Jews Pleased as Pope Clarifies Covenant Stance

Jewish religious leaders expressed relief Thursday at the apparent pullback by Pope John Paul II from doctrinal statements about Jews that had created concern about a growing rift in relations between the Roman Catholic Church and Judaism.

In a carefully worded explanation Wednesday of the meaning of the traditional Christian and Jewish covenants with God, the Pope dropped references to Jewish infidelity to God, with its implication that the Jews’ status as a chosen people had been abrogated and that they were damned.

“I am very happy,” said Rabbi David Rosen, an official of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. “We are grateful for the clarification.”

The Anti-Defamation League had lodged a complaint about previous papal messages suggesting that the Jewish covenant with God had been superseded by the Christian covenant. In comments made in early August, the Pope proclaimed that the Jews had shown “infidelity to God” in several cases illustrated in the Old Testament and that the prophets had come “to warn them of their hardness and foretell a new covenant yet to come.”

The words seemed to fly in the face of theological efforts by liberal Jewish and Catholic leaders to wrestle with the concept that the Jewish covenant lives on as the root of Christianity.

“There is a possible conclusion that the two can grow together in parallel,” Rosen said.

In the past few weeks, Catholic-Jewish relations have been buffeted by the coincidence of the Pope’s doctrinal views with a controversy over the presence of a Catholic convent on the grounds of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland.

The conflict over the convent created a special stir in Israel, which sees the presence of Carmelite nuns and of a large cross within view of the camp as a desecration.

Polish church leaders had said they would vacate the building in favor of an ecumenical prayer center to be constructed nearby. But the deadline for closing the convent passed in February without action.

A Jewish protest group demonstrated at the convent in July and was forcibly evicted by construction workers.

In early August, Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, the archbishop of Krakow, announced that the church had dropped plans for the ecumenical prayer center. The cardinal accused the Jewish protesters of intruding on the convent and attempting a takeover.

In response, the demonstrators, from the New York-based Coalition of Concern, called on the Israeli government and world Jewry to press for a travel boycott of Poland.

Pope John Paul II, who is Polish, declined to intervene. He has refused to discuss the convent with visiting Jewish representatives.