Title: Pope's Road to
Israel Paved by Past Errors
Author: Lee Hockstader
Publication: Washington
Post
Date: March 12, 2000
JERUSALEM, March 11 --
Shortly before his death in 1904, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism,
was granted an audience with Pope Pius X in Rome. He came right to the
point: The Jewish people, scattered across Europe, dreamed of a national
home in the Holy Land of Palestine, Herzl said. Could they count on the
Vatican's support?
The pope, dispensing
with pleasantries, spoke plainly. "The Jews have not recognized our Lord,
therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people," said the Holy Father,
according to Herzl's diary account of the meeting. "And so if you come
to Palestine and settle your people there, we will be ready with churches
and priests to baptize all of you."
Now, on the cusp of a
new century, an extraordinary thing is happening. For the first time, an
incumbent pope is to make an official visit to the Jewish state and Palestinian-controlled
territory later this month. There, in addition to his personal pilgrimage
retracing Christ's steps in Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem and Galilee,
John Paul II will pay homage to the Jews in their homeland in a way that
would have been unimaginable in Herzl's time, or even a generation ago.
"This event really does
embody this amazing historical and ideological transformation," said Rabbi
David Rosen, head of the Anti-Defamation League's Jerusalem office.
Still, as the pope's
six-day visit to the Holy Land nears, Israeli Jews are of several minds
about the event. Many or most Israelis, particularly secular Jews, are
more or less pleased that the pontiff is coming. But others are uneasy,
and some, especially the most observant religious Jews, are actively hostile.
By most measures, John
Paul has done more--considerably more--than any previous pontiff to make
overtures, and amends, to Jews.
Having grown up on friendly
terms with Jews in a small town in prewar Poland, he became the first holy
father to make a recorded visit to a synagogue--Rome's, in 1986. He condemned
the Holocaust as an "indelible stain" on the 20th century and made a pilgrimage
to the death camp at Auschwitz in the first year of his papacy.
The pope led the church
to apologize, in 1998, for the acquiescence of many Catholics in the liquidation
of European Jewry in World War II, and in a special Mass today, he is expected
to offer a prayer acknowledging that and other wrongs committed by Catholics.
He has nudged church teachings and doctrine into a strikingly friendlier
posture toward the Jews, encouraged interfaith dialogue and, in 1993, established
full diplomatic relations with Israel.
"He's done more for Catholic-Jewish
relations in 20 years than the Catholic Church has done in 2,000," said
Father Michael McGarry, rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute near
Bethlehem.
The pope's gestures and
pronouncements are all the more astonishing considering the glacial pace
at which the Vatican usually shifts its views. When a pope last passed
through the Holy Land, in 1964, Paul VI never publicly spoke the word "Israel,"
refused to meet with the country's chief rabbi and made clear that his
one-day tour of Christian holy sites did not confer official Vatican recognition
on the Jewish state.
Jews are ambivalent about
the pope's trip, largely because of the Vatican's public silence during
the Holocaust and the bitter historical dispute that swirls around the
role and influence of the wartime pope, Pius XII.
The Vatican insists that
Pius XII worked quietly and wisely to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust,
and that vocal public intervention by the Vatican may have only brought
retribution from the Nazis, against Jews as well as Catholics. But many
Jews believe that by keeping quiet, the pope was guilty of complicity in
the slaughter, or at the least passivity.
Jewish leaders around
the world, noting that standard Catholic liturgy included prayer for the
"perfidious Jews" until the mid-1960s, regarded the 1998 apology as partial.
They were disappointed, and in some cases angered, that it seemed to absolve
the Vatican itself of any role in nurturing antisemitism.
In a Gallup poll conducted
last weekend for the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, three
of five Israelis took a positive view of the pope's trip here. But nearly
as many, 52 percent, doubted or rejected outright the church's sincerity
in apologizing for the role of Christians in the extermination of Europe's
Jews.
Those doubts may only
be reinforced by the Vatican's release of a document March 1 dealing with
the church's "errors of the past." Although seemingly timed for the pope's
trip to Israel, the document contained no apology.
The pope is expected
to treat the topic personally today during his "Day of Pardon" Mass. Yet
whatever the particulars of his message, it is unlikely to dissolve the
doubts of many Jews.
"We don't have a lot
of room in our hearts for this man and this religion," said Channa Flam,
a Brooklyn-born, devoutly religious Israeli whose father's family was wiped
out in the Holocaust. "We don't have a lot of room in our hearts for forgiveness."
To be sure, the government
is going all-out to make the pope's trip a success, spending millions in
preparations, finessing Saturday Sabbath restrictions on travel, and laying
on helicopters, hundreds of buses and a custom-built, armored, tractor-like
popemobile to navigate the tortuous, narrow streets of Jerusalem's Old
City.
Mindful that the pope's
March 21-26 visit will pack a powerful symbolic punch, Israeli authorities
are determined that it will inaugurate a new era of amity between the world's
1 billion Catholics and 13 million Jews. The police code name for the trip
was not chosen at random: "Operation Old Friend."
Yet it will take more
than official goodwill to overcome centuries of suspicion, hatred and bloodshed.
Even among Israelis who wish the pope well, or who favor closer ties to
promote the welfare of Jews living in predominantly Christian countries,
it often doesn't take long for a conversation about the Catholic Church
to veer off into the minefield of historical memory.
In a recent interview,
Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, an Israeli member of parliament from the ultra-Orthodox
United Torah Judaism Party, said he appreciated the pope's overtures to
the Jewish people. Yet in the space of a 90-minute interview, he managed
without prompting to make mention not only of the Holocaust, but also of
the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms against Jews in czarist Russia and
the Crusades, among other blood-stained milestones in the grim history
of Christian treatment of Jews.
For centuries, Ravitz
said, the Roman Catholic Church taught contempt for the Jewish people--a
teaching that Pope John XXIII resolved to eliminate only in the early 1960s.
"If you are a human being
with normal feelings, you can't just wipe it away," he said. "Just because
the pope says something new, will the Christian world accept it?"
The lingering suspicions
and long memories, if held most strongly by only a minority of Israelis,
have found expression in grumblings among religious Jews in advance of
the pope's visit.
In some of Jerusalem's
ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, graffiti and posters have appeared on walls
condemning the pope as "wicked" and an "idolater." Religious militants
of the Kach movement, which Israel has outlawed for its extremist views,
spray-painted warnings on the walls of the chief rabbinate's offices in
Jerusalem protesting the pontiff's visit and warning Israeli officials
not to meet with him.
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg,
a prominent American rabbi, recently told an international convention of
Jewish veterans that as a young parish priest, the pope was passive during
the Holocaust, and that Israelis should not receive him with celebration.
And a large group of
rabbis and laymen, representing rabbinical councils across Israel, signed
a petition calling on the pope to cancel a Saturday Mass in Nazareth. Although
Nazareth is populated entirely by Arabs, the 2,137 signers of the petition
were concerned that Israeli security arrangements for the Mass at the Basilica
of the Annunciation would entail a "massive desecration" of the Jewish
Sabbath.
These stirrings of discontent,
although they do not represent the mainstream of Israeli opinion, have
alarmed some officials and threatened to obscure what most analysts agree
is a remarkable journey by a pope who has made reconciliation with Jews
a hallmark of his papacy. Last week, Haim Ramon, the Israeli cabinet minister
in charge of arrangements for the trip, had to fly to Rome to discuss with
Vatican officials how to control the fallout from the pope's plans to say
Mass and travel on the Jewish Sabbath.
"Everything is being
reduced here instead of seeing this as a wonderful opportunity for celebrating
this man who represents Jewish-Christian reconciliation," said Yossi Klein
Halevy, a respected Israeli author and journalist. "We're trivializing
it and dredging up grudges."
Klein Halevy, who grew
up in Brooklyn in the 1960s and '70s, underwent his own transformation
of attitudes toward Christianity and the Catholic Church, much of it under
John Paul's papacy. For him, as for some other religious Jews, the Christian
cross itself represented a kind of menace.
"Jews see it as a visceral
threat, and that's how I grew up," he said. "Growing up in Brooklyn I'd
be afraid to walk past the church. I'd cross the street to avoid it. The
question was, do you cross the street or walk past it and surreptitiously
spit?
"I had to actively train
myself to first of all not fear the cross, and then learn to respect and
then learn to appreciate it as a symbol of devotion. But that was a conscious
act of training."
Other Jews have not reexamined
their attitudes toward the church. And in recent years and months, many
have detected enough new irritants in Catholic-Jewish relations to justify
their resentments.
In 1998, for instance,
the Vatican touched a nerve with many Jews by canonizing Edith Stein, a
brilliant Jewish intellectual who became a Carmelite nun and was killed
at Auschwitz. The Vatican regards Stein as a Christian martyr of the Holocaust.
But many Jews believed that by singling out for sainthood a Jewish convert
who died at Auschwitz, the church was attempting to expropriate Jews' overwhelming
suffering.
That suspicion flared
when Carmelite nuns opened a convent near Auschwitz in 1984, and again
in 1998 when Polish Catholics erected more than 100 crosses just beneath
the death camp's barbed-wire-topped walls.
Some Israelis also have
long resented the Vatican's diplomatic support for the Palestinians' national
aspirations, and there are concerns the pope will reinforce that position
when he meets with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during his trip to
the Holy Land.
Just last month, the
Vatican signed an agreement with Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization
recognizing the "inalienable national legitimate rights of the Palestinian
people"--in effect, a call for statehood. And in a thinly veiled swipe
at Israel, whose annexation and declared sovereignty over all of Jerusalem
the Vatican rejects, the agreement states that "unilateral decisions" affecting
the city's status are "morally and legally unacceptable."
"Catholic-Jewish history
is not just about tears," said Father Thomas Stransky, a Catholic scholar
who has done ecumenical work in Israel for many years. "But there've been
a lot of tears."