The Pope the Jews Need

While some Jewish leaders want the next pope to pity the Jews, what we need is a partner against secularism.

BY: David Klinghoffer

Bill Clinton was called the nation's first black president, in recognition of African-Americans' sense that he unfailingly identified with their concerns. If Clinton deserved this tribute, then John Paul II could be called the first Jewish pope-at least the first since ancient times (when the very earliest church leaders were all Jews by birth). In John Paul II, Jews found a wellspring of anguished sympathy, and repentance, for the centuries of suffering of God's ancient servant, Israel, at the hands of Christians.

Now Jews are wondering what kind of pope will come next. Since one of the historic accomplishments of John Paul II was to reestablish the papacy as the foremost leadership office in all Christendom, the next pope's attitude toward the Jews and Judaism will have a powerful impact that reaches well beyond the confines of his own church.

While John Paul II was a cherished friend to the Jews, we now need a different sort of pope to move our relationship with the Christian world forward. If the next pope really wants to show respect for the Jews and our faith, he will offer us not pity but partnership.

Even before Karol Wojtyla became pope, his approach toward the Jews was evident. During deliberations over the 1965 "Nostra Aetate", the Second Vatican Council's "Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions," which began the revolution in Jewish-Catholic relations, the assembled cardinals and bishops reached an impasse until the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla spoke up powerfully for what would become the final statement. "Nostra Aetate" renounced the old charge that the Jews of all generations remain responsible for killing the Christian savior, and it rejected the idea that the Jews are "repudiated or cursed by God."

As pope, Wojtyla went further. "Nostra Aetate" was a doctrinal document, but John Paul II's way was to speak on behalf of the heart. His statements about Jewish-Catholic relations were important for the emotions they conveyed-mainly pained regret at the way Jews had been held in contempt or indifference-or actively persecuted-by generations of Christians.

In his book "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews," historian James Carroll identified the high point of John Paul II's pontificate as the 2000 visit to Jerusalem, when the ill and elderly pontiff prayed at Judaism's holiest site, the Western Wall that once abutted Herod's Temple.

According to Jewish custom, the pope left a note containing a prayer in a crevice of the wall. His note read, "We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer." The words were drawn from a formal apology to the Jews issued by the Vatican that year, which followed upon a 1998 "confession" regarding the Holocaust, titled "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah."

Of the apology given in 2000, Carroll writes critically that it "avoided a direct confrontation with the source of anti-Semitism"-that source being, in Carroll's view, the New Testament Gospels themselves and subsequent normative Christian teachings. Carroll continues, "It was possible to hear that apology as a regret for behavior that was inconsistent with core church teaching, instead of set in motion by it."

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