In January, when Pope Benedict XVI reversed the 1988 excommunication of four bishops of an ultra-traditionalist Catholic group called the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), he probably knew it would ignite a firestorm.The church has significant unresolved problems with the society, among them its gross disobedience to the previous Pope.
Benedict was determined to try to end a schism with a movement that exhibits a fervent piety he shares and is trying to encourage in Europe, where SSPX is strongest.
But almost simultaneous with the Pope's announcement, a Swedish-TV interview surfaced in which SSPX bishop Richard Williamson matter-of-factly denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.
The ensuing international outcry forced the Vatican to release a generalized condemnation of Holocaust denial--though it didn't rule out Williamson's return as a Roman Catholic bishop.
Then an unlikely figure entered the fray: Angela Merkel. German Chancellors don't usually weigh in on church matters, she said. But when the Vatican gave "the impression that it could be possible to deny that the Holocaust happened," she felt compelled to demand that the Pope repudiate the idea, lest it affect relations with "the Jewish people as a whole."
In essence, Merkel (a Protestant) was tutoring the German Pope on his responsibilities to the Jews.
On May 11, Benedict arrives in Israel during an eight-day visit to the Holy Land, his first since becoming Pontiff. The trip is a near carbon copy of one made by his predecessor John Paul II in 2000.
The Vatican hopes to use the trip to build on its 44-year rapprochement with the world's Jews after centuries of conflict and persecution. During his papacy, John Paul became the first modern Pope to visit a synagogue, recognize the state of Israel and apologize for the role Christians played in the Holocaust.
But since Benedict's election, his relations with Jews--although similar in broad outline to John Paul's--have been plagued by mixed messages that have caused critics to wonder whether he has botched the opportunity to redress past shortcomings and strengthen the church's ties to the Jewish people.
Like John Paul, Benedict came of age in one of the Holocaust's European slaughterhouses, and many expected that the Bavarian, like the Pole, could turn his somber history into a special authority for combatting anti-Semitism and pursuing the pro-Jewish reforms the church enacted at the Second Vatican Council in 1965.
But he hasn't done so. Instead, says David Gibson, the (Catholic) author of The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World, "here's a Pope who grew up under the Nazis, who witnessed this whole thing, a man with such an acute and vivid sense of language and experiences--and yet for whom one of the great dramas of the 20th century is somehow invisible in what he communicates."
Nobody thinks Benedict is an anti-Semite, and those close to him assert that aspersions on his enthusiasm are ridiculous. "He has written on the meaning of Judaism for Christianity," says Cardinal William Levada, his successor as Vatican doctrinal chief. "And he has also shown a fundamental sympathy that not even written words can have."But the Williamson affair was only the most recent episode in a series of gaffes and sour notes by the Pope. He seems simply to have forgotten Jewish concerns on a range of decisions regarding liturgy, sainthood and historical interpretation.
In the case of SSPX, there is a distinct possibility that he knew full well he might offend Jews but went ahead anyway.
Rabbi James Rudin, senior interreligious adviser for the American Jewish Committee, notes that while "flash points happened with John Paul II as well, you always knew the Pope was committed to solving them. With Benedict, there's a sense of concerned bewilderment."
Even after Benedict returns to the Vatican from the Holy Land, it's likely that he will still have to address skepticism about whether he shares John Paul's commitment to strengthening ties between Catholicism and Judaism--or whether he is willing to let his papacy be a tepid transition into a period of interfaith neglect.
The Missteps
Concern about the muddiness of Benedict's message first surfaced when he visited Auschwitz in 2006.
Those attending the event were moved by his obvious emotion at the former death camp. But his address that day was marked by some highly peculiar ellipses. He failed to mention anti-Semitism, instead contending that "ultimately" the Nazis' motive in killing Jews was to "tear up the taproot of the Christian faith."
And although he claimed to speak as a "son of the German people," Benedict seemed to downplay any ordinary-German implication in the Holocaust.
Instead, he placed blame on a "ring of criminals [who] rose to power by false promises ... through terror ... with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power."
Both assertions are highly suspect. Although the German people as a group were not guilty of mass murder, neither were they innocent dupes throughout the process. And the idea that Hitler killed 6 million Jews to get at Christianity approaches the perverse.
When Jewish groups complained, Benedict devoted a general audience to condemning anti-Semitism--although he revisited neither his church's nor his homeland's role in the Holocaust.
In 2007, the Pope raised eyebrows again, this time in widening the usage of the Tridentine Mass, commonly known as the Latin Mass. Jewish concern focused on the Tridentine prayer "for the conversion of the Jews," which is spoken on Good Friday, the anniversary of Christ's Crucifixion and historically an occasion for anti-Jewish riots.
Benedict made some conciliatory changes in the prayer's content but refused to drop the stated objective of "conversion," infuriating some Jewish leaders, who saw it as an unnecessary provocation.
Most troubling of all was Benedict's reinstatement of Williamson, a debacle whose full scope the Vatican seemed to recognize only the day after Merkel's upbraiding. The church demanded that Williamson recant his gas-chamber denial, and the Pontiff released a letter that deplored the strain between the church and the Jews resulting from his "mistake."He assured a visiting group of Israeli rabbis of his intent to deepen Catholic-Jewish relations and his belief that the Jewish people "were chosen as the elected people" to communicate fidelity to God.
Was that message sufficient? Rabbi David Rosen, the Jerusalem-based chair of the umbrella International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, says the Williamson affair is an "absolute gift" because it enabled the Pope to reiterate his affection for the Jews.
Yet while Benedict may have been unaware of Williamson's Holocaust-denying interview, the Pope--who has been trying to pull the SSPX back into the fold for decades--must have been aware that anti-Semitism was something of an SSPX calling card.
Says Eugene Fisher, a former Jewish-affairs expert for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who generally lauds Benedict's dealings with Jews: "I think he should have had a notion that this would be a problem. The society website had all this [anti-Jewish] stuff in it."
By all appearances, Benedict chose to ignore it.
The Past That Made the Pope
Any understanding of Benedict's subtle disengagement from Jewish questions begins in his youth. Joseph Ratzinger served a brief, mandatory stint in Hitler's Wehrmacht, but both Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center and the former East German secret police closed investigations into that part of his history without detecting any enthusiasm for Hitler's regime.
Ratzinger's family was solidly anti-Nazi. But unlike John Paul, Ratzinger had no childhood Jewish playmates. His older brother Georg told German philosopher Raphaela Schmid, "I didn't know what a Jew was."
That changed when their family moved from a small Bavarian village to the town of Traunstein, where in 1933, papal biographer John Allen reports, a DO NOT BUY FROM THE JEW sign hung in the main square.
In an interview, Benedict recalled crowds threatening an Archbishop, "After the Jews, the Jew lover."
Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Pope's point man for Christian-Jewish affairs, says Benedict believes "Germans have a special obligation to do something more for the Jewish-Christian relationship."
But it's not apparent that the Pope views the Holocaust with a sense of personal remorse.
Wolfgang Benz, head of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin, notes that generalized remorseful feelings "started with [Germans] about 10 years younger" than the 82-year-old Pope.
Members of Benedict's generation tend to judge themselves strictly on the grounds of personal culpability.
Moreover, the Pope identifies heavily with his church, which he sees as having played a heroic anti-Nazi role. (History is far more ambiguous, although institutional Catholicism acquitted itself better than Protestantism.)
As Catholicism's longtime philosophical enforcer, he holds even more fiercely than did John Paul to the belief that the church as a holy entity is perfect. He is less eager to critique the acts of its followers, especially since he may feel any admission of weakness could undermine his battle against European secularism.
Finally, there is Benedict's relationship to Vatican II's bedrock statement on the Jews, Nostra Aetate. Published in 1965, it said that Christianity "received the revelation of the Old Testament through" them, that they bear no collective or ongoing guilt for the death of Christ and that anti-Semitism is wrong--all teachings the Pope undoubtedly affirms. It also pointedly quotes St. Paul's New Testament preaching that God never retracted covenants he made with the Jews before the birth of Jesus.This contradicts the ancient church claim that Christ replaced (or "superseded") the Jews' divine connection--a position that exposed Jews to some 1,700 years of none-too-gentle Christian evangelizing and conversion.
The ongoing Jewish covenants--combined with points made in other conciliar documents--seem to temper the idea that Catholicism is a uniquely effective road to salvation that has little to learn from other traditions.
But Benedict sometimes seems nostalgic for the old understanding. In 2006, for instance, he preached that in choosing 12 Apostles, Jesus was summoning the 12 tribes of Israel to be "reunited in a new covenant [Christianity], the full and perfect accomplishment of the old."
There are harmless ways to interpret this.
But it might also help explain why Benedict refused to delete the "conversion" wording from the Latin Mass.
The Cost of Indifference
On balance, Benedict is an admirer of the Jews, but one whose goodwill toward them may be moderated by his other concerns. Should that matter?
"It's hard to imagine, but it's true that the Jews are not at the top of the agenda of everyone else in the world," quips Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a professor of Jewish studies at Bard College with whom the Pope has a fruitful scholarly relationship.
One could justifiably wonder why, on an issue like the Latin Mass or SSPX, a busy Pope should constantly have to ask himself whether it's good for the Jews.
There are several good reasons. For one, as Merkel made clear, Germans have a special obligation. "We don't want [history] to repeat itself," as papal adviser Kasper says. The Holocaust also remains an affront to the self-understanding of Christians, and Western civilization as a whole.
We learned the word genocide through the Jews. Since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has set the post-Shoah standard in acknowledging the absolute unacceptability of the Jewish loss.
Without the Catholic Church's leadership on the issue, other Christian groups might not have followed.
Since papal conclaves have a cutoff age of 80 and tend to elect Popes from their own number, Benedict is likely to be the last Pontiff who can say, "We remember," and mean it literally.
As the church's center of gravity moves southward, he may also be one of the last European Popes, and Jewish relations tend to be low on the radar of African and South American bishops. (One of the latter recently said the Jews own the media.)
When Benedict is gone, says Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, "not only may Judaism be off the agenda--it may face opposition.
There's a clumsiness to how Benedict has dealt with some of these issues, and we really hope he fixes them while he's still here. Because the next guy may not be fixing any of it."
There is time. Yet this scholar-Pope knows that history's long rhythms also dictate that a great project is not completed or fulfilled in a year, decade or even quarter-century.Some of Benedict's would-be defenders suggest that once he has made his visit to the Jewish homeland, the Pope is right to "move on."
He knows better: like any other vital priority his church takes into its stewardship, this one too must be heeded and tended, not just now but for the (very) long haul.
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Source (TIME)
SV (ED)