It is a great joy to accept the invitation of Archbishop Timothy Dolan, a friend for many, many years. I look forward to talking with you and to responding to your questions about the very significant and positive developments that have taken place in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people in the last four decades. I do so this evening with a special emphasis on Pope John Paul II, who has been thoroughly dedicated to efforts to build bridges between church and synagogue.
Pope John Paul has committed himself to making the teachings of the
Second Vatican Council come alive in the thinking of Catholic people around the world.
Back in 1962, before the Second Vatican Council began, I had the privilege of speaking to a number of lay people of all religious backgrounds in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The person who introduced me to the group was Rabbi David Bookstaber, of Ohev Shalom, the local Reform Congregation. At that event, I was able to quote General Charles DeGaulle, who foresaw the Second Vatican Council as a watershed event for the life of people living in the 20th century.
History bore that out, although not perhaps in the ways that General DeGaulle was thinking when he uttered those words.
At the Council, Cardinal Augustine Bea introduced the first draft of what eventually became the Declaration on the Relationship Between the Catholic Church and Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate). It seems to me like yesterday when the Cardinal stood before us at the Council to speak with persuasive logic of the request of Pope John XXIII before he died that the Council take up this issue. Cardinal Bea referred to what had occurred under Nazi rule in Europe during World War II. He repeated the injunction of Pope John XXIII that the Council should take whatever steps are necessary to be sure that never again would the Christian scriptures or the teachings of the Church be misused in a way that might contribute to anti-Semitism.
- That the Church draws nourishment from the revelation contained in the Hebrew scriptures. The Law, the Prophets, the Psalms and the Wisdom literature—all are part of a heritage given to that people with whom God made a covenant through Abraham and Moses.
(Amplifying on this point, the Holy See’s Commission for Religious
Relations with Jews in 1985 underscored the Catholic belief that
the covenant between God and the Jewish People continues to exist. John Paul II in Australia referred to “an irrevocable covenant;” in Warsaw, “that election to which God is irrevocably faithful.”)
- The Church, as Saint Paul points out, is founded by Christ who, “according to the flesh,” pertains to the Jewish people (cf. Romans 9:4-5). The Virgin Mary, the Apostles, indeed practically the entire infant Church could be correctly described as Jewish.
- Although some Jews opposed the spread of the gospel of Jesus, “nevertheless, according to the Apostle, the Jews still remain most dear to God because of their fathers, for he does not repent of the gifts he makes nor of the calls he issues (cf. Romans 11:28-29).”
“Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred Synod (The Second Vatican Council) wishes to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit above all of biblical and theological studies and of brotherly dialogues.”
- With specific reference to texts of the Christian scriptures, the Council points out that what happened to Jesus in “his suffering cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today.” What follows is the basis for catechetical instruction to ensure that neither Christian scriptures nor Christian teaching could be used in any way that would be an excuse for anti-Semitism.
In the years since the Second Vatican Council, we have tried to apply this document to preaching in our churches and to our teaching in seminaries,
in universities, colleges and, perhaps most important of all, in the religious education classes for children of every age.
Pope John Paul II made me personally aware of how closely he had taken to his heart the challenges and possibilities of Catholic-Jewish relations when on September 1, 1987, he received the International Liaison Committee of Catholics and Jews at his residence at Castelgandolfo. He spoke of what had occurred in his native land of Poland on September 1, 1939, when the Nazis invaded the country and began a period of persecution. He recalled how he had returned to his own hometown after the war to discover that many who had been his friends and classmates were no more. He spoke of his own meditation on the meaning of the exodus and of how he could understand that the Jewish people would see in Israel today a fulfillment of ancient prophecy. The year before, Pope John Paul had become the first Pope since St. Peter to visit a synagogue. Since then, in all of his trips, he has tried to meet with local Jewish leaders. That includes his trips to our country. I recall vividly his meeting with the Jewish leadership in Miami in 1987 and in New York in 1995. One was very formal and the other very informal. Both were occasions when heart spoke to heart. At Miami, Pope John Paul specifically commended our dialogue efforts in the United States and our commitment to introduce a formal curriculum on the Holocaust in our Catholic schools. This we have succeeded in doing, with help from representatives of various Jewish groups. The outline of the curriculum has now been distributed nationally with the endorsement of our United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Earlier, our Conference Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations issued guidelines for the proper dramatizations of the sufferings and death of Jesus, the Passion Play. (These principles for the portrayal of the Passion of Jesus have been shared with Mel Gibson, and we are hopeful that the motion picture that he is now making will take into account our concerns.)
Also, in the United States, we have been able to introduce into our published liturgical resources statements that make clear the teaching of the Councils of Trent (Jesus died for all.) and of Vatican II (What occurred in the suffering and death of Jesus is not to be attributed to the Jewish people of his day or any subsequent age.)
In our dialogues with representatives of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations we truly seek to see the other party’s point of view as the other party sees and feels it. Each party tries to do so in a way that is faithful to one’s own beliefs, to what we hold that the Lord is calling us to be and do.
I shall never forget what Rabbi Mordecai Waxman said to some of us in Rome in 1987: “If you truly wish to be our friends, you must know what causes us pain.” And here we come to telling each other what causes pain, what causes hurt.
In many exchanges, I have been helped to tell Catholic friends that, for Jews the Holocaust with all its horrors was uniquely genocidal. It is for our Jewish friends like a sacrament is for us in our faith, a sacred sign – whatever detracts from its significance, whatever seems to obscure its evil or honor those who did the evil, smacks of sacrilege and there will be pain, and painful reaction.
In 1987, both Catholic and Jewish delegations agreed in the final communiqué to say that the demonic Nazi ideology which spawned the Holocaust was indeed opposed to all religions, and that many Christians also perished in the death camps.
We know what happened in Holland: the Catholic bishops there protested in 1942 against the roundup of the Jews. In retaliation, the Nazis then sent off to Auschwitz Catholics who had Jewish blood and hastened the deportation of all Jews. It is not clear, even to this day, how much good precise, public denunciation in other settings could have accomplished in the face of a dictatorship with total power in its hands. Even in the Jewish community at that time there existed a dilemma, with some Jews deciding not to speak out publicly, but rather to work quietly and behind the scenes. Today both the Jewish and the Catholic communities need to grapple with the complexities of that tragic period, not in a judgmental way, but constructively for the sake of the future.
Even as, through our continuing discussions, Catholics have been reminded afresh of deep Jewish sensitivities regarding the Holocaust so I am hopeful that our Jewish partners in dialogue have gained new insights. They have learned, for example, what may strike many visitors to Yad Vashem in Israel: most numerous of all on the list of “righteous gentiles” who risked their lives to help Jews escape are the Catholic Poles.
They learned that the death camp at Auschwitz was built to handle first the Polish intellectual elite, including clergy, and the Army officers who still survived. These selected Poles were being exterminated at Auschwitz a full year and more before the horrifying decision was taken at Wallensee to try to eliminate the Jews.
Perhaps too our Jewish friends have learned also that, within the Catholic Church, there is now as there has always been, a great deal of variety, flexibility, difference and disagreement. Even as during these years Catholics have begun to appreciate that the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee are three entirely separate organizations, so we invite our Jewish and other neighbors to realize that within the Catholic Church there are many different juridical entities, some of the possessing surprising autonomy as far as our Church law is concerned.
Over a period of years, beginning in 1990 at Prague, the International Liaison Committee considered various aspects of the Holocaust. In Prague, in Baltimore in 1992, and in Jerusalem in 1994, reports were made going into details of how in different countries, different events occurred.
These were the occasions for gathering materials which led to the publication in 1998 of We Remember, an official statement of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews regarding the Holocaust and what led up to it.
The day of the issuance of that statement, a number of us arrived in Rome on pilgrimage from Jerusalem. In our group were 7 rabbis, 6 bishops, 2 priests, and 2 laymen, one Jewish and one Catholic. We had agreed to divide our time half and half in our visit to the Holy Land, spending half the time at sights of interest to our Jewish partners in dialogue and half the time in places which we Catholics believed our Jewish friends should know about.
This division of time, to my surprise extended also to our worship experiences.
In his pilgrimage of 2000, at Yad Vashem the Pope also saw the remembrances of the righteous gentiles who had saved some from the Nazis. I was reminded of something Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, a Baltimore native who did extraordinary interreligious work with the American Jewish Committee, told me in 1987. In Chicago he had convened a meeting of Jewish and Catholic survivors of the death camps in Poland. Almost immediately there was shouting and mutual accusation. Rabbi Tanenbaum called the group to silence and then asked each of the Jews to describe how he or she managed to survive. Every one had been rescued by a Catholic Pole! When they realized this, the atmosphere changed. Those present realized that, with the Nazis, both Jews and Catholic Poles were victims, and the destruction of the Jewish people their first incredible priority. One of the continuing challenges we face is the healing of memories, and Pope John Paul's prayerful, respectful visit to Yad Vashem helps that to happen.
The Pope's visit, while primarily a personal spiritual pilgrimage, meant something also to all those interested in the peace process for the region. For years he has been following through on our Church's consistent teaching about war and peace, and the importance of a just peace, so that families and children can live and grow preserved from an atmosphere poisoned by threat or fear.
His coming offered fresh encouragement to the parties of the region to work together to resolve differences peacefully. The day must come when Israel can be secure within its established borders, the Palestinians can know that their heritage and homeland are acknowledged, and the neighboring Arab countries can see the merit of working and trading with the democratic State of Israel. Also, for those who live in Jerusalem, the Holy City par excellence, there is hope for the guarantee that their religious and civil rights will be acknowledged and protected in a way upheld by the international community.
Yet another, highly significant motif of the pilgrimage was the interreligious dimension, involving Jews and Muslims in dialogue with Christians. What Pope John Paul said to those gathered for the interfaith service will be a great legacy of his pilgrimage of peace, "Each of our religions knows, in some form or another, the Golden Rule: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Precious as this rule is as a guide, true love of neighbor goes much further. It is based on the conviction that when we love our neighbor we are showing love for God, and when we hurt our neighbor we offend God. This means that religion is the enemy of exclusion and discrimination, of hatred and rivalry, of violence and conflict. Religion is not, and must not become, an excuse for violence, particularly when religious identity coincides with cultural and ethnic identity. Religion and peace go together! Religious belief and practice cannot be separated from the defense of the image of God in every human being.
"Drawing upon the riches of our respective religious traditions, we must spread awareness that today's problems will not be solved if we remain ignorant of one another and isolated from one another. We are all aware of past misunderstandings and conflicts, and these still weigh heavily upon relationships between Jews, Christians and Muslims. We must do all we can to turn awareness of past offences and sins into a firm resolve to build a new future in which there will be nothing but respectful and fruitful cooperation among us.
"The Catholic Church wishes to pursue a sincere and fruitful interreligious dialogue with the members of the Jewish faith and the followers of Islam. Such a dialogue is not an attempt to impose our views upon others. What it demands of all of us is that, holding to what we believe, we listen respectfully to one another, seek to discern all that is good and holy in each other's teachings, and cooperate in supporting everything that favors mutual understanding and peace . . ..
"If the various religious communities in the Holy City and in the Holy Land succeed in living and working together in friendship and harmony, this will be of enormous benefit not only to themselves but to the whole cause of peace in this region. Jerusalem will truly be a City of Peace for all peoples. Then we will all repeat the words of the Prophet: 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord…that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.'(Is 2:3)"
On June 19 and 20 of the year 2000, the kind of dialogue between Jews and Catholics of which the Pope spoke in Jerusalem took place in Washington, D. C. Although most of the participants were American, the meeting had an international flavor. Rabbi Ron Kronish from Jerusalem was there, along with Father Remi Hoeckman, Secretary of the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jewish People. Rabbis from the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Movements participated. The theme: penance and repentance in our two faith traditions.
The dialogue was frank, revealing areas of difference and highlighting the ingredients of successful dialogue and the obstacles that can block understanding and progress. Dr. Eugene Fisher, of our office in Washington, spoke of an aspect we have often see as a source of misunderstanding: the particular quality of what he called "Catholicspeak," the language in which our official Church documents are written for translation locally for some billion people around the world. It is a gentle style, quite different from the direct, sometimes strident approach more common in New York City; it is a style more subdued and peaceful, not polemical.
It is precisely because of ongoing dialogue that, in his apostolic letter, Ecclesia in America, following the Synod for America, Pope John Paul II could write the following:
"American society also includes Jewish communities, with which the Church has fostered increasing cooperation in recent years. The history of salvation makes clear our special relationship with the Jewish people. Jesus belongs to the Jewish people and he inaugurated his Church within the Jewish nation. A great part of the Holy Scriptures, which we Christians read as the word of God, constitute a spiritual patrimony which we share with Jews. Consequently any negative attitude in their regard must be avoided, since 'in order to be a blessing for the world, Jews and Christians need first to be a blessing for each other'."
But words, in whatever style they are written, do not accomplish as much as deeds in advancing relationships between our faith communities. Let me cite two moments in the Pope's visit to Jerusalem. One was his meeting with the two chief rabbis of Israel. Dr. Fisher has commented, "This. . .defies virtually all expectations based on tradition: the successor of the Apostle Peter, the 'chief,' as it were, of the apostles, meeting with respect, dignity and due deference the heirs of the Pharisees. It was a meeting of dialogue not diatribe, a meeting of reconciliation after centuries of alienation. It was a meeting neither the pope's nor the chief rabbis' parents could have dreamed to be possible in their wildest imaginations."
The other moment came when the Pope went to the Western Wall and placed in a crevice there the prayer he had written begging God's forgiveness for the sins of Christians against Jews. Several at our June meeting here in Washington reflected that most moving was the Holy Father's pause for prayer, his hand spread out upon the wall, as though he were in contact with all the Jewish suffering and all the Jewish hopes of the centuries.
We live in a sacred time. It is a time when the course of human history is changed, and for the better. It is a time when I see youth inspired by the vision of an old man who knows how to talk with and to them, as at Denver, Manila, Paris and last summer in Rome. Dr. Eugene Fisher has pointed out a remarkable fact. This one man from Poland lived under both Nazi and Communist oppression.
In November 2000 at the death camp at Majdanik, just outside of Lublin, I witnessed a deeply moving service inspired by the teaching of the Pope. The Romanian Orthodox Patriarch, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, the Muslim Imam of Poland and the ranking Protestant clergyman of the land helped lead the service. I had a part, reading in English the psalm with the words, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem." The hour and a half program was televised live through all of Poland. All could hear the testimony of survivors that the loudspeakers carried as we walked, some 4000 strong, from station to station in the camp. By the end all felt the seriousness and the weight of the sad memories of the camp and I was reminded of another reality.
When Pope John Paul was born, his land was home to the largest number of Jews in the world. When he was ordained a priest a quarter of a century later—after the Nazis had taken the lives of millions of Jews—only a pitiful remnant remained. This priest from Poland has now seized the opportunity not just of a lifetime but of a millennium. The world will be forever better for it.
Cardinal William H. Keeler
Archbishop of Baltimore
