Optimism on Eve of Meeting With Pope

Catholic and Jewish leaders said they were optimistic Monday after daylong meetings here in preparation for today’s unprecedented talks with Pope John Paul II aimed at relieving strains in Vatican-Jewish relations caused by the Pope’s June audience with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim.

Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, leader of the nine-man Jewish delegation to the talks, said the meeting with John Paul at his summer residence in Castelgondolfo “is going to lead, I’m quite convinced, to highly positive results.”

Bishop William H. Keeler of Harrisburg, Pa., who joined the discussions on the Vatican side, said that the talks were “very positive” and that he felt “very good” about them.

The nine Jewish leaders, most of them representing the International Committee on Interreligious Consultations, an umbrella group of largely American Jewish organizations involved in Jewish-Catholic dialogue, were invited to meet with John Paul to help calm the wave of outrage that swept the international Jewish community after the Waldheim audience.

The Pope was widely criticized for being insensitive to war crimes charges brought against Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations, as the result of Waldheim’s service in the German army in World War II. Following Waldheim’s papal audience, most major American Jewish groups said they would boycott the pontiff’s September visit to the United States, including a special meeting with Jewish leaders scheduled for Sept. 11 in Miami.

However, the papal invitation to discuss “fundamental issues” and a letter that John Paul wrote to the head of the American Bishops’ Conference urging Christians to study the “terrifying experience” of the Holocaust eased the tension, Waxman said after Monday’s talks with Cardinal Johannes Willebrands and eight other senior Catholic clergymen.

Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, director of International Relations for the American Jewish Committee and a member of the delegation, said he is now confident that the Miami meeting and other meetings with Jews during the papal visit to the United States will go ahead “unless there is some unexpected failure here.”

“There is positive interest on both sides to make this meeting work in a significant way,” Tanenbaum said before Monday’s discussions.

Waxman said, “We think the meeting will create a sense of rapport between the communities.” Asked if he thought the Jewish delegation had made real progress in its talks with the Willebrands group Monday, he said, “Yes, we think we have.”

Both sides said they had agreed at the outset of Monday’s meeting to refrain from talking publicly about the particular issues they discussed, but Waxman said, “We are discussing fundamental issues and we are coming, it seems to me, to very positive conclusions.”

The Jewish group, including seven Americans, a Swiss and an Israeli, had earlier described a four-point agenda that had been sent to the Vatican. Among the issues to be raised with the Pope, and presumably discussed with the Willebrands delegation, are church attitudes and teachings on Jews, Judaism and the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the Vatican’s reasons for not extending diplomatic recognition to Israel. The Waldheim affair would be included in discussions of the Holocaust, they said.

Explaining his optimism concerning the outcome of today’s talk with the Pope, Waxman said, “The meetings in themselves represent a statement, a statement of concern and attention.”

Optimism Expressed

He said that “they are sensitive to the fact that Jewish people throughout the world were very shocked” by the Waldheim audience and that in the Vatican meetings so far, “the level of understanding (by church officials) is very high.”

“We think it will be a very good meeting (with the Pope),” Waxman said. “We are going in with a very good attitude . . . . The Pope is a great moral figure, a great religious figure and a great gentleman.”

With Waxman, who is chairman of the International Committee on Interreligious Consultations, and Tanenbaum at the papal discussion today will be Gerhardt Riegner, former secretary general of the World Jewish Congress; Gilbert Klaperman, president of the Synagogue Council of America; Seymour D. Reich, president of B’nai B’rith International; Geoffrey Wigoder of the Israel Interfaith Committee; Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Organizations; Rabbi Leon Klenicki, director of interreligious cooperation of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League, and Rabbi Henry Siegman, vice president of the American Jewish Congress.