Pope John Paul II and the Jews

By Eugene Fisher - 09/17/04

Jews in 1978 were not at all sure what to make of a Polish pope. Yet he has come, despite a number of difficult controversies over the years, to symbolize for them much of what is best in Christianity.

Pope John Paul II was the first pope to visit a death camp, Auschwitz, in 1979. Auschwitz is the symbolic center of Jewish remembrance of the Shoah (Holocaust).

The communist government, as it had done in Babi Yar in Russia, had built a monument at Auschwitz that obscured what took place there for the Jews, making it a memorial to humanity in general. Memorial stones in many languages were laid out to represent the countries from which people had been taken by the Nazis. Ignored was the fact that most of the victims were Jews and that many others were Poles.

The pope went first to the Hebrew inscription and prayed there. Rising, he went to the Polish stone, prayed and then departed.

It was a subtle rebuke of communism's attempt to deny the Jewish reality of the Shoah.

Pope John Paul again made history in 1986 by being the first since St. Peter to visit and pray in a synagogue (though his gesture had precedents in visits by American bishops to synagogues). The pope condemned anti-Semitism as "sinful." He also affirmed the validity of Jewish faith and of God's covenant with the Jews: "The Jewish religion is not extrinsic to us but in a certain way intrinsic to our own religion. With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers, and, in a certain way, it can be said that you are our elder brothers."

Though some Jews thought this referred to the biblical Jacob usurping the divine promise from his elder brother, the reference was most likely to Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son in which the father reassures the elder son: "My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours" (Luke 15:31).

Pope John Paul II in 1987 met with the Jewish leadership of both Poland, which had the world's largest Jewish community before World War II, and the United States, which now does.

---In Warsaw the pope called Jewish witness to the Shoah a prophetic and salvific "warning voice for all humanity."

---In the United States the pope called for Holocaust education on every level of Catholic education and urged the world to recognize the Jews' right "to a homeland."

And in 1994 the Vatican and Israel entered into a "Fundamental Agreement," exchanging ambassadors the next year. The exchange removed what had been a major block in Jewish-Catholic dialogue. (Jews thought the church had refrained from recognizing Israel for a theological reason based on the ancient "deicide" canard that God, punishing the Jews for their role in Jesus' death, cursed them to wander forever without a homeland.)

When the newly reunited Germany sent its first ambassador to the Vatican in 1990, the pope spoke for the first time of "the heavy burden of guilt for the murder of the Jewish people" that for Christians "must be an enduring call to repentance." In 1994 the pope presided over a Holocaust Memorial Day concert within the Vatican itself.

During the Jubilee Year 2000, Pope John Paul led a liturgy of repentance in Rome in which he articulated the church's sorrow over seven major categories of pervasive Christian sin over the centuries; one category included sins against Jews over the centuries.

Only a few days later, the pope went to Israel. His predecessor, Pope Paul VI, had briefly come to Jerusalem in 1964, but this was the first extensive visit by a pope to the Jewish state.

As was his custom, the pope kissed the soil of the land he was entering and listened to its national anthem. Many people in the Jewish community wept to see this.

The pope then visited Yad VaShem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, meeting there with a group of survivors, among whom were people from his own hometown in Poland.

Finally, Pope John Paul went to the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Jerusalem Temple. There, like so many humble Jews before him, he placed a prayer of petition to the God of Israel in a crack between the stones; this prayer reiterated the prayer from the year 2000 liturgy of repentance.

The pope's prayer affirmed in the strongest way possible that anti-Semitism has no place in the church. The prayer acknowledged the legitimacy of Jewish faith and the church's debt to Judaism for having given the world the revelation of God:

"God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations: We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and, asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant."

Eugene J. Fisher is associate director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations.