Pope Reaches Out to Non-Catholics, Meets With Leaders of Other Faiths : Religion: Cementing bonds of friendship, the pontiff grants private audiences to Jewish, Muslim and Protestant clergy after Mass.

Cementing bonds of friendship, Pope John Paul II met privately Saturday night with Jewish, Muslim and Protestant religious leaders as he capped a day of appeals to moral values shared by many faiths.

The pontiff greeted the clergy at the Madison Avenue residence of New York Cardinal John J. O’Connor during separate meetings intended to give members of each faith his undivided attention.

During his 17-year pontificate, John Paul has emphasized both ending divisions within Christianity and healing the nearly 2,000-year-old estrangement with Jews. He has also reached out to members of the Islamic faith, particularly during sensitive negotiations involving the Holy Land and Palestinians.

Emerging from his meeting with the Pope, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, a Southern Baptist who describes himself as an evangelical Christian, said he was moved by John Paul’s approach with the roughly 25 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox leaders.

“I came away with the sense that there is a new openness and harmony between the evangelical Christians and the Roman Catholic Church, not only in America but around the world,” Robertson told The Times.

Robertson, who plans to form a new “Catholic Alliance” as an adjunct to his grass-roots political action organization, the Christian Coalition, said family values and other social and political issues would continue to unite Catholics and evangelical Protestants.

Senior Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, called the audience with the Pope “a nod in the continuing dialogue we’ve enjoyed for the last 30 years.”

He said the Pope looked “dog tired” during the meeting in the first-floor living room of O’Connor’s residence, John Paul’s final public appearance in a day that began with a spectacular Mass in Central Park.

“I hope in my lifetime I see Jerusalem again,” Bretton-Granatoor quoted the Pope as saying. “We replied in Hebrew, ‘Im yirtzah ha Shem [with the will of God].’ ”

Bretton-Granatoor, who met with the Pope at the Vatican in 1990, said in an interview that great progress had been made between the two faiths. But the Jewish community worldwide, he said, still hopes for a papal encyclical--among the church’s most authoritative teachings--against anti-Semitism.

Bretton-Granatoor and Robertson said they shared the Pope’s concern about what Robertson called “family values,” including the nation’s high divorce rate and the plight of some children.

Perhaps no Pope more than John Paul II has reached out so consistently to other faiths. In the case of Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians, the pontiff has made extraordinary efforts to bring about reconciliation.

In 1965, the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council issued a historic statement, Nostra Aetate, which declared that Jews as a people were not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus, and they should not be seen as accursed or rejected by God.

In one of the most significant symbols of change, John Paul established diplomatic relations with the state of Israel in late 1993--a final sign that the Catholic Church had forever rejected the theology of “perpetual wandering,” which held that Jews were condemned to be without a homeland because of their role in the death of Jesus.

John Paul was also the first Pope to visit the Jewish synagogue in Rome. Under his leadership the church has issued statements of repentance for anti-Semitism and issued a declaration that Jews “still remain most dear to God.”

In April, 1994, he received a delegation of about 100 Jewish Holocaust survivors at the Vatican on the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Despite Jewish anger over John Paul’s meetings with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat in 1981 and then-Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who was accused of involvement in Nazi war crimes, in 1987 and 1988, the Pope has transformed the church’s views of Jews and Israel.

The Pope has also reached out to non-Catholic Christians. Last June, he issued a pronouncement on Christian unity that kindled new hopes that the historic divisions among Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians may one day be healed.