Until the Catholic church faces its complicity in the persecution of Europe's Jews, relations between the faiths will suffer.Voices of dismay and disappointment resound around Israel in the wake of Pope Benedict's "pilgrimage", but only someone ignorant of the Vatican's record or willfully naive could be surprised at his failure to tackle the issues that matter throughout the Jewish world.
It was a re-run of his visit to Auschwitz in May 2006, when he contrived to avoid any acknowledgment that Christianity itself bred antisemitism and that Germans, as well as others, voluntarily and often enthusiastically robbed, tortured and slaughtered Jews by the million between 1933 and 1945.
Of course the visit had an immediate agenda, but it would be a mistake to focus narrowly on the recent furore over the reinstatement of the excommunicated bishop Richard Williamson, who denies the systematic mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis.
It would be equally off-target to look at the pope's desire to beatify the controversial wartime pontiff Pius XII, accused by many of remaining silent in the face of the genocide, even in October 1943 when 1,000 Jews were rounded up in the Rome ghetto "under his very windows" and deported to Auschwitz to be murdered.
The continuing refusal of the Papal curia to allow independent historians full access to the Vatican archives is a source of deep frustration, but this too is only a pendant to the bigger questions.
These festering concerns are symptomatic of a deeper malaise within the Vatican that afflicts relations between Jews and the Roman Catholic church. A key to understanding this friction lies in the papal document issued in 1998 by John Paul II, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.
John Paul, it must be remembered, made huge efforts to bridge the gulf between Jews and Catholics and to heal old wounds. Early on in his pontificate he visited the Rome synagogue and proclaimed the Jews to be the elder siblings of his flock. He visited Auschwitz and spoke memorably of Jewish suffering there. But when it came to doctrine and the culpability of the church for modern anti-semitism, his own conservatism and the reactionaries within the curia made it impossible to take the steps that Jews longed for.
We Remember was frank about the torment inflicted on Jews by Christians, but dodged the question of responsibility by maintaining that they acted cruelly because they had been led astray by modern, secular ideologies. By implication, if they had been more Christian they would not have acted so badly.
But it is hard to think of more theologically rigorous or enthusiastically anti-Jewish regimes than the clerical fascist states presided over by Jozef Tiso in Slovakia and Ante Pavelić in Croatia.
While it is true that senior Catholic clerics balked at racial dogmas that cut across the prerogative of the church to convert Jews and to define who was a Christian, Nazi racial anti-semitism easily nested within traditional forms of Jew hatred.
Indeed, recent research on the Roman Catholic press shows that from the 1870s onwards La Civilta cattolica and L' Osservatore Romano routinely used the language of racial anti-semitism.
These papal organs continuously denounced Jews as the carriers of modernism, revolutionary ideas, and secularism. This was the basis for the collaboration between Catholics and right-wing parties after the first world war and the Russian revolution: both detected a worldwide conspiracy of "Bolshevik Jews" intent on undermining Christianity and the social order.
Before he became Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli was the papal nuncio in Bavaria where he observed, with alarm, the "Red Republic". Pacelli negotiated the concordat between the Vatican and the Third Reich. He privately welcomed the German invasion of the godless Soviet Union.
When Nazism was finally defeated, it was his Vatican that presided over ratlines that enabled Catholic war criminals to escape to South America. While he had been silent about specific Nazi crimes, Pius XII vociferously denounced the USSR and communism after 1945.
For these reasons, to Jews the record of the Catholic establishment is indelibly stained with, at worst, active collaboration or, at best, a passive acquiescence in the persecution and mass murder of Europe's Jews. Until it acknowledges this complicity, relations between the two faiths will always be compromised.
This is not to deny the heroism of many thousands of Catholics across the continent who rejected anti-Jewish prejudice of any brand and saved Jews. Nor is it to ignore the great strides in dialogue that have been made, especially since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s declared that Jews should not be held responsible for the death of Christ and thus challenged the fundamental tenets of contempt towards Judaism.
However, Jews in Israel and around the world hoped that of all pontiffs, Benedict, who was born in Germany, lived under Nazism and was enrolled unwillingly in the Hitler Youth, might be more amenable to movement on these crucial dilemmas. It has proven a false hope. Benedict was a doctrinal strongman under John Paul II, a reactionary in all matters of doctrine. His conduct in Israel says nothing about the man but everything about the church as an institution and a set of beliefs.
It may be generations, if ever, before the Roman Catholic church is able to look into its soul and to accept its responsibility for cultivating the climate of hate and the theological rationalisations that contributed so heavily towards the genocide against the Jews.
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