Questioning the Pope
RIEMER, JACK
Questioning the Pope Holocaust Scholars Write to the Vatican dited by Harry Cargas Westport. CT: Greenwood Press. 1999.176 pp., hardcover $49.95 REVIEWED BY RABBI JACK RIEMER This is...
...Was the Vatican a bureaucracy in which moral issues got tabled during the war...
...He has made improving relations with the Jews a priority of his papacy...
...Perhaps this time the questions will be answered...
...In this hook he invited 13 scholars of the Holocaust—some Catholic, some Protestant, some Jews (some well known, some just starting out)—to write open letters to the Vatican, raising questions that they felt deserved a response...
...And they raise questions that should not be ignored...
...What can the church do to practice repentance so that it will be taken seriously when it preaches repentance...
...That would be impressive...
...On the one hand, we feel we should appreciate of how slowly all institutions change and how seldom any institution repents...
...He felt that Jews lost their lives at Auschwitz but that Christianity nearly lost its moral credibility there...
...He called himself a post-Holocaust Christian because his whole understanding of Catholicism and of life itself was transformed when he became aware of what happened and of what did not happen during the Holocaust...
...He spent much of his life challenging his church to face up to the fact that not a single Nazi was ever excommunicated by the church, that Pope Pius XII's silence during the Holocaust was deafening, that the church helped Nazis escape from justice after the war, and that its institutional concerns seem to have outweighed its moral concerns...
...And so we read these open letters, not gleefully, not with a sense of "Good, give it to them," but with a sense of hope...
...And so we are understandably perplexed...
...With his passing, a mighty moral voice within the American religious community has been silenced...
...But he has also embraced Kurt Waldheini, the former U.N...
...He lived long enough to edit it and write the introduction, but he passed away before it was published...
...Pope John Paul II is a very complex man, and it is therefore not easy to understand his attitude towards the Jews...
...One thing the church could surely do: Publish a response to these letters and not ignore them...
...the questions and the pain remain...
...Perhaps this time the questions will be heard...
...and he supports the canonization not only of Edith Stein, the Jewish convert who died at Auschwitz, and of the Polish anti-Semite Cardinal Glemp, but of Pope Pius XH, the World War II pontiff...
...Secretary General and Austrian president who lied about his involvement in the Nazi army...
...What changes can be made to the structure so that it does not fail again...
...he embraced Arafat long before anyone else did...
...1999.176 pp., hardcover $49.95 REVIEWED BY RABBI JACK RIEMER This is Harry Cargas's last hook...
...The essays are balanced, and they are couched in the politest terms...
...The Christians who participate in this symposium each write respectfully, but they ask the hard questions...
...And yet...
...Rabbi Jack Riemer is spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Tikvah in Boca Raton, Florida and co-editor of So That Your Values Live On (Jewish Lights) and the forthcoming Jewish Insights into Death and Mourning (Syracuse University Press...
...He was the first pope in history to cross the Tiber and visit the synagogue in Rome, the first to extend diplomatic recognition to Israel, die first to sponsor a Holocaust remembrance concert in the Vatican itself— and no pope has been as articulate in denouncing anti-Semitism as he...
...Under the circumstances, real progress has been made, and it is churlish to say that it is not enough or that it is too slow...
...And he was one of the brave few who harried the church year after year to take both real and symbolic action to rectify- its sins of omission and commission during the war for the sake of its own moral integrity...
...As Car-gas himself puts it, the church can't have it both ways—on the one hand, arguing that no one can pass judgment without seeing the Vatican records, and on the other, refusing to open those records...
Vol. 25 • February 2000 • No. 1
