The pope came to S.F. in 1987 — and local Jews weren’t too happy about it

Pope Leo XIV, elected May 8 by the cardinals in Rome, is the first American to hold that title. It’s unclear so early in his role whether he’ll come to the U.S. any time soon.

Only once has a pope visited San Francisco.

It was a touchy visit for many local Jews. While tens of thousands of Californians flocked to see Pope John Paul II during his 1987 visit to the city, his tour also roused a tumult among the Jewish community.

Even before the pope got to the Bay Area on Sept. 17, 1987, Jews across America had been gearing up for protest. At the heart of the matter was the pope’s recent meeting in Rome with the president of Austria at the time, Kurt Waldheim.

“Two Jewish groups this week took the Pope to task for agreeing to meet Austrian President Kurt Waldheim at the Vatican on June 25,” we wrote that month. “It will be the first trip abroad for Waldheim, a practicing Catholic, since he was elected 11 months ago. He has been officially barred from entering the United States and is shunned by most Western governments because of evidence of his complicity in Nazi atrocities during World War II.”

Waldheim, who had served as United Nations secretary-general and was elected president of Austria in 1986, was known to have served in the German army. But lurking in his biography were other, more unsavory details about his ties to the Nazis, connections that he hid and denied until the truth was revealed.

So his meeting with the pope was controversial.

“We are at a crisis moment, at a crossroads as a result of this Waldheim situation,” Rev. John David Shanahan, a Catholic priest in Larkspur, wrote in our paper in August 1987. “On the one hand Jews and Catholics might go their separate ways. On the other hand, all of this might lead to deeper dialogue and closer ties.”

The meeting with Waldheim was only three months before the pope’s scheduled visit to San Francisco, which was part of a 10-day U.S. tour.

An unsigned editorial in our paper in July 1987 titled “Dianne and the Pope” called out Mayor (and rising Jewish politician) Dianne Feinstein for planning a fundraising dinner at her own home ahead of the pope’s visit to help financially support a planned public mass.

“We would have expected a more visible form of protest by Feinstein. In meeting Waldheim, the pope gave recognition to someone who is banned from entering the United States because of his Nazi past. That alone should have given Feinstein pause. But certainly as a Jew, she should feel the same anger and horror that most of us experienced when the pope praised Waldheim and failed to make mention of any of his World War II activities,” we wrote.

“Feinstein’s attitude on the Waldheim affair makes a mockery of the U.S. decision to bar the Austrian president, and, at the same time, insults the Bay Area’s Jewish community.”

In a news article that same month, staffer Peggy Isaak Gluck dove into the details.

Feinstein “explained that she did not cancel the event because the pope’s scheduled trip to San Francisco Sept. 17-18 ‘is a major visit to the city,’ and because ‘when I give my word, I keep my word,’” Gluck wrote.

“Nonetheless, at least one prominent Jew has declined to serve on the San Francisco papal welcoming committee because of the pope’s meeting with Waldheim. In addition, a number of Bay Area Jewish leaders who were invited to the event at Feinstein’s home have said they will not attend because of the Waldheim affair, although they declined to be named in print,” Gluck continued.

There was another issue at stake, too. The Jews of America wanted the pope to recognize the State of Israel and were frustrated by Catholic ambivalence over Christian minorities and the status of Jerusalem. (The Vatican formally recognized Israel in 1993.)

“We’ve learned to expect the worst from the pope,” we wrote in an unsigned editorial titled “A papal problem” in June 1987. “In a statement following the announcement of the Waldheim invitation, the World Jewish Congress said, ‘This is the pope who met with [PLO chief Yasir] Arafat; this is the pope who refuses to recognize Israel. This is not the first unsavory character whom the pope has received in audience.’”

Our letter writers took sides.

“I took a recent trip to Warsaw and Auschwitz, the concentration camp site where so many people, young and old, were killed by the Nazi regime. It was so powerful to see the clothes and other things that belonged to the victims of German cruelty. I don’t wish to meet the Polish pope at all,” wrote B.M. Branzburg of San Mateo.

Not every letter writer supported plans to protest, though.

“I think it’s terrible, the idea of protesting and picketing the pope’s visit to San Francisco,” wrote Harry Friedman of Yreka. “If we can’t embrace the pope, at least we can respect him and the office he represents. The pope is a charismatic person. Disrupting his visit can only put a bad taste in millions of mouths around the world. I don’t know what could be done that would help the cause of anti-Semitism more.”

But at least some Jews in the Bay Area wouldn’t back down.

Between 30 and 50 picketers showed up at Feinstein’s house, including, we reported, Holocaust survivors and Michael Lerner, who had founded Tikkun magazine a year earlier

The press also showed up, including this paper.

After a while, Feinstein “summoned Lerner and Dr. Michael Thaler, president of the Holocaust Center of Northern California, to the entrance of her home for a 10-minute conversation that they all acknowledged afterward was a frank exchange of views,” wrote Gluck and Adele Framer. “But Lerner further characterized the discussion with the mayor as ‘a conversation for the [benefit of the] press.’”

Feinstein told our publication that the dinner had been arranged before the pope met with Waldheim.

“‘I’ve talked to people — people who advise me from a Jewish point of view — and people understand my position,’ Feinstein stressed. She said she does not expect the flap to affect her relationships in the Jewish community. ‘I think the pope’s [audience with Waldheim] was a mistake,’ she stated.”

In the end, the pope came and the mass took place. About 70,000 people crammed into Candlestick Park. His visit was met with Jewish protests, vigils, a shiva and a petition — not huge ones, but determined ones, that refused to let the pope’s celebrity overshadow their condemnation of his actions.

“Lerner, who acknowledged the recent progress made between Catholics and Jews on a group-to-group level, nevertheless stressed the importance of organized protest, a strategy that other Jewish groups earlier had opposed,” staffer Winston Pickett wrote in our paper in September 1987. “‘We can’t suppress our anger,’ he said. ‘We have to say to this pope, ‘You can’t have a moral crusade in America when you have not dealt with the immorality of cozying up to Nazis.’”