Page 9, 22nd January 2010

22nd January 2010

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Page 9, 22nd January 2010 — Catholics and Jews: learning to disagree
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Catholics and Jews: learning to disagree

Some commentators argue that Catholic-Jewish relations are at an all-time low. In fact they have attained a new maturity, says Anna Arco Across the Tiber and down river from the Vatican lies Rome’s Great Synagogue, at the heart of what was for centuries Rome’s Jewish ghetto. There, at the Tempio Maggiore, John Paul II prayed alongside the Chief Rabbi of Rome in 1986, becoming the first pope in almost two millennia to pray in a synagogue. That day, he called the Jewish people “our dearly beloved elder brothers”. Last Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI became the second pope in history to visit the synagogue, marking an important moment in the often uneasy dialogue between Judaism and Catholic Christianity.
Pope Benedict’s attempts at a rapprochement with the Society of St Pius X have offended the Jewish community, especially in his native Germany, and have been seen by the wider public as a step backwards for the Church. The common perception is that, unlike his predecessor, John Paul II, Pope Benedict has had a much more troubled relationship with the Jewish community, but that is not entirely true. A search through the Times archive brings up countless articles during John Paul II’s pontificate concerning problems similar to those which still plague the dialogue between the two religions.
When Benedict XVI liberated the Traditional Latin Mass with the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum in 2007, he raised an outcry because an older version of the Good Friday prayer would be more widely used. While the older prayer no longer referred to the “perfidious Jews”, a phrase removed in 1959, it caused offence because it referred to the “blindness” of the Jews. Pope Benedict modified the prayer, again causing anger, this time both among Catholic traditionalists and Jewish groups. The former thought the Pope was tampering with an ancient tradition while the latter felt he had not gone far enough.
But the crisis moment came in January 2009 when Pope Benedict announced that he had lifted the excommunications of four Lefebvrist bishops. One of the four, Bishop Richard Williamson was shown on Swedish television shortly before the news was released, saying that there were no Jews gassed during the Shoah. Surprised by the subsequent media storm Pope Benedict repeatedly condemned Holocaust denial.
David Gibson, a journalist who has written a book about Pope Benedict, said on CNN last week that the Pope’s relationship went one step backward, one step forward. He likened it to the 1993 movie Groundhog Day in which the main character relives the same day over and over again.
Some feared that the Pope Benedict’s visit to the synagogue might be cancelled after the controversial wartime pope Pius XII’s Cause progressed last month. Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, Rome’s present Chief Rabbi, decided to go ahead with the visit, even as Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, the leader of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly, boycotted the meeting over Pius XII’s potential beatification.
Pope Benedict was greeted by Riccardo Pacifici, the president of Rome’s Jewish community, who said that the visit would leave a “profound sign”. While Mr Pacifici praised the Florentine nuns who had saved his father and his uncle from deportation to a Nazi concentration camp he also criticised Pius XII’s alleged “silence” over the Holocaust which he said “still hurts as an undelivered gesture”.
He said: “A sign from the Pope might not have stopped the trains of death but would have sent a signal, a world of consolation and human solidarity towards our brothers transported to the chimneys of Auschwitz.” In his speech, which was loudly applauded, the Holy Father spoke out about the horrors of the Shoah and the need for more dialogue and understanding between Jews and Catholics. He apologised for the “failings of [the Church’s] sons and daughters” and begged “forgiveness for all that could in any way have contributed to the scourge of anti-Semitism and antiJudaism”. At the same time, he offered an oblique defence of Pius XII. He said that many had been indifferent to the plight of the Jews but many Italian Catholics had “reacted with courage, often at the risk of their lives” and that “the Apostolic See itself provided assistance, often in a hidden and discreet way”.
Many saw the visit as the continuation of a promising process started by the publication of Nostra Aetate at the Second Vatican Council and followed up by Pope John Paul II. It was also seen as an important moment to shore up what has been achieved in Jewish-Catholic dialogue and to extend the hand of friendship and cooperation.
Such a papal visit would have been inconceivable in the preconcilliar Church and probably even during the Council, when Nostra Aetate was bitterly fought over. The German Cardinal Augustin Bea, who drew up the early versions of the text and was its fiercest defender, insisted an explicit statement denying that the Jews of the present were guilty of deicide, which was opposed by some of the more conservative Council Fathers.
After endless wrangling and several versions of the schema, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council approved a weaker but nevertheless groundbreaking version of the document which held “neither all Jews indiscriminately at the time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his [Christ’s] Passion”. It explicitly condemned anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews and called for education of the faithful.
Rabbi David Rosen, a key player in interreligious dialogue and a former Chief Rabbi of Ireland, explains the shift in Catholic attitudes to Judaism. He says that there “is no transformation comparable to this development of relationships between Catholics and Jews. To have seen a community first as rejected by God, belonging to the Devil and to then shift to viewing that same community as the authentic roots of Christianity; and as Pope John Paul II put it, ‘the dearly beloved elder brother of the Church of the original Covenant never broken and never to be broken’, that is a mind-boggling transformation”.
Although Rabbi Rosen was critical of the way in which certain crisis situations had been dealt with by the Curia (and believes the Pope must take responsibility for this) he says it is unfair to perceive Pope Benedict’s pontificate as a step backwards. He says, however, that it was easy to see how even educated people come to that conclusion, citing the beatification of Pius XII, the Lefebvrists and the liberation of the older form of the Latin Mass among other instances, but these would ultimately not affect the substance of the dialogue. He says that not one of these was an initiative put forward by Pope Benedict.
Rabbi Rosen says the issue of Pius XII goes back many years. “We should ask ourselves why it has taken so many years for the Vatican to approve his status of heroic virtues – surely out of caution and sensitivity to the Jewish community. Pius XII belongs to the most traumatic period in the history of the Jewish people and it is inappropriate to expect Jews not to be upset about the issue, that anybody who did not lay down his life in protest could be considered a saint is almost anathema to Jews.” He says that while it caused angst for some people, “it is not something which would torpedo the process for both parties. And on this period in history, we shall have to learn to agree to disagree. It’s unfair to expect Jews to be objective about that period of their history just as its unfair to expect Catholics to be objective about popes.” The visit to the synagogue, Rabbi Rosen says, was turning revolutionary moments into institutions. He said: “By visiting the Roman synagogue Benedict XVI is making it very difficult for a subsequent pope not to pay such a visit. John Paul II’s visit could have been a one-off, but now with Benedict XVI’s visit there is a sense of continuity.”




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