Our Elder Brothers and Sisters

No pope moved closer to Jews than John Paul II

By Richard P. McBrien - National Catholic Reporter - 04/29/1994

When the history of this pontificate is written, Pope John Paul II's outreach to the Jews may be among his most enduring achievements.

The most recent papal initiative is of particular significance. Earlier this month, the pope invited Elio Toaff, the chief rabbi of Rome, to the Vatican as guest of honor at a concert given by the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to honor the memory of victims of the Holocaust.

In a land where gesture - figura, in Italian - is of the highest importance, the pope may have been trying to underscore the equal dignity of the two faiths by seating the chief rabbi next to himself on identical gilt and brocade thrones.

A large menorah, or ceremonial candelabrum, stood out over the crowd of some 5,000 invited guests, including about 100 Holocaust survivors with their children and grandchildren. Six survivors of the death camps lit six candles, representing the 6 million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis.

According to The New York Times, the high point of the concert came when the cantor of Temple Emanu-El in New York intoned in Hebrew the 92nd Psalm, "Oh Lord, it is good to give thanks," to a composition written by Schubert in 1826 for the dedication of a synagogue in Vienna.

The pope himself was described as being visibly moved when the actor Richard Dreyfuss read Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, to Leonard Bernstein's music. Many in the hall wept openly.

"Many at that time mourned, and their lament resounds still," the pope said to the crowd. "We hear them here too. Their lament did not perish with them but lifts up strong, struggling, heartrending, and it says, |Do not forget us.'"

"The candles lit by some of the survivors," he continued, "seek to demonstrate symbolically that this hall has no narrow limits, but that it contains all the victims: fathers, mothers, sons, brothers, friends. In our memory they are all present. They are with you; they are with us."

Although the chief rabbi did not speak at the concert, he issued a statement expressing his appreciation for the pope's effort to commemorate the Holocaust and saying that the concert itself had "a significance that goes beyond that of a simple artistic event."

At an audience earlier in the day, a survivor of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising told the pope: "As a young boy growing up in prewar Warsaw, I feared the sidewalk next to a church. Now, some 50 years later, the unthinkable is happening."

A survivor of the death camps at Auschwitz and Matthausen added: "When the pope shook my hand, I had the feeling 2,000 years of Jewish suffering had come to some kind of turning point." The pope, he said, demonstrate "that there is a way to live together in harmony and peace."

The change in Catholic-Jewish relations had been initiated more than 30 years earlier by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council.

In an audience with 130 U.S. Jews in October 1960, Pope John, who as a Vatican diplomat during the Second World War had assisted in the escape of many Jews from capture and death, told them his favorite biblical story about Joseph recognizing his brothers.

"I am your brother," the pope concluded. "We are all sons of the same Father. We come from the Father and must return to the Father."

The Second Vatican Council that Pope John himself called to work toward the unity of all peoples was especially emphatic about the close spiritual bonds that exist between the church and the Jews.

Jesus and the apostles were Jews, the "Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religion," Nostra Aetate, pointed out. And the Jewish people "still remain most dear to God."

The council deplored "the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source," because they contradict the meaning of the cross of Christ through which the prince of peace "reconciled Jew and gentile, making them both one himself."

For too many centuries, however, the cross of Christ has functioned for our Jewish brothers and sisters not as a symbol of peace and reconciliation, but of fear, division and even death.

And that explains why, for example, the Holocaust survivor at the Vatican concert reported that, as a young boy in Poland, he had been afraid to walk by a Catholic church.

Our record has been, for the most part, shameful. But thanks to visionary leaders like Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II and to remarkable events like the Second Vatican Council and this recent Vatican concert, that record has begun at last to improve.

The achievement of these individual leaders and events, however, will be finally meaningless unless and until the spirit of reconciliation permeates the entire Catholic community, everywhere.