Posted on 05/05/2011 12:12:38 PM PDT by presidio9
Passover is over and Shavuot is weeks away. It's a season when Jews traditionally take time for contemplation and reflection.
This year, I've been reflecting on Catholicism. Rather on the complicated interfaith nexuses between Catholics and Jews.
In large part, of course, this is because of the beatification May 1 of Pope John Paul II.
Critics have questioned the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to waive the usual five-year waiting period and fast-track John Paul's road to sainthood.
And JP2 had his faults -- his handling of the priest sex abuse scandals has come under particular recent scrutiny.
But the Polish-born pontiff was the best pope the Jewish world ever had.
"There have been few times in the 2,000 years of Christian Jewish relations when Jews have shed genuine tears at the death of a Pope," the eminent Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum wrote in a recent column. "When Pope John Paul II died, I -- and many other Jews -- cried."
I don't recall actually shedding tears when John Paul died on April 2, 2005 at the age of 84. In fact, I was in the midst of celebrating my nephew's bar mitzvah.
But I did feel deeply touched by his passing -- I had reported on John Paul during most of his nearly 27-year papacy.
In a deliberate and demonstrative way, he had made bettering Catholic-Jewish relations and confronting the Holocaust and its legacy a hallmark of his reign, and I had chronicled milestone after milestone in this process.
There had been frictions and setbacks, to be sure. Key among them was the pope's support for the canonization of his controversial World War II predecessor, Pius XII, and his refusal to open secret Vatican archives to clarify Pius' role during the Holocaust.
He also hurt Jews by welcoming Austrian President Kurt Waldheim to the Vatican after Waldheim's World War II links to the Nazis had come to light. And he upset Jews with his meetings at the Vatican with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
These episodes, however, were far outweighed by positive steps. Some of them were truly groundbreaking measures that jettisoned -- or at least shook up -- centuries of ingrained Catholic teaching and changed Catholic dogma to reflect respect for Jews and the Jewish religion and apologize for the persecution of Jews by Catholics.
They ranged from his visit to Rome's main synagogue in 1986, to his frequent meetings with rabbis, Holocaust survivors and Jewish lay leaders, to his repeated condemnation of anti-Semitism, to the establishment of relations between the Vatican and Israel, to John Paul's own pilgrimage to the Jewish state in 2000, when he prayed at the Western Wall.
It was evident throughout that he was deeply influenced by his own personal history of having grown up with Jewish friends in pre-World War II Poland and then witnessing the destruction during the Shoah.
As Berenbaum put it, John Paul II was "directly touched by the Holocaust" and "assumed responsibility for its memory."
The program director of a Catholic-run interfaith and dialogue center near the Auschwitz death camp agreed.
"Auschwitz was not an abstract tragedy but it formed part of his life," the Rev. Manfred Deselaers told the Catholic news agency Zenit.org. "Auschwitz was the school of holiness of John Paul II."
Given this background, it seemed fitting that the Vatican chose to beatify John Paul on May 1 -- the eve of this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah.
The coincidence, though, was not intentional.
In the Catholic calendar, May 1 this year marked the Sunday after Easter, a feast called Divine Mercy Sunday. And John Paul II had died on the very eve of Divine Mercy Sunday in 2005.
Still, the timing sent out a powerful message. And it made me reflect on how very, very radically relations between Catholics and Jews have changed, even in just the past few decades.
Relations between Catholics and Jews are not perfect, of course, and they never will be. There are still anti-Semitic elements in the Church, and John Paul II's teachings have not trickled down to all the world's more than 1 billion Catholics. But we do live in a different world.
For centuries, the popes and the Vatican "worked hard to keep Jews in their subservient place -- barring them from owning property, from practicing professions, from attending university, from traveling freely," Brown University historian David Kertzer wrote in his 2001 book "The Popes Against the Jews." "And they did all this according to canon law and the centuries-old belief that in doing so they were upholding the most basic tenets of Christianity."
Here in Rome, the papal rulers kept Jews confined to a crowded ghetto until 1870. In many places Jews would stay indoors at Easter for fear of being caught up in a blood libel accusation or be accused of desecrating the Host.
Less dramatically, I still remember from childhood how Catholic kids in my suburban Philadelphia neighborhood were forbidden to enter synagogue to attend their friends' bar mitzvah services.
Formal dialogue began only in 1965, with the Vatican's Nostra Aetate declaration that repudiated the charge that Jews were collectively responsible for killing Jesus, stressed the religious bond between Jews and Catholics, and called for interfaith contacts.
Two decades later, in 1986, when John Paul became the first pope to visit a synagogue, he embraced Rome's chief rabbi, Elio Toaff, and declared that Jews were Christianity's "dearly beloved" and "elder brothers."
Toaff met frequently with John Paul, and the two established a warm rapport. In fact, Toaff and the pope's longtime secretary were the only two individuals named in John Paul's will. The rabbi called that inclusion "a significant and profound gesture for Jews" as well as "an indication to the Catholic world."
Long retired now, Toaff celebrated his 96th birthday on April 30 -- the day before John Paul's beatification.
The memory of John Paul "remains indelibly impressed in the collective memory of the Jewish people," Toaff said in a statement published after the beatification in the Vatican's official newspaper. "In the afflicted history of relations between the popes of Rome and the Jewish people, in the shadow of the ghetto in which they were closed for over three centuries in humiliating and depressing conditions, the figure of John Paul II emerges luminous in all of its exceptionality."
When I was a kid back in the 50s, I belonged to a Boy Scout troop sponsored by a Presbyterian Church. Once a year they had 'Scout Sunday' and invited all the troop members to attend. I asked my parish priest if it was ok if I went. He said to the effect that I'd better go because that church did a lot for the kids and I owed them that respect, and BTW, say hello to Rev. Anderson while I was there. They were good friends.
I think that not attending another service was a myth that a lot of people believed, and not actually a church rule.
Ping
“Let’s make a few phone calls?” To whom? Document, please.
Zolli converted when he was not named Chief Rabbi of Israel. It was a sour grapes move.
“Zolli converted when he was not named Chief Rabbi of Israel. It was a sour grapes move.”
So nice of you to offer your opinion on the matter.
I guess you were there when he converted and could read his mind and heart.
I would ask you to offer an opinon as to what I am thinking.
But on second thought, I will tell you point blank- STFU.
Go back and read the comments to you from the others (except mine). They were all trying to educate you and all you can do is throw another stone. Good training, I guess.
Well, there weren’t 20 million combatants, and in any case by Western Powers I mean the leadership. Everyone knew something aweful was going on, but witness the Red Cross’s complicity in the Theresienstadt charade. But could anyone guess that the Nazis were so obscessed with the Jewish Question that they were willing to starve units on the Eastern Front in order to ship Jews to their deaths? It was insane, but they were doing it. Only the Conspirators did something. But it seems that the Allies were unwilling to trust them. The stupidity of the “unconditional surrender thing.” They say that even Stalin with nonplused. He is said to have commented, but if they surrender to you, you can make it as unconditional as you want. Which is what McArthur did in Japan. And if Hitler had disappeared in July, 1944, the terms proposed to the new Goverman Government would have made Versailles seem like a slap on the wrist.
“I think that not attending another service was a myth that a lot of people believed, and not actually a church rule.”
My Methodist Mom and Catholic Dad were not allowed to get married in his church back in 1945; they had to have the wedding in the rectory. When my Mom’s cousin got married at her church in 1957, we were allowed to attend the wedding service, but were told it would be a sin to participate; even singing the hymns would have been wrong.
I call bull. Rabbis are encouraged to marry and have a large family. Celibacy is unnatural, causing natural human desires to be bottled up, which then sometimes spill out in unnatural ways.
Utter nonsense.
Your completely unsubstantiated accusation is as petty as it is false.
Zolli did not put himself forward as Chief Rabbi for Israel.
When Zolli converted in 1945, the Chief Ashkenazic Rabbi of Israel was Yitzhak Herzog, who was only 57 years old and in good health, and Herzog had already held the office for almost a decade when Zolli converted.
There was no vacancy and there was no question of Zolli replacing the well-respected and established incumbent.
You should quit making stuff up.
There was indeed a Chief Rabbinate of Israel in 1945 - in fact two, as there still are today: one for the Ashkenazim and one for the Sephardim.
This Rabbinate preceded the formation of the state of Israel.
Zolli, by the way, was Ashkenaz and not Sephardic - his name was Anton Zoller before the Fascists forced him to Italianize it.
However, juliej completely invented the whole "sour grapes" thing - her claim is laughably ahistorical and betrays zero knowledge of the history and the politics involved.
Perhaps the rabbinates were using the name “Palestine” after the mandate before 1948, and then were changed with the coming of independence. I do know that the Jewish brigade recruited by the British during WWII used an armpatch that said "Palestine" on it, so the term did not have the same connotations that it does now.
Meanwhile, the Pope saved 860,000 -- Lapide's number, not mine -- but his actions are continually criticized by those who claim he "didn't do enough" or "was silent".
As the old saw goes, no good deed goes unpunished.
He did a lot more than "speak up". The convents and monasteries around Rome were full of Jews. The Pope's own summer house at Castel Gandolfo was the place of refuge of a number of Jews; some Jewish babies were even born there. When the Nazis demanded a ransom of 50 kilograms of gold for some Jewish prisoners, the Pope provided 15 kilograms from the Vatican reserves. There are many other examples.
When John XXIII, who was then the Papal nuncio in Istanbul, was credited with saving thousands of Jews by giving them false baptismal papers, he replied, "You should thank the Pope. Everything that I did, I did on his instructions."
What about Alexander VI? Sure he threw orgies in the Vatican. But he also gave expelled Spanish Jews sanctuary in Rome and protected them -- a move that was both right and deeply unpopular.
The Chief Rabbinate of Israel pre-dates the State of Israel by centuries. Its origin lies in an Ottoman-appointed position, the “Rishon L’tzion,” (”First in Zion”) which was created in the mid-17th century.
That number is a ludicrous exaggeration. All of Italy had only 50,000 Jews at the time.
Who says that it only consisted of Jews in Italy? There were over nine million Jews in Europe before World War II started.
A piece of history not very well known....
I have the greatest respect for my Jewish brethren, but there's a trend going on that I've seen among my friends here as well as on FR. Much of what the Jewish community "knows" about Catholics in general and Pope Pius XII in particular is not very well founded. When I talk to my friends, it's "I heard . . ." or "Somebody said . . . " that the pope did this or did that (or didn't do this or that).
The release of the East German and Russian espionage files revealed that STASI and the KGB waged a campaign to discredit Pius XII, because they saw him as an enemy of Communism as well as Fascism (which he was). This included funding the scurrilous play The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter), which (although completely fictional) is one of the main sources of the libels against the pope.
You have to carefully investigate what you hear rather than taking it at face value. It may well originate with people who have ulterior motives and are deliberately taking advantage of a certain cynicism in the Jewish community.
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