Papal Silence

A more than slightly surprising piece of news received only perfunctory coverage in the American press late last month This was the news that Pope John Paul II had sent a pair of peace envoys to the Middle East: Cardinal Pio Laghi, a veteran diplomat who was once papal nuncio to the United States, and Monsignor Giovanni d'Aniello of the Vatican Secretariat of State.

One might have thought that just now wouldn't be the time for the pope to offer his services as a mediator between the Jews and the Arabs of Israel/Palestine. Less than a month earlier, the pope had offended a good many Israelis-not least the editors of the Jerusalem Post--by failing to repudiate and denounce an anti-Semitic tirade made during his historic visit to Syria, by the country's President Bashar al-Assad.

The church's past record of anti-Semitism is beyond dispute (see James Carroll's recent "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews"), but no apology was forthcoming for the papal silence in Syria. John Paul II has repudiated anti-Semitism on other occasions, and Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls would go no further than to say that "The Holy See's position against anti-Semitism is well known and has been stated thousands of times."

As the first Roman pontiff to visit Damascus in more than 1,500 years, John Paul sat in silence while Assad attacked the Jews of the world as people who "try to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality with which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the prophet Muhammad." When Assad finished, the pope simply read his prepared speech, a plea for peace.

A Jerusalem Post editorial insisted that the pope's silence might all too easily be taken as assent, given the church's past anti-Semitism: "It therefore behooves the pope to make a public apology to the Jewish people and to refute the rubbish contained in Assad's speech."

Even before his moment of silence in Syria, the pope's credibility in the role of mediator was not high. The Israelis, as Jews, still associate the pope with the Holocaust, while the Palestinians, as Muslims, associate him with the Crusades. Muslim Israelis might take a more open or nuanced view, as may Christian Palestinians. But they are (a few talented individuals aside) marginal to the negotiations that somehow must take place.

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