Jewish groups are mending ties with the Vatican following a dispute over a Holocaust-denying bishop.The efforts follow controversy over comments by a bishop denying the full scope of the Holocaust, and longtime strains in the relationship between Jewish and Roman Catholic leaders.
Representatives of the World Jewish Congress said they were optimistic about Vatican-Jewish relations after meeting with top Vatican officials. In addition, a group of American Jewish leaders met with Pope Benedict XVI recently to commend him for his “firm stand” to end the dispute over Bishop Richard Williamson.
Israel’s chief rabbinate, the Jewish state’s highest religious authority, confirmed that it would resume theological talks this month that had been suspended in the wake of the Williamson affair. And Benedict plans to visit Israel during his travels to the Holy Land later this year.
Jewish groups had expressed outrage after Benedict lifted Williamson’s excommunication on Jan. 21. The British traditionalist had denied in an interview broadcast on Swedish state TV that 6 million Jews were killed during World War II. He said only about 200,000 or 300,000 Jews were killed and none of them in gas chambers.
About 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. Many were gassed in death camps, while others were killed en masse by firing squads, starvation and other methods. About 240,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel.
After an unusual criticism by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Vatican bowed to Jewish demands and publicly demanded that Williamson recant before being admitted as a bishop into the church.
The World Jewish Congress’ deputy secretary-general, Maram Stern, and Richard Prasquier, president of the French Jewish umbrella group CRIF, met with Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican official responsible for relations with Jews.
A WJC statement said the two representatives both expressed optimism that the Williamson affair would soon be over and that “it would not burden the Catholic-Jewish relationship in the longer term.”
“Today we strongly reaffirmed that the denial of the Shoah is not an opinion but a crime,” Prasquier said, using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
In the wake of the incident, Israel’s chief rabbinate had suspended a regularly planned meeting in March to discuss aspects of Catholic and Jewish religious teachings.
Rabbi David Rosen, a longtime participant in Vatican-Jewish dialogue, said in an e-mail that the Vatican’s statement requiring Williamson to recant “provided exactly what we had been calling for. Had it been issued 10 days earlier, we could have avoided much distress and damage, above all for the image of the Holy See itself.”
He stressed there was never any severing of ties between the rabbinate and the Vatican.
Williamson and three other traditionalist bishops were excommunicated in 1988 after being consecrated without papal consent by the late ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Lefebvre founded the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X in 1969, opposed to the Vatican II reforms, including its outreach to Jews.
The society confirmed it had removed Williamson as director of its seminary in La Reja, Argentina, outside Buenos Aires. It had already distanced itself from his views and ordered him to end public comments about the matter.
Williamson apologized to Benedict for having stirred controversy but hasn’t repudiated his views. A German magazine quoted Williamson as saying he would correct himself, if he is satisfied by the evidence, but that “will take time.”
Israel’s president will escort Pope Benedict XVI around the Holy Land when he visits in May, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, amid strained relations between the Vatican and the Jewish state.
“In May of this year, Israel will receive a special visitor, Pope Benedict XVI,” Olmert said, without giving an exact date. “President Shimon Peres will escort him as he visits various sites around the country.”
Peres, 85, is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been active in Mideast peace efforts for decades.
Benedict’s trip was planned before the Williamson affair surfaced. The pope later condemned Williamson’s remarks and spoke out against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
There has been only one other official visit by a pope to the Jewish state, by Pope John Paul II in 2000.
Pope Paul VI visited in 1964, but in a reflection of the strained nature of the relationship, he spent only part of one day in Israel and never ventured into Jewish west Jerusalem. At the time, Jerusalem was divided between Jordanian and Israeli control. He met Israel’s president briefly at Megiddo in Israel’s north, but did not address him as president or mention the word “Israel” in public during his unofficial visit.
The Vatican and Israel established diplomatic relations in the early 1990s, but relations have often been tense.
The Vatican objected to a caption under a photo of World War II Pope Pius XII at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. It alleges that Pius didn’t act to help Jews as they were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to their deaths.
Israel was offended when senior Vatican Cardinal Renato Martino said during Israel’s recent military campaign to stop rocket fire from the Gaza Strip that Gaza resembled a “big concentration camp.”
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(Source: SJRC)