At the Auschwitz death camp, the pope said "I could not fail to come here."He might have said the same during his Holy Land visit, where he again condemned anti-semitism and spoke of the promise of peace for Israelis and Palestinians.
In our time we are entered upon a great war between those who believe that God is the organizing principle of our lives and the source of all that we need, and those who, following the principle, “You can become like God, knowing good and evil,” believe that the State should take that role.
The commanding heights of western civilization in our time, government schools, colleges and universities, the media, and most of the Internet are almost entirely in the hands of advocates for the State as the supreme authority for our lives. Their culture has become so intense that a Miss California has come under severe attack for saying what all Jews, Christians, and Muslims have believed since God decreed it in Eden, that marriage unites one man and one woman.
During the past few decades, the popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have been trying to bring together Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims who believe that God is the organizing principle of our lives and the source of all that we need. Humanly, it is impossible. Some Jews still resent Christians for events that occurred centuries ago. Within Christendom, the people Christ prayed would be one are visibly divided. Some Muslims resent both Jews and Christians. But John Paul and Benedict know that the Catholic Church is the voice of God in the world. No man rivets world attention as they do. Benedict travels the world reminding us that God is the organizing principle of our lives and the source of all that we need.
We had better become one flock. Below the radar, the governments of Western Civilization are gradually embracing transnationalism, which increasingly moves decision-making authority from each nation to a world government that arrogates sovereign authority to itself. Soon they will be one body. On our side, in this life we will either become one body, holding God’s morality fast against the State’s storming assault, or fall as a house divided. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, seeing all this with great clarity, have reached out to Jews, Protestants, and Muslims, hoping to develop a united community of Abrahamic faith, emphasizing God’s absolute authority and truth against the increasingly united movement toward State control of daily life.
The Holy Father’s pilgrimage carried a burden. On June 30, 1988, Archbishop Marcel-François Lefebvre, head of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), against the direct orders of Pope John Paul II, consecrated four bishops. On July 2, 1988, John Paul II declared in his apostolic letter Ecclesia Dei § 3: “In itself, this act was one of disobedience to the Roman Pontiff in a very grave matter and of supreme importance for the unity of the church, such as is the ordination of bishops whereby the apostolic succession is sacramentally perpetuated. Hence such disobedience –which implies in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy–constitutes a schismatic act.”
As part of an effort to heal the schism, on January 21, 2009, under Benedict XVI’s express authority, the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops remitted the four bishops’ excommunications. On the very same day, Swedish Television aired Bishop Richard Williamson’s months-old argument that Jews had been killed in the death camps but not by gas because the gas chambers were not constructed to protect persons outside. The Holy Father and the Vatican have pointed out that lifting the excommunication was not a reinstatement of the four bishops. That will occur only if and when they affirm the teachings of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council including Nostra aetate § 4 and related positive teachings on Judaism. Even so, if Benedict had known that Bishop Williamson’s six-minute interview would be broadcast that day he would have handled the situation differently. But he did not know.
Still, the coincident events led some Jews to assume that lifting Bishop Williamson’s excommunication implied Church approval of his views. By the time of Benedict’s Holy Land visit, Vatican statements and charitable rabbis had somewhat settled the situation, but there is still a residue of concern among some Jews.
The burden was more than one incident. During the entire pilgrimage, there has been an undertone of criticism from many Israelis. Let us look at two representative examples: On May 11, 2009, Reuben Rivlin, Speaker of the Knesset, and Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, made public statements that offer us an occasion to correct the record for those who have so far been unfamiliar with it.
Speaker Rivlin complained: “He is also a German, whose country and people have asked forgiveness. But he himself comes and speaks to us like a historian, as an observer, as a man who expresses his opinion about things that should never happen, and he was - what can you do? - a part of them.” At age 14, the boy Joseph Ratzinger was forced into the Hitler Youth. He did not attend meetings, and when he was drafted he deserted the German Army. We might expect a senior Israeli official to understand that a man apologizes for what he has freely chosen to do, not what he was forced by state power to do.
Rabbi Lau added: “Something was missing. There was no mention of the Germans or the Nazis who participated in the butchery, nor a word of regret. If not an apology, then an expression of remorse.” This charge that there have not been enough apologies is an example of what formal logic calls the fallacy of the unfalsifiable proposition. No matter how many apologies the Vatican makes, the argument can always be made that there should have been more. To the Catholic mind, one apology to God suffices. Catholics go to Confession once for a particular sin, express true contrition, receive absolution, and the atonement is complete. Can man demand more?
Holy Mother Church has already expressed teshuva, repentance, on many occasions. In December 1999 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the same Pope Benedict XVI against whom they complain, published Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and Faults of the Past. In section 5.4 he wrote: “The hostility or diffidence of numerous Christians toward Jews in the course of time is a sad historical fact and is the cause of profound remorse for Christians aware of the fact that Jesus was a descendent of David.”
Pope John Paul II, during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, said on March 23, 2000, at Yad Vashem: “Jews and Christians share an immense spiritual patrimony, flowing from God's self-revelation. Our religious teachings and our spiritual experience demand that we overcome evil with good. We remember, but not with any desire for vengeance or as an incentive to hatred. For us, to remember is to pray for peace and justice, and to commit ourselves to their cause. Only a world at peace, with justice for all, can avoid repeating the mistakes and terrible crimes of the past.” Three days later, John Paul placed this prayer, on Vatican stationery and signed, into the Western Wall: “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.”
Let us return to those times, when memories were fresh and many eyewitnesses were still available. When Pope Pius XII passed into eternity in 1958 there was a huge outpouring of Jewish thanks. Golda Meir, then Israel’s Foreign Minister, cabled the Vatican: “When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict.”
Rabbi Herzog, then Chief Rabbi of Israel, cabled: “The death of Pope Pius XII is the loss of a great man to the world at large. Catholics are not alone in lamenting his passing.” Rabbi Elio Toaff, the Chief Rabbi of Rome after Rabbi Zolli, sent this: “More than anyone else, we have had the opportunity to appreciate the great kindness, filled with compassion and magnanimity, which the Pope displayed during the terrible years of persecution and terror.”
On April 13, 1986, when John Paul II visited Bet Hatefutsot, the Great Synagogue of Rome, Rabbi Toaff, then still Chief Rabbi of Rome, was there with him. When John Paul passed into eternity in 2005, Rabbi Toaff, by then retired, came to the Vatican’s Clementine Hall to pay his respects as the Jews of Rome filled Bet Hatefutsot and the smaller synagogues to overflowing. Rabbi Toaff was one of the only two living persons mentioned in John Paul II’s will.
We may summarize it all with the work of Orthodox Rabbi Pinchas Lapide, a senior Israeli government historian who did extensive research in the archives of Yad Vashem. He wrote in his seminal 1967 book, Three Popes and the Jews, on p. 215: “The final number of Jewish lives in whose rescue the Catholic Church had been instrumental is thus at least 700,000 souls, but in all probability is much closer to the maximum of 860,000.… These figures … exceed by far those saved by all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined.” Rabbi Lapide added on p. 267, “[Pius XII] … alleviated, relieved, retrieved, appealed, petitioned – and saved as best he could.… Who but a prophet or martyr could have done much more?” Orthodox Rabbi David Dalin declared in his 2005 book, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, on p. 11, “Lapide’s volume remains the definitive work by a Jewish scholar on the subject.”
The heroic efforts of Pius XII and so many others are the capstone of a long history. During the Middle Ages many Jews were driven from the lands in which they lived and fled to Poland. On March 16, 1998, Cardinal Cassidy, president of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews, published "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” prepared at the express request of Pope John Paul II. With John Paul’s express approval, Cardinal Cassidy wrote: “In the Christian world—I do not say on the part of the Church as such—erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people. Such interpretations of the New Testament have been totally and definitively rejected by the Second Vatican Council.”
During the past thousand years Poland, the most Catholic country in Europe, with its red and white flag reminding us of the blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side, sheltered the world’s largest Jewish community and center of Jewish learning. The Nazis built Auschwitz in Poland because so many Jews and Catholics lived there. During John Paul’s visit to Auschwitz on June 7, 1979, he observed pointedly that six million Poles lost their lives during World War II. On May 28, 2006, when Benedict visited Auschwitz, he said: “Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people. For this very reason, I can and must echo his words: I could not fail to come here.”
St. Peter, the Catholic Church’s first pope, often visited the ancient Temple and the synagogues for Jewish prayer. He passed into eternity while the Temple still stood. But after him, for 1,900 years no pope ever visited a synagogue until John Paul visited one in 1986. No pope ever visited a mosque until John Paul visited one in 2001. Coming together is the work of decades. Sometimes, as on the journey from Sinai to Canaan, one generation has to pass and the next one arise. But a papal pilgrimage to the land that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all hold most sacred focuses our attention on the war as nothing else can. Let us look at some of the visits he made during his pilgrimage.
On May 9, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI said at the Mosque al-Hussein bin Talal in Amman, Jordan: “With increasing insistency, some maintain that religion … is necessarily a cause of division in our world; and so they argue that the less attention given to religion in the public sphere the better.… However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?
In the face of this situation, where the opponents of religion seek not simply to silence its voice but to replace it with their own, the need for believers to be true to their principles and beliefs is felt all the more keenly. Muslims and Christians, precisely because of the burden of our common history so often marked by misunderstanding, must today strive to be known and recognized as worshippers of God faithful to prayer, eager to uphold and live by the Almighty’s decrees, merciful and compassionate, consistent in bearing witness to all that is true and good, and ever mindful of the common origin and dignity of all human persons, who remain at the apex of God’s creative design for the world and for history.”
On May 11, 2009, Pope Benedict visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. The Holy Father, with immense dignity, began with a quotation from the Book of Isaiah: “I will give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name … I will give them an everlasting name which shall not be cut off” (Is 56:5). Then he said, “This passage from the Book of the prophet Isaiah furnishes the two simple words which solemnly express the profound significance of this revered place: yad – “memorial;” shem – “name.” I have come to stand in silence before this monument, erected to honor the memory of the millions of Jews killed in the horrific tragedy of the Shoah. They lost their lives, but they will never lose their names: these are indelibly etched in the hearts of their loved ones, their surviving fellow prisoners, and all those determined never to allow such an atrocity to disgrace mankind again. Most of all, their names are forever fixed in the memory of Almighty God.”
Pope Benedict ended with another beautiful observation: “As we stand here in silence, their cry still echoes in our hearts. It is a cry raised against every act of injustice and violence. It is a perpetual reproach against the spilling of innocent blood.… My dear friends, I am deeply grateful to God and to you for the opportunity to stand here in silence: a silence to remember, a silence to pray, a silence to hope.”
On that same afternoon, Benedict then visited the Notre Dame Center in East Jerusalem. At a gathering of priests, rabbis, and sheikhs, the Holy Father emphasized the need for absolute truth even within an interreligious dialogue: “Religious belief presupposes truth. The one who believes is the one who seeks truth and lives by it. Although the medium by which we understand the discovery and communication of truth differs in part from religion to religion, we should not be deterred in our efforts to bear witness to truth’s power. Together we can proclaim that God exists and can be known, that the earth is his creation, that we are his creatures, and that he calls every man and woman to a way of life that respects his design for the world.”
During that meeting Sheik Taysir al-Tamini, head of the Islamic Supreme Court in the Palestinian Territories, got up and gave a six-minute unscheduled speech to remind us that even peace has its adversaries. He spoke in Arabic, so that only the Arabic speakers present understood what he was saying, but the tone of his speech was obviously hostile.
The Sheikh began with a story about Saladin, who conquered Jerusalem but upheld the rights of Christians there. He continued with a tirade against Israel, and asked the Holy Father to condemn Israel’s “crimes” against the Palestinian people. With no simultaneous interpreter the Holy Father could not understand even one word, but he knew it was a tirade. When the sheikh was finished, the meeting broke up.
Overall, the incident highlighted the Holy Father’s emphasis on the need for interfaith dialogue as “a wonderful opportunity for people of different religions to live together in profound respect, esteem and appreciation, encouraging one another in the ways of God.”
On May 12, 2009, at the Western Wall, the Holy Father prayed:
God of all the ages,
on my visit to Jerusalem, the “City of Peace”,
spiritual home to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike,
I bring before you the joys, the hopes and the aspirations,
the trials, the suffering and the pain of all your people throughout the world.
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
hear the cry of the afflicted, the fearful, the bereft;
send your peace upon this Holy Land, upon the Middle East,
upon the entire human family;
stir the hearts of all who call upon your name,
to walk humbly in the path of justice and compassion.
“The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul that seeks him” (Lam 3:25)!
From there, on May 12, the Holy Father paid a courtesy visit to Hechal Shlomo Center in Jerusalem, where he met with the two chief rabbis of Jerusalem, Sephardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar and Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger. The Holy Father highlighted the Catholic desire for outreach: “Here in Israel, given that Christians constitute only a small portion of the total population, they particularly value opportunities for dialogue with their Jewish neighbors.”
And he emphasized that the dialogue has to be built on a rock solid foundation. “Trust is undeniably an essential element of effective dialogue. Today I have the opportunity to repeat that the Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to the path chosen at the Second Vatican Council for a genuine and lasting reconciliation between Christians and Jews. As the Declaration Nostra Aetate makes clear, the Church continues to value the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews and desires an ever deeper mutual understanding and respect through biblical and theological studies as well as fraternal dialogues.”
The Holy Father remembered also the Palestinians. On May 13, in front of their presidential palace in Bethlehem, he began: “I greet all of you from my heart, and I warmly thank the President, Mr. Mahmoud Abbas, for his words of welcome. My pilgrimage to the lands of the Bible would not be complete without a visit to Bethlehem, the City of David and the birthplace of Jesus Christ. Nor could I come to the Holy Land without accepting the kind invitation of President Abbas to visit these Territories and to greet the Palestinian people.” Then, in a few charitable words, he articulated his vision of a Palestinian state: “Mr. President, the Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbors, within internationally recognized borders.”
Let us pass several other visits during the Holy Father’s pilgrimage and go directly to his May 15 visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It was the last day of this Holy Land pilgrimage, and the Holy Father was thinking about summarizing his message. There, in the place where the crucified Christ was buried and none among His Apostles had any hope that He would rise, the Holy Father said, “This is the message that I wish to leave with you today, at the conclusion of my pilgrimage to the Holy Land. May hope rise up ever anew, by God’s grace, in the hearts of all the people dwelling in these lands! May it take root in your hearts, abide in your families and communities, and inspire in each of you an ever more faithful witness to the Prince of Peace!”
The Holy Father added, “As the new Adam, Christ is the source of the unity to which the whole human family is called, that unity of which the Church is the sign and sacrament.”
And later the same day, during his last hour in Israel, at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, with the El Al airliner waiting to carry him back to Rome, the Holy Father addressed Shimon Peres: “Mr. President, you and I planted an olive tree at your residence on the day that I arrived in Israel. The olive tree, as you know, is an image used by Saint Paul to describe the very close relations between Christians and Jews.”
And he returned to his advocacy of a Palestinian state: “Let it be universally recognized that the State of Israel has the right to exist, and to enjoy peace and security within internationally agreed borders. Let it be likewise acknowledged that the Palestinian people have a right to a sovereign independent homeland, to live with dignity and to travel freely. Let the two-state solution become a reality, not remain a dream. And let peace spread outwards from these lands, let them serve as a ‘light to the nations’ (Is 42:6), bringing hope to the many other regions that are affected by conflict.” May it become so.
In the overarching conflict between God and State as the organizing principle of our lives and the source of all that we need, with our responsibility to uphold God’s absolute authority and truth, I believe Benedict would say of his Holy Land pilgrimage what he had said three years earlier at Auschwitz: “I could not fail to come here.”
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