Catholic-Jewish Gains Hurt by Waldheim Issue

One of the major efforts of the Second Vatican Council to reform and modernize the Roman Catholic Church was a revolutionary document that Catholic and Jewish leaders agree has produced more positive encounters between the two faiths in the last 22 years than occurred during the first 1,900 years of Christianity.

A ringing indictment of anti-Semitism, “Nostra Aetate” (In Our Time), repudiates the once widely held Christian view that the Jewish people were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. The roots of the document, adopted on Oct. 28, 1965, reach back to the re-examination among Catholic thinkers that followed the Holocaust of World War II.

But to Jewish leaders the world over, today’s scheduled official meeting at the Vatican between Pope John Paul II and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim represents a serious setback to hard-fought progress in overcoming religious bigotry and political persecution. The negative reaction by Jews--if not mitigated--could seriously damage the fragile relationships between the Jewish community and the Vatican for years to come.

Wartime Past

Jewish groups charge that Waldheim, the U.N. secretary general from 1972 to 1982, covered up a wartime past in which he acted as a senior intelligence officer for German army units in the Balkans involved in the deportation of thousands of Jews, Greeks and Yugoslavs to Nazi death camps between 1942 and 1944.

Waldheim, an active Catholic, has admitted his wartime service but denies any wrongdoing. He became president of Austria last July, and the visit to the Vatican is his first official trip abroad as president. He was expected to meet alone with the Pope this morning for about 30 minutes and to be accorded full honors, including a Swiss Guard salute and the playing of national anthems.

And, despite unprecedented progress in Jewish-Catholic dialogue, the Waldheim affair is only the latest in a series of recent Vatican diplomatic moves that have disturbed Jews and supporters of the Jewish state of Israel.

Previous Protests

In 1982, John Paul overrode similar strong protests from Israel and Jewish groups when he received Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in a private audience at the Vatican.

Last November, the Vatican ordered Cardinal John J. O’Connor of New York to cancel meetings with President Chaim Herzog and other Israeli leaders in their Jerusalem offices for fear that a meeting there might be interpreted as accepting Israel’s claim to sovereignty over the city--a claim that is challenged by Arabs. In a last-minute compromise that was compared to the wisdom of King Solomon, O’Connor met in the home part of Herzog’s mansion rather than in his office, which is in the same building.

The incident angered many Jews, however. And only after a three-hour meeting with Jewish leaders upon his return to New York was O’Connor able to mollify them. He apologized to the Israeli nation for what he called his “mistake” of failing to be familiar with Vatican protocol forbidding such official meetings in Jerusalem.

John Paul’s beatification on May 2 of a Jewish-born Catholic nun who was killed at Auschwitz in 1942 involved another highly charged religious issue that did not sit well with many Jews.

The ceremony, the second of three steps to sainthood in Roman Catholicism, was held in Cologne, West Germany, for Edith Stein. The issue was sensitive because many Jews insist that Stein was gassed not because she was a Carmelite nun but because she was born a Jew. The Vatican maintains she suffered martyrdom for her Catholic faith.

Jews Remain Vexed

In a related matter, European Catholic and Jewish leaders decided in February to move a Catholic convent away from the Nazis’ old Auschwitz concentration camp in deference to those who said the convent’s presence detracted from the physical site that many Jews regard as the most important symbol of the Holocaust.

And the plan of the Carmelite nuns who occupy the convent to name it after Edith Stein--an idea since abandoned--further rubbed nerves that were already raw.

On the international level, Jews remain vexed about the Vatican’s unwillingness to extend full diplomatic recognition to the state of Israel and to recognize Jerusalem as its capital. The Vatican maintains diplomatic relations with 116 countries, including many of Israel’s neighbors, but has declined to grant official diplomatic recognition to either Israel or Jordan, citing the need for their border conflicts to be resolved.

Centuries of Persecution

Israel claims united Jerusalem as its political capital, having captured the eastern half of the formerly divided city from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

But because Jerusalem has religious significance for Jews, Christians and Muslims, the Vatican believes that the city should be under special, international supervision. The Pope also supports the idea of a homeland for Palestinian refugees.

Jewish sensibilities to the relationship between the Holy See and Israel long predate the creation of the modern state in 1948, stretching back to centuries of religiously motivated persecution by Christians in general and Roman Catholics in particular.

“Israel is a spiritual as well as a political matter for us,” said Rabbi Leon Klenicki, director of interfaith affairs for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. “Israel is something more than a state; it is a realization of the biblical promise. An exchange of ambassadors means for us a total recognition of our Jewish being . . . a people that lives in the world and relates to the Promised Land. Israel is, if you will, an ‘incarnation.’ ”

Pope’s Clear Stand

Whatever diplomatic blunders in Jewish eyes the present Pope may have committed, his record on anti-Semitism has been clear: He has repeatedly condemned it, as he has Germany’s Nazi past.

In fact, on the same trip to Germany last spring, he beatified a German Jesuit, Rupert Mayer, one of the country’s few priests who spoke out forcefully against the Hitler regime. The Pope also has bestowed high honors on Jews who have worked to bring about greater understanding between Catholics and Jews.

In 1984, the Polish pontiff became the first Vatican leader to call specifically for the security of the state of Israel. And last April, he garnered Jewish good will by being the first Pope since St. Peter to pay an official visit to a synagogue.

During the visit to the ancient Orthodox synagogue in Rome, John Paul hailed the Jews as “our dearly beloved brothers.”

Lingering Bitterness

“The Jewish religion is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain way is ‘intrinsic’ to our religion,” the Pope told the congregation. “With Judaism therefore we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. . . . In a certain way it could be said that you are our elder brothers.”

But Catholic-Jewish relations remain complex and controversial. And hope for further improvement lies mixed amid lingering bitterness toward the Vatican just below the surface.

As Israel’s President Herzog put it at the time of the Pope’s synagogue visit: “This is an important step forward . . . on the way to conciliation and the correcting of injustice which the church perpetrated on the Jewish people during 1,500 years of history . . . (but) history cannot be erased.”

Indeed, admits Msgr. Royale Vadakin, director of the Los Angeles Archdiocese Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs Office: “Basically, the relationship between Christians and Jews from the 1st to the 20th centuries was estrangement at best, hostility and violence at worst.”

Parting of the Ways

Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism had come to a parting of the ways by the end of the first century of the Christian era, according to Eugene Fisher, a specialist in Hebrew studies who heads the Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations of the U.S. Catholic Bishops, with the two groups diverging in their interpretation of the role and claims of Jesus.

At the same time, the Christian church became more influenced by the large numbers of Gentiles who were joining it. Meanwhile, in the Jewish synagogues, the remaining followers of Jesus were thrown out.

By the year 132, Christian communities in Palestine petitioned the Roman authorities to be given separate religious status from Jews.

“It is from this period that anti-Christian polemic begin to appear in Jewish Bible commentaries,” notes historian Paul Johnson in his massive new book, “A History of the Jews.”

Christian Mob Attacks

By the year 313, Emperor Constantine had become a Christian convert, and a brief period of toleration followed. But when Christianity became a state religion in the late 4th Century, Jews became a “problem” for Christianity, and Christian mob attacks on synagogues became common, according to Johnson.

Early in the 5th Century, the leading Greek theologian, John Chrysostom, delivered eight polemical “Sermons Against the Jews,” which “became the pattern for anti-Jewish tirades. . . . Thus a specifically Christian anti-Semitism, presenting the Jews as murderers of Christ, was grafted onto the seething mass of pagan smears and rumors, and Jewish communities were now at risk in every Christian city,” Johnson wrote.

However, through much of the Middle Ages, Jews had civil rights, and canon (church) law in force at the time made disruption of Jews at worship punishable by excommunication, Fisher said in an interview.

Pent-up anti-Jewish feelings were unleashed during the Crusades in the 11th through 14th centuries, resulting in restrictions, trumped-up charges and massacres.

Bigotry Against Jews

Jews were accused of poisoning wells and cisterns in order to spread the dreaded Black Plague, despite a papal bull contradicting the allegation and blaming it on the devil.

Kings and bishops forced Jews to live in ghettos, pay special taxes and, by restricting their social lives and methods of livelihood, to engage in usury. Often, they were made to wear yellow caps for identification.

Until the mid-19th Century, the Jewish community in Rome had to endure a particular humiliation. When a new Pope was elected, he passed by the gate of the Jewish ghetto, where he was met by the chief rabbi. According to documentation obtained by veteran Vatican correspondent Bruno Bartolini, the rabbi formally bowed, and the Pope gave him a swift ritual kick in the posterior.

Before the Second Vatican Council, much Catholic teaching held that Jews were the chosen people until the coming of Jesus, but by killing and rejecting him as Messiah, the Jews forfeited their covenant with God and turned over to the Christian church their place as the people of God’s salvation.

Landmark Document

Before 1965, none of the previous 20 Catholic councils had even considered the question of relationships with the Jewish people.

But “Nostra Aetate” changed all that.

The landmark document directs the Catholic Church not to forget the spiritual bond linking “the people of the New Covenant with Abraham’s stock.” It declares that Jesus’ death “cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today.” And it says the Catholic Church “deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed at the Jews at any time and from any source.”

“After Vatican II,” observed Klenicki of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League, “the church had a kind of reckoning of the soul vis-a-vis Judaism.”

Vadakin, who is coordinator of the Pope’s scheduled interfaith meeting on Sept. 16 in Los Angeles, acknowledges that “Nostra Aetate” was “only a beginning--it did not establish a precise formula or even outline specific programs.” But, he added, “We have made a quantum leap (in Jewish-Catholic dialogues) in the past 22 years.”

Sought to End Tensions

The American bishops took the lead in implementing the Vatican document, setting up a secretariat for Catholic-Jewish relations in 1967 and issuing guidelines to “eliminate sources of tension and misunderstanding” and “multiply intergroup meetings” between the two faiths. Similar actions were taken by other national hierarchies.

Examples of the changed atmosphere abound. Lessons and books in parochial schools have been changed, not only to eliminate references to Jews as Christ-killers, but also to stress the Jewishness of Jesus and recognize the validity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people. Rabbis and priests preach in each other’s pulpits, and students for the priesthood and the rabbinate often meet for theological discussions.

Vadakin and Alfred Wolf, rabbi emeritus of Wilshire Boulevard Temple and a chief architect of Jewish-Catholic exchanges in Los Angeles, point with pride to local programs precipitated by the thaw in relations.

These include placing Jewish college students in Catholic high schools, where they teach one day a week; faculty exchanges between St. John’s (Catholic) Seminary and Hebrew Union College; priest-rabbi dialogues that since 1971 have produced widely circulated statements of Jewish-Catholic understanding, and an annual visit by 1,000 Catholic high school students to Wilshire Boulevard Temple to participate in a model Passover seder.

A Lot Is at Stake

Leaders in the dialogue movement say the touchy meeting between the Pope and Waldheim takes on added significance because so much progress in the delicate Jewish-Catholic rapprochement is at stake.

Already, one major American Jewish group, the 50,000-member American Jewish Congress, has said it will boycott interfaith meetings with John Paul scheduled in Miami and Los Angeles during his nine-city trip to the United States this September.

Other U.S. Jewish groups have threatened to follow suit unless the pontiff holds a meeting with world Jewish leaders prior to his visit to America and explains to their satisfaction why he agreed to see Waldheim.

Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, head of the group charged by world Jewish organizations to conduct the reconciliation dialogue initiated by “Nostra Aetate,” sent a strongly worded official letter this week to Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, the Vatican official in charge of relations with the Jews. Waxman’s letter called the Waldheim audience “a terrible blow to the future of Jewish-Vatican relations.”

Waldheim Issue More Serious

Even the conciliatory and mild-mannered Wolf conceded that “in the public perception, the Waldheim matter is taken more seriously (than either the Arafat or O’Connor incidents) . . . for the simple reason that here is a person who clearly has had a Nazi record for war crimes recognized by our own government and by democracies all over the world.”

Still, Wolf and Vadakin said in separate interviews this week that--regardless of the outcome of the Pope-Waldheim meeting--they are determined not to let it jeopardize close relationships between the nation’s largest Catholic archdiocese and second-largest Jewish community. (There are 2.6 million Catholics in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and about 550,000 Jews in greater Los Angeles, second only to New York.)

Msgr. George Higgins, who was the first acting director of Catholic-Jewish relations for the U.S. bishops, agreed that Jewish withdrawal from the meetings with the Pope in Miami and Los Angeles “would be a disaster . . . (that) would set dialogues back years.”

But he added a more sanguine assessment of the Waldheim audience: “If one instance can derail 20 years of reasonably good progress, then we’ve all been kidding ourselves.”

New York’s Cardinal O’Connor has put an even more positive spin on the prospects, saying today’s meeting could turn out badly for Waldheim: “The Polish government was very anxious to have him (the Pope) come to Poland until he got there. Then they were horrified at the things he said and did.”

Says Rabbi Wolf: “We will wait and see.”