Mahony Fights Bitterness Between Catholics, Jews

In an address that frankly acknowledged a long history of anti-Semitism in the Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony told the Board of Rabbis of Southern California on Tuesday that Jews and Catholics should use three decades of interfaith understanding to build toward “deeper reconciliation” in the new millennium.

Mahony’s speech marked the first time in the region’s history that a Catholic archbishop had spoken to rabbinical leadership, and he used the occasion to directly tackle the centuries-old legacy of bitterness and hate between the church and Jews.

Pope John Paul II is expected to use next spring’s Lenten season to lead the church in new acts of public repentance for Catholic failings during the Holocaust, Mahony said. And he outlined several goals of his own that he called on both faiths to pursue.

On the Catholic side, he said, the church must continue to work toward eliminating all vestiges of “anti-Judaism” and “anti-Jew” thinking from Catholic teaching and preaching, he said. At the same time, he suggested, Jews could gain a deeper appreciation of how much the church’s teachings and practices have changed in the three decades since the historic Second Vatican Council.

Both sides, he said, should move from either indifference or “mere toleration” of each other’s faiths to “mutual respect and sheer delight in the diversity of God’s good creation.”

He also called on both faiths to build on their shared experience of reaching out to immigrants.

“Our common work is to protect and defend the marginalized, the ghettoized, the weak, the vulnerable, the voiceless, the nameless and the forgotten,” he added.

He then responded to direct questions from Jewish leaders, among them a Holocaust survivor who said he could not understand the church’s failure to fully repent for the moral failings of some church leaders and Catholic laity during World War II.

The polite but frank exchange at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ offices in the Mid-Wilshire district was seen by both sides as another milestone in efforts in Los Angeles and worldwide to bring about a reconciliation between two major faiths.

Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark of Temple Beth Ohr in La Mirada, the president of the Board of Rabbis, said Mahony’s appearance was the fulfillment of a dream of his. “How glorious is this day,” Goldmark said in Hebrew.

Mahony’s address, for which he said he has been preparing for months, came just eight months after the Vatican issued a controversial document, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” that disappointed many Jewish leaders as well as some leading Catholic thinkers.

Although it unequivocally condemned anti-Semitism and past Christian persecution and violence against Jews, the Vatican statement also appeared to defend Pope Pius XII, who is widely thought to have failed to condemn Nazi atrocities in explicit terms.

But, Mahony said, John Paul can be expected at the end of the millennium to speak further on the subject and express the church’s “deep sorrow.”

“We can anticipate that this public act of repentance will focus in particular on the Shoah,” he said, using the Hebrew term that refers to the Nazi genocide.

In Washington, a leading official with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ secretariat for ecumenical and inter-religous affairs, said the pope has asked two colloquia to prepare background papers on anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, as well as a paper on the Inquisition. Another biblical commission is examining anti-Jewish statements in the New Testament.