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Witness to the Holocaust sees healing journey reach culmination

March 27, 2000
JERUSALEM (CNS) -- Pope John Paul II came to the Holy Land to revisit the roots of the Christian faith, but he made an equally intense pilgrimage of reconciliation to the Jewish people. As the stooped figure in white moved through Jerusalem in late March, some of the most emotional moments were those spent with the people the pope has called his ``Jewish friends.'' In a historic gesture intended to help calm centuries of troubled religious waters, he became the first pope in history to pray at Judaism's most holy place, the Western Wall. He met with Israel's chief rabbis and pledged the church's continued struggle against anti-Semitism. At the Holocaust memorial of Yad Vashem, he said the Jewish tragedy was ``heart-rending,'' then shared poignant memories with survivors of the Nazi extermination campaign from his hometown in Poland. For the 79-year-old pope, these were giant steps in a lifelong spiritual journey that has become, to a large extent, an interfaith journey of the whole church. It began in the streets of Wadowice, the pope's hometown near the Auschwitz death camp, where his Jewish friends -- one-fourth the town's population -- disappeared one by one under Nazi occupation. ``These were his friends. This was his youth that was taken away. The Nazis marched in and systematically murdered his childhood friends,'' said Eugene Fisher, director of Catholic-Jewish relations for the U.S. bishops' conference. The pope's journey continued with a visit to the Auschwitz death camp in 1979, on his first visit back home as pope. It hit its stride in the Jewish synagogue of Rome, where the pope made an unprecedented visit in 1986, calling Jews ``our elder brothers.'' Eight years later, an insistent Pope John Paul -- undeterred by internal church hesitation -- established diplomatic relations with Israel and expressed regret for some Christians' failure to show ``spiritual resistance'' during the Holocaust. At the Western Wall in Jerusalem March 26, his healing journey seemed to reach a culmination, confirming a fundamental turnaround for the Catholic Church. ``The church for centuries taught that since the Jews killed Jesus, God wanted to punish the Jews, God destroyed the temple and sent the Jews wandering. In our time, the Jews have come back, and here is the pope -- coming to the wall of prayer,'' Fisher said. He said the pope's visit to the Western Wall, where Jews have come for centuries to lament the destruction of their temple, in a certain sense represented the ``other half'' of his 1986 synagogue visit. ``The synagogue was how Jews prayed in the diaspora, in a sense, but the center of Jewish prayer was at that wall,'' Fisher said. ``I think the symbol of the pope praying there will sink in very deeply. It's an inexpressibly profound moment in terms of religion.'' What especially impresses Fisher and other experts in Catholic-Jewish dialogue is the pope's ability to ``re-image'' the church's position on salvation history in regard to the Jews and express it in symbolic gestures that repeatedly strike a chord among people of both faiths. The Second Vatican Council laid out the new teaching on Jews in the document ``Nostra Aetate,'' but it was the Polish-born pontiff -- the witness to the Holocaust -- who brought it home in a highly visible way. ``Sometimes the things you do have much more effect than what you say. These things remain,'' said Cardinal Edward I. Cassidy, who oversees Vatican dialogue with Jews. The Vatican and some Jewish leaders now hope that the pope's dramatic gestures, televised and discussed all over Israel, will bring Israeli Jews up to date on the church's changed attitude. ``In Israel, almost nothing is known about the progress made in Catholic-Jewish relations since Vatican II,'' Father David Jaeger, an Israeli who has worked on church-state negotiations, told the Vatican missionary agency, Fides. He said the church intends to press for revisions in the Israeli school curriculum on this issue. ``It's true, very little is understood about the change in church teaching in Israel,'' said Rabbi David Rosen, head of the Israeli office of the Anti-Defamation League. ``The proof is that `Nostra Aetate' wasn't translated into Hebrew until the Vatican established diplomatic relations with Israel. ``The pope's visit has given people here a sense of discovery and appreciation. I think it is really opening up people's ears the way nothing has done before,'' he said.