The Holy Father in the Holy Land
Weigel, George
The Holy Father in the Holy Land Christian-Jewish relations will never be the same after the pope's visit to Israel. BY GEORGE WEIGEL Jerusalem SHORTLY AFTER his election as pope in October...
...Bethlehem was in disputed territory...
...The pope's tearfilled meeting with Holocaust survivors from his hometown completed an hour that reduced the previously cacophonous NBC/ MSNBC studios at the Jerusalem Hilton, where I was working, to silence...
...But on numerous occasions in the ensuing years, he would ask those same diplomats, "When will you let me go...
...And as the pope prepared to arrive at Lod Airport outside Tel Aviv on March 21, six years after full diplomatic relations had been established between the Holy See and the state of Israel, one Israeli academic was still claiming that the pope's surreptitious political agenda was to delegitimate the Jewish state and its positions on Middle East issues...
...Most especially including, it was clear, the times and places represented by Yad Vashem...
...For years, some Israeli scholars argued that the Catholic Church could never "recognize" the Jewish state for theological reasons...
...Only 44 percent of Israelis, according to one poll, know that the Catholic Church has publicly and flatly condemned anti-Semitism...
...My friend seemed struck by this, said he would think about it, and hoped that what I said reflected something other than elite Catholic opinion...
...And in any case, I said, "You can't read 'the Jews' in John's Gospel as though St...
...deeply ingrained attitudes and suspicions are another...
...He was in Jerusalem as a commentator for NBC and MSNBC...
...But at bottom, biblical religion is about a God who, as John Paul put it on his arrival in Israel, "has gone before us and leads us on"—a God who entered history in order to redeem history...
...But the papacy is an inherently public office, and as the intertwined papal and Israeli flags on Jerusalem's lampposts suggested, John Paul came to the Holy Land as the embodiment of a complex and often tortured history...
...Silence in which to try to make some sense of the memories which come flooding back...
...As he satisfied his yearning to be a pilgrim in those places, John Paul II was also bearing witness to that truth...
...Finally, John Paul had had enough...
...And knowing that evil's victory during the Final Solution had ensnared too many Christians, he then made what no one watching could doubt was a heartfelt statement of repentance: "As Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place...
...John were describing a blackballing session at an upmarket men's club in the 1920s...
...Virtually everyone present could feel and see the truth of this...
...John and its multiple references to "the Jews" in their contestation with Jesus...
...This man of profound emotion was surely crying inside as he walked slowly to the rostrum before the eternal flame, the faces of childhood friends who perished in the death camps before his mind's eye...
...This was wisdom, humaneness, and integrity personified...
...John Paul II responded, "Not outside...
...When I asked why, he replied, "Because your sacred text is anti-Semitic...
...There has been immense progress in Catholic-Jewish dialogue since the mid-1960s...
...In that sense, the most important thing John Paul Il's pilgrimage to the Holy Land will contribute to the dialogue is a new iconography...
...John Paul insisted that his was a pilgrimage without political or diplomatic purpose...
...Here was a man immersed in prayer, walking in the steps of Christ, George Weigel is the author of Witness to Hope: The Biography ofPope John Paul II (HarperCollins...
...The pope bent in silent homage over the eternal flame at Yad Vashem...
...The remaining bigots notwithstanding, Catholic-Jewish relations could never be the same...
...reminding the world that the year 2000 is not a mere calendrical quirk...
...Silence in which to remember...
...the pope in happy conversation with the president and prime minister of a sovereign Jewish state—these are images that communicate the truth of this new relationship very, very powerfully...
...Once asked, "Do you ever cry...
...But his surprise at this was chastening...
...Fewer still, one suspects, realize what it means when the pope teaches that God's covenant with the Jewish people is perma-nent—that in the Catholic perspective, Judaism has an abiding religious integrity and an indispensable moral mission in the world...
...the pope at the Western Wall...
...No one can say, plausibly, that these were empty gestures by a crafty politician...
...Academics will be academics, and no doubt some of them will continue to make such utterly implausible claims...
...No one can reasonably doubt, now, that things have changed...
...nothing more needed to be said...
...for the next five years, there were endless arguments about whether and how it could be done...
...When he broached this to the traditional managers of popes, they were aghast...
...The interplay of that history and this singular personality made for some of the week's most dramatic moments...
...By celebrating Mass at the traditional site of Christ's last supper with his apostles, by preaching at the site of his sermon on the mount, by praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, at Calvary, and at the tomb where Christ's body was laid, John Paul II fulfilled one of the deepest desires of his Christian heart...
...I assured him that it did, and that when the people in my parish heard "the Jews" during the Good Friday reading of the Passion according to St...
...Interestingly, one of the things the papal pilgrimage suggested to Jews and Catholics alike was the degree to which a new relationship between them is going to require a significant development in Jewish understandings of contemporary Catholicism...
...Critical scholarship can help us read the Bible more intelligently...
...But dialogue among religious professionals in Jewish and Catholic organizations is one thing...
...At the same time, he reminded Christians (and others) taught by generations of scholars to be skeptical of the Bible that biblical religion is a gritty, earthy business...
...And while the Second Vatican Council's rejection of the hoary deicide charge against the Jews seems rather widely known in Israel, a considerable number of well-meaning Jewish intellectuals continue to think that serious inter-faith dialogue at the theological level is simply impossible...
...the logistics were impossible to arrange...
...the Holy See had no diplomatic relations with any state in the region...
...Remembrance, he continued after a moment, must be in the service of a noble cause: "We wish to remember for a purpose," he said, "to ensure that never again will evil prevail, as it did for the millions of innocent victims of Nazism...
...They cannot be ignored...
...To do so, they claimed, would be to deny what they took to be Catholic doctrine, namely, that the Jews were condemned to wander the earth as punishment for their forefathers' rejection of Jesus as the messiah...
...Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah...
...John Paul took the event to an entirely different level in an intensely personal speech...
...He began on precisely the right note: "In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence...
...What had been accomplished legally in the 1993 Basic Agreement between the Vatican and Israel was now plain for all to see...
...Prime Minister Ehud Barak's moving address thanked John Paul for doing more for Jewish-Catholic relations than any pope in history...
...One learned and kindly man, for example, told me that, while he very much admired John Paul II, the new, religiously focused conversation the pope was proposing between Catholics and Jews just wasn't on the cards...
...That this was never Catholic doctrine seemed to make no difference, no matter how often that was explained...
...Biblical religion is not simply an idea...
...On June 29, 1999, he wrote a letter to the entire Catholic Church announcing, quite simply, that he would go to the Holy Land in 2000...
...But for much of the world, the sight of the bishop of Rome raising a hand in salute at the Israeli flag, listening to the solemn playing of "Hatikvah," and being welcomed as an honored guest by the Jewish state settled the matter...
...BY GEORGE WEIGEL Jerusalem SHORTLY AFTER his election as pope in October 1978, John Paul II had an idea: He should spend his first Christmas in Bethlehem...
...I tried to explain that 200 years of New Testament scholarship had made clear that all the Gospels were written, to one degree or another, in a polemical context amidst a family quarrel— the fight that eventually saw the Christian movement separate, around 70 a.d., from what would become rabbinic Judaism...
...A series of local polls conducted by Jewish-led interfaith centers in Israel uncovered profound ignorance of the sea-change the Church has undergone in the past 35 years...
...Those who insist on treating Holocaust history as a kind of zero-sum negotiation over degrees of responsibility had been working the press overtime, arguing for or against the proposition that the pope ought to "go farther" this time than in past pronouncements...
...Nothing was missing...
...popes simply didn't do drop-bys...
...John, they were hearing a story about individuals two millennia ago, not making a summary judgment about an entire people...
...it is built on events that happened to real people, in real places, at particular moments in time...
...That point was driven home when John Paul II went to the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem on March 23 to pay homage to the victims of the Holocaust...
...When I asked what that meant, he cited the Gospel of St...
...He also came as Karol Wojtyla, a Pole, a priest, and a pope who has invested enormous energy in building a new conversation between Catholics and Jews...
...For one of the few times in his 21-year pontificate, John Paul let his evangelical instincts be trumped by the ingrained cautiousness of the Vatican's diplomats: He spent Christmas 1978 in Rome...
...In 1994, in an apostolic letter announcing the Great Jubilee of 2000, he proposed making a lengthy pilgrimage to the great sites of biblical history...
...A few days later, an Israeli friend, a soldier-intellectual of wide experience, called to say, "I simply had to tell you that my wife and I were crying throughout the pope's visit to Yad Vashem...
...And now he has done it...
Vol. 5 • April 2000 • No. 29
