyptian approval of Israel’s sole governance of Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, the official primary reasons for “not yet with Israel,” which the Holy See publicized in January 1991, were ethical and political:
- Israel’s military presence and its harsh treatment of Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories are not acceptable.
- By its unilateral “annexation of the Holy City of Jerusalem” (1980), Israel in fact has not guaranteed and fostered the same rights and treatment for the Christians and Muslims that Jews enjoy in their spiritual, cultural, civic and economic activities.
- The treatment of the Catholic communities and institutions in Israel and in the Territories contradicts the principles of religious freedom and the equality of citizens before the law.
Implicit is another strong reason: inevitable repercussions on Catholics in Arab countries that are in conflict, if not at war, with Israel.
Thus, the Holy See, in different ways and forums, has been recognizing the right to a homeland (patria, not necessarily a sovereign state) for “the Palestinian people, so many of whom remain refugees and are homeless.” Pope John Paul H pushed for a just situation: “While all concerned must honestly reflect on the past—Muslims no less than Jews and Christians—it is time to forge those solutions which would lead to a just, complete and lasting peace in the area” (September 1987). “The two peoples [Jews and Palestinians] have an identical, fundamental right to their own homeland, in which they live in freedom, dignity and security with their neighbors” (Vatican press communique, December 1988).
The area in question here is the whole Middle East. The specific elements of the Palestinian question are intrinsic to Arab-Israel relations. One expects that the Holy See’s process of normalizing relations will include also Jordan and the “interim” and “post-interim” political entity of Palestine. The Holy See could become one of the religious bridge-builders between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the entire Middle East.
4. Diplomatic relations with the Holy See do not in themselves mean a Catholic theological judgment on the “established” religion of a state, e.g., the Anglican Church in England, the Lutheran Church in Denmark, the Orthodox Church in Greece, Islam in Iran, Buddhism in Thailand or Judaism in Israel.
Diplomatic relations with the State of Israel would not ipso facto mean Catholic theological judgment of Israel to be a sovereign state or of the Jewish people as such, any more than it invites the Israeli Government to pass religious judgment on the Catholic Church, or on how the Catholic faith understands the pope and his ecclesial relation to Catholics in Israel or on the religious relations of Catholics to Jews.
Jewish historians of papal acts and statements often quote the diaries of Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), who launched the modern Zionist movement. On Jan. 25, 1904, in an audience with Pope Pius X, Herzl requested papal support for the return of the Jews to Palestine. According to Herzl, the Pope responded: “We are unable to support this movement …. The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.” Herzl also records the remarks of Secretary of State Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val during the same Rome visit: “As long as the Jews deny the divinity of Christ, we certainly cannot side with them …. How can we agree to their regaining possession of the Holy Land?… In order that we should come out for the Jewish people in the way you [Herzl] desire, they should first have to accept conversion.”
How much has changed? Despite Catholic insistence that the theological presuppositions of Pius X are incompatible with the present official theology of the church’s relations with the Jews, the suspicion of a deep lingering anti-Jewish stance in Vatican circles has not been put to rest, at least not in Israel. One often hears this suspicion articulated among those Israeli Jewish religious leaders who have had little, if any, dialogue with Christians and remain isolated from direct exposure to modern Catholic theology. Emeritus Chief Rabbi Goren believes that Pope John Paul “cannot change anything, because the existence of the State of Israel is a direct contradiction of Christian dogma. Jesus announced that after the Jews were expelled from the land, they would never return. And here [in Israel] suddenly there has been an ingathering ot exiles.” Rabbi Goren asks, are the Jews “expecting that the Pope should see things our way and agree to contradict Christian dogma?”
Sergio Minerbi, an Israeli Jewish scholar of Vatican affairs, has stated that the only real value of diplomatic normalization would be the opening of “a new channel of communication through which [Jews] could convey their spiritual concerns to the Holy See.” This would mean not only that Israel should become the central partner for inter-religious dialogue with the Catholic Church, but that the secular agencies of Israeli state. hood should be the dia1oguers! To Minerbi’s hope, David Rosen, former Chief Rabbi of Ireland and now an Israeli consultant to the negotiations, responds, “Anyone familiar with the complex relations between state and religion in Israel, which is characterized by a pre-modern sociological reality, can only be highly skeptical.”
I would be more blunt. The last people to enlist as the primary partners in the Catholic/Jewish religious dialogue should be diplomats—on either side. The Holy See wisely keeps the competencies separate between its Secretariat of State and the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.
At Present, the primary Catholic motive and interest in Judaism is not a pragmatic adjustment to a world of religious pluralism, or a Realpolitik in the community of nations. Nor is it guilt over past anti-Judaism in Catholic teaching and the hounding and persecution of the Jews, or over lingering prejudice among some Catholics today. The driving force is more positive.
Essential to Catholic identity, according to Vatican Council II, is the active memory of “the spiritual bonds that tie the people of the new covenant to the offspring of Abraham.” “The Jewish religion,” the Pope explained to “our elder brothers” during his 1986 visit to the Rome synagogue, “is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain way is ‘intrinsic’ to our own religion. With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion.” Both the church and the Jewish people “belong to the unfathomable design of God, who does not reject His people.”
Anti-Semitism may still be alive in Catholics today, and it may take a long time to wither away. But it has become most difficult to link anti-Semitism with official Catholic teaching. And diplomatic relations would be beneficial both to Israel and the Holy See in detecting those misuses of religion, Christian or Jewish, which try to justify manifestations of anti-Judaism or of anti-Catholicism, whether, for example, in Slovakia or Colombia or in Israel.
Diplomatic relations will not reconcile Jewish-Catholic history. But I am convinced that they would free up the present dialogue between Catholics and Jews to look more objectively at theological/ethical issues, both abroad and above all in the Holy but troubled Land. Especially now.
The initial Peace Accords between Israel and the P.L.O. have changed at least the psychological climate in the local mainstreams. There is a chance that hostile groups will begin to see each other no longer as enemies but as cooperating neighbors, if not friends. Their destinies are interwoven. They cannot escape each other in the one land that bears two confronting histories, peoples and cultures, with several ideologies and so many prejudices.
The first-hand experiences of indigenous and other Catholics in the Holy Land, in fact of all Christians, urge us, in the spirit of a biblically rooted social ethics, to face issues with our Jewish partners on the following: the covenantal relation of the Jewish people to “the land” (Eretz Israel); the relation between the land and the sovereign nation-state of Israel; the civic rights and responsibilities of Israeli Jewish and Arab citizens and of Palestinians and Jews in the Territories; the witness of religious peoples who refuse to be trapped by indifference, hate, violence or who refuse to escape into false pieties, but who accept God’s revealed demands of true justice and authentic love for all in the Holy Land, whether Jew, Christian or Muslim.
Furthermore, some of us Western Catholics who reside in the Holy Land are aware that at the very time our worldwide church is trying to be more faithful by removing the Jews from what Jules Issac called Christian mepris, or contempt, and by liberating Jews from material and spiritual ghettoes, the conflictual context in this land has been feeding remnants of classical anti-Judaism in the Western and Eastern Christian traditions, for instance the following misconceptions:
- That by their crucifixion of Jesus (“God-killing,” deicidium) and by their failure to accept Jesus as the Messiah, Lord and Saviour, the Jews have forsaken all fights to God’s promises. In divine punishment, the Jews should continue to wander forever and not enjoy the gift of a restored homeland.
- That the New Covenant has completely replaced the Old Covenant. The synagogue kneels before the church, whatever power the Jews may have, in Israel or elsewhere.
For most indigenous Christians here, this old, tired agenda in the Western dialogue is not yet on the table. Also not on the table are the local Christian questions to Israeli Jews: “Who are your neighbors on the same land? Why is so much anti-Christian prejudice, or ‘anticrossism,’ dumped on us indigenous Christians who are not Western?”
Indeed this agenda is not the customary one for diplomats.
6. The Holy See speaks only for the Catholic Church, not for other churches in Israel, and not for the Muslims. These others would not have it otherwise. But initially they did fear that the Holy See would seek from the Israeli Government a privileged position, and that such a political step would interfere with the growing ecumenical relations between the churches and the interreligious relations between Christians and Muslims. This interference would be perceived more seriously if the dominant image is negotiation over the protection of holy sites and church properties, and not over the fostering of the security and welfare of the peoples in the Holy Land.
During the period of negotiations, Catholic representatives have been keeping the other local church leaders and the Muslim authorities informed on the meaning and intention of diplomatic ties and on the positive implications for all religious communities in Israel. Diplomatic relations could result in a localized and clear mutual acknowledgement of those civic rights pertaining to religious freedom for both individuals and communities. These both Israel and the Holy See have already affirmed by their signing various declarations on human fights.