The Pope Must Make Some Reparation : An Act, a Special Word, Is Needed to Assuage the Pain of His Audience for Waldheim

The Pope receives ambassadors and heads of government as the sovereign of a diminutive state, just large enough to secure his independence and enable him to keep watch over his far-flung flocks and to shepherd a universal church that transcends national boundaries, classes and time itself. As a sovereign, the Pope must deal diplomatically with states and political bodies, with organized religions and ideologies, with which he may at some times be more or less in accord than others. The president of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, is thus in the sheerly diplomatic perspective no different from South African President Pieter W. Botha, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze or President Reagan--all of whom and so many others John Paul II has received in audience.

But the Pope from Poland, where the largest extermination camps were located, himself a former university professor of ethics and as Pope a universal teacher of morality, is looked to by his church and indeed by all men and women of good will for precepts of how the Christian world is to deal with the horrendous legacy of Nazi violence perpetrated near the very heart of old Christendom.

John Paul II has evidently chosen, as with his intending assassin, Ali Agca, to exemplify forgiveness. But, unlike Ali Agca, Kurt Waldheim is not a penitent in prison but, until now, a head of government diplomatically isolated within the confines of his republic. He had been barred from the United States by reason of the discovery of his tap root in the Nazi past, gravely compounded by his studied prevarication and concealment of his history when called on to serve the world as U.N. secretary.

If the government of a great nation constitutionally neutral in the realm of religion has been moved to debar the president of an ideologically neutral republic and reject appeals for reconsideration, surely the Pope and his secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, should have reflected much longer before responding favorably to the pressures of the Christian Democratic Party of Austria to rehabilitate their president’s reputation on the world scene by what promised to be an uncommon display of diplomatic ceremony, pomp and even cordiality.

It is hard to believe that the raging dismay in the United States and elsewhere should have come as a surprise to the Vatican. It is painfully sensitive to the fact that its concordat negotiated with the Third Reich in early 1933 was the first diplomatic success of Adolf Hitler. The papal invitation to the president of the land of Hitler’s birth, while no doubt correct in the strict sense of protocol, evokes excruciating memories for American Catholics and Protestants no less than for Jews.

Austria, unlike the Federal Republic of Germany, has undertaken no sustained act of reparation for the Nazi period. Nor have its churches, like those in Germany, made any declaration of collective remorse for their relative silence, or even indirect implication, in what went wrong in their homeland. Instead, with a certain contempt for world opinion, the Austrian people, despite the mounting evidence of concealed documentation, persevered in electing Waldheim in a kind of national referendum that now makes of their president more than a standard head of state. The president of Austria has himself become a collective and symbolic figure, unlike his bland and neutral image as the secretary general of the United Nations.

But as the abominations of Nazism were crimes against humanity, we are all morally involved in what takes place at the audience in Rome on Thursday. Rather than the Jewish community speaking up alone, American Catholic bishops and many other Christian groups should join in a measured, grave and reasoned ecumenical expression of dismay, and in the formulation of an interfaith appeal to the Pope to make some reparation.

Jeremiah, who anticipated the New Covenant no longer graven on the tablets of stone but written on the heart, also warned: “They have healed the wound of my people slightly, saying ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”

Among the Lord’s people are the Austrians themselves, who had indeed been grappling with their past and had sought several innovative ways by which their neutral republic could play a role as mediator between East and West, Jew and Muslim. And among the same Lord’s people are the Jews and the Christians of the United States who await the second pilgrimage of the Pope in September. The churning emotions that have been aroused can be assuaged only by some signal act and some deeply interpretive word from the Pope, who, having received the president of the native land of Hitler, might well in due course receive the president of Israel, the recovered homeland of the Jews, an Israel whose recognition the Vatican has so far studiously avoided.

In the meantime, a Pope who as a seminarian in Nazi-occupied Krakow is remembered for his deeds of mercy toward the Jews, and who as pontiff joined in prayers with the chief rabbi of Rome, and who three times prayed in Polish death camps, and whose forthcoming American pilgrimage inspired great hopes for further advances in Jewish-Catholic relations, will surely find some way to relieve the fresh seizure of painful memories, to reach out tactfully and fraternally to the survivors of the Holocaust.