It tells you just how bad the Catholic Church has been to Jews by how good we feel Pope John Paul II has been to Jews.
Don’t get me wrong. I think John Paul was an extraordinary human being. He was a true intellectual who produced dozens of deeply spiritual works, yet he also had an uncommon common touch. He could relate to anyone, to everyone. Though he lived the live of a celibate priest, he was amazing in being able to connect to children.
And he was clearly a great pope, someone who left the walls of the Vatican to personally reach out to his far-flung flock. He is the only person in the world whose death is being mourned deeply in every corner of the earth.
An extraordinary person, an extraordinary pope. All true. Equally true is that when it comes to being a friend of the Jews, he was so-so, OK, not bad.
That, on first blush, seems not to be the case, with many Jewish officials already proclaiming him “the best pope the Jews have ever had.” Problem is, that it is a reflection on how bad prior popes have been to the Jewish people, not how great John Paul has been to us.
Consider but some of his predecessors over just the past 100 years or so. Pope Pius IX, for instance. He not only supported keeping Rome’s Jews in a ghetto, but he was the man behind the 1858 kidnapping of a young Jewish boy who had been secretly baptized as a baby.
Then there’s Pope Pius X who, in 1904, met with Theodor Herzl. Herzl, speaking in Italian, told the pope of his plans for the Zionist movement. The pope, shall we say, was less than supportive.
“We cannot give approval to this movement,” he said. “We cannot prevent Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we can never sanction it. The soil of Jerusalem, if it was not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus … The Jews have not recognized our lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.”
And then there was Pope Pius XII, the Holocaust pope, who not only said not one peep to save Jews, who not only did not one thing to save Jews, but who gave comfort to the Nazis as they set about the systematic extermination of the Jewish people.
And so, yes compared to the popes I’ve just listed, John Paul II was a great guy.
But taken on his own record, he was no great friend of ours.
He went to a synagogue, he went to Auschwitz, he went to Israel. All nice gestures, all good things to do, all, indeed, important things to do. I give him full credit for sending powerful symbolic messages both of love for the Jews and about how badly the church has treated the Jews.
But symbols are just symbols. It was nice, yes, for the pope to spend a couple of hours in a Rome shul. Going to Auschwitz was as much for his Polish compatriots as for us. And going to Israel, I’m afraid I can’t give a pope too many brownie points for going to Israel. Israel, please remember, is where the man Catholics consider the son of God was born, lived his whole life, preached his preachings, was crucified and resurrected. Since all that is what Christianity is all about, I don’t see what a big favor it is to Jews for the top Christian guy to want to see the places Jesus was.
Yes, the pope made some nice symbolic gestures while in Israel, going to Yad Vashem, going to the Western Wall, meeting with the chief rabbis. Again, I’m glad he did, I’m thankful he did, I give him credit for having done so. Especially considering the example his prior popes left for him.
But when I look at John Paul’s reign, it seems to me that on a lot of big stuff, on substantive stuff, he was anything but a friend to the Jews, let alone the best pope we have ever had.
He met with Kurt Waldheim twice, even after his Nazi connections were publicly known. Even worse, he met with Yasser Arafat 10 times, beginning back in 1982, which was way before Oslo, way before Arafat, at least on paper, renounced terrorism against Israel. When Arafat died, a statement put out in the pope’s name was stunning in the sorrow it expressed for the man responsible for the murder of so many innocent Jews. And while, yes, this pope did establish diplomatic relations with Israel, he made sure to do the same at the same time with the PLO, though virtually no country on Earth other than the nutty ones had done so.
Beyond that, remember that Pope Pius IX mentioned above, the guy behind the abduction of a Jewish child? Well, John Paul made him a saint, despite pleas from the Jewish world. He also made Edith Stein — a Jew who converted to Catholicism, became a nun and was killed at Auschwitz — a saint, despite pleas from the Jewish world.
So while John Paul’s time may not have been such great days for the Jews, we should mourn their passing, for it’s likely we’ll look back on them as the good old days. And look back on John Paul maybe not as the best pope the Jews ever had, but as a good friend of the Jewish people. May he rest in peace.
Joseph Aaron is the editor and publisher of the Chicago Jewish News.