Top Papal Aide, Jewish Leaders Confer

In an effort to ease sharp interfaith tensions caused by Pope John Paul II’s recent audience with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, American Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders held two informal meetings in New York this week with the Pope’s secretary of state, parties involved in the closed sessions said Friday.

Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, director of international affairs for the American Jewish Committee in New York, said discussions with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli included the need for a clarification of the Pope’s “central commitment on the Nazi Holocaust, anti-Semitism and . . . the question of full diplomatic recognition of Israel” by the Vatican.

The pontiff’s decision to meet on June 25 with Waldheim, who has been accused of complicity in Nazi war crimes, provoked a firestorm of criticism from Jews the world over and has threatened to scuttle Jewish participation in two interfaith meetings with the Pope scheduled during his U.S. visit this September.

An international umbrella group of Jewish organizations has demanded “substantive discussion” with John Paul on Catholic-Jewish relations before his announced Sept. 10 dialogue with U.S. Jews in Miami.

Tanenbaum, a participant in the 90-minute Thursday morning meeting with Casaroli, said the Vatican official seemed sympathetic to the request.

“He said: ‘These are important ideas. I’ll discuss them with my boss,’ ” Tanenbaum said in a telephone interview.

Tanenbaum called the meeting “a good first step, a significant beginning. . . . The conversations were honest and real, but only preliminary to other needs that we discussed quite frankly.”

In a statement issued Friday, Archbishop John May of St. Louis, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he hoped the session “will mark the . . . intensification of efforts by both Catholics and Jews to explore our common faith heritage, to eliminate discrimination and to increase mutual understanding and respect.”

Informal Meeting

May said the Thursday meeting, which took place in the Manhattan residence of Archbishop Renato Martino, the Vatican’s permanent observer at the United Nations, was “informal in nature” and so it “would not be appropriate to report on its content in any detail.”

The initiative for the meetings with Casaroli, who is the Pope’s right-hand man in affairs of state, came from U.S. bishops’ concern that the Waldheim audience could seriously damage the fragile relationship between the U.S. Jewish community and the American Catholic Church that has been carefully built up through the last two decades, Tanenbaum said.

Other Jewish leaders who met with Casaroli on Thursday were Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations; Rabbi Gilbert Klaperman, newly elected president of the Synagogue Council of America, and Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly. Catholics included Martino; Bishop William H. Keeler of Harrisburg, Pa., who chairs the U.S. Bishops Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, and Msgr. Daniel Hoye, general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference.

In a preliminary meeting on Wednesday night, Casaroli, who was in New York for unrelated business, met with May, Keeler, Hoye, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York and Bishop Francis Mugavero of Brooklyn. The result of that gathering was Thursday’s meeting with Jewish leaders, Tanenbaum said.

At the first meeting, Casaroli was presented with “an assessment of Catholic-Jewish relations in the United States,” May said, “especially as they have been impacted by recent controversies and allegations that the Catholic Church is insensitive to the memory of the Holocaust.”