John Paul and Jews

Editorial

The late Pope John Paul II has been credited with instigating an historic rapprochement with world Jewry. The pope had a profound impact on Jewish-Catholic relations, partly as a result of his own close relationship with the Polish Jews of his home town.

As a child, Karol Wojtyla grew up in a Polish environment that historians have described as overwhelmingly anti-Semitic. Young Karol apparently eschewed this tendency, going so far as to attend synagogue with a friend at a time when non-Jewish Poles were not known to set foot in a shul. John Paul would admit late in life that he did little to confront the Nazi regime that overran his homeland, but after the war he reportedly worked tirelessly to return Jewish children who had been entrusted to Catholics, if not to their families, then into the arms of the surviving Jewish community.

The Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s altered 2,000 years of Catholic teachings that had explicitly accused the Jewish people of deicide, a charge that has contributed to the deaths of millions of Jews over two millennia. That accusation was rescinded by the radical events of the council, but the practical applications of this liberalization remained mostly unrealized until the pontificate of John Paul.

As pope, John Paul took a number of landmark public steps to build bridges with Jews. He visited the Great Synagogue of Rome in 1986 and went to Israel in 2000, where he visited the Western Wall, placing a prayer of atonement between the stones. He also visited Yad Vashem.

But John Paul stopped short of an apology for the silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust. There were other rough spots on the road to reconciliation, too. The beatification of Edith Stein, a convert to Catholicism who was murdered by the Nazis because she was nevertheless viewed as a Jew, raised difficult questions of theology and of sensitivity.

On a broader level, this pope's involvement in the collapse of Soviet-dominated communism throughout eastern Europe, beginning with Poland, cannot be overestimated, either in John Paul's role in bringing it about, or in the impact it had on the Jews of eastern Europe.

It is said that John Paul's exhortation to Poles on his first visit to his homeland as pontiff – "Be not afraid" – awoke a liberalizing spirit among Poles.

But liberalizing was not a term that applied to many of the pope's other priorities. On several other fronts, John Paul led the Church away from the liberalizing influences of the secular world of which many Catholics had become part. John Paul crushed the liberation theologians of Latin America, undermining the efforts of the radical priests who had set about to repair the earthly conditions of their parishioners and insisting instead that the full attentions of Latin America's priests be devoted solely to ensuring the poor a reward in the afterlife.

Just as wide-reaching was John Paul's continued insistence that birth control is counter to religious teaching. The implications of John Paul's arch-conservative approach to sexuality cannot be overstated. A refusal to permit family planning of any sort has direct impacts on the fate of millions of Catholic women worldwide – a far more direct and tangible impact than the pope's more symbolic refusal to engage in even the beginnings of a discussion on the ordination of women as priests. Arguably far more deleterious to global health and the right to life was John Paul's steadfast refusal to reconsider his complete opposition to condoms, even as the epidemic of HIV/AIDS was resulting in increasing thousands of dead Catholics and others. The millions of people worldwide whose health was dependent on Catholic hospitals and other Church charities will judge John Paul's actions on AIDS ... if they are alive to do so.

John Paul was a complex individual. History will determine whether his actions saved the Church from a secularizing world and as a result reinvigorated Catholicism, or whether he merely delayed an inevitable liberalization. For Jews and other observers of the pope's role in recent European history, John Paul's complexities and contradictions will remain a subject of deep disagreement.

More urgently, the next pontiff will either continue or redirect the Church's policy toward the Jews, whom John Paul called "our older brothers." Whoever the cardinals select as the next leader of the world's billion Catholics will have a profound impact on the entire world, but there is almost no chance that the next pope will have the same kind of personal history and direct experience with Jews as John Paul.

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