From Painful Past Toward a Future of Harmony

As Christianity hurtles toward its third millennium, hopes and expectations are building that the last vestiges of enmity that have poisoned Catholic-Jewish relations for nearly 2,000 years will die with the 20th century.

For decades, Christians in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular have engaged in wrenching and painful soul-searching about the role of their religion in the inhumanity and unspeakable crimes that have befallen Jews.

From Pope John XXIII, who in the early 1960s interrupted a Good Friday service to forbid the choir from ever again singing about “perfidious” Jews, to Pope John Paul II, who opened diplomatic relations with Israel and issued a statement on the church’s role in the Holocaust, progress in furthering Jewish-Catholic relations has been growing.

But as a dramatic meeting at an Encino synagogue Wednesday night proved, outstanding issues remain--and interest in Catholic-Jewish relations is far from limited to clergy and scholars.

More than 1,600 people turned out at Valley Beth Shalom for the event organized by the American Jewish Committee and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to listen to scholars and clergy of both faiths confront “a troubled past” and discuss what can be done to build a better relationship.

Organizers of Wednesday’s gathering sought to symbolize the progress in relations by having a choir of Catholic students sing Psalm 133 in Hebrew and the synagogue choir present Psalm 114 in both a Sephardic cantillation and Gregorian chant. Later, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, and Rabbi Harold Schulweis, senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom, together lighted six candles of remembrance for those who died in the Holocaust.

“We are here,” Schulweis said, “because the God we worship will not be segregated. The God we pray to will not be isolated in heaven. The God we revere is on Earth as in heaven. God calls upon us to join hearts, hands and minds to protect our loved ones from the threat of the haters whose venom poisons the air we breathe and who seek only to divide, to spoil, to set us apart.”

Mahony told the audience, “We share the common hope that we will continue to grow in mutual understanding and respect through the kind of dialogue we participate in this evening. . . . Even the candor with which we express our disagreements is indicative of this progress.”

Problem Areas Remain

Not all Jewish-Christian relations are so smooth.

Earlier this week, for example, Rabbi A. James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee said official relations between Judaism and Southern Baptists are the worst they have been in decades.

Jewish leaders were angered last month when the Southern Baptist foreign mission board issued a guide asking church members to pray for the conversion of Jews to Christianity during the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

In contrast to Catholic-Jewish relations, Rudin said, there is virtually no official dialogue with the 15.9-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

With Catholics, however, interfaith cooperation at the grass-roots level appears to be growing. A Catholic-Jewish women’s conference has been established. At the Wednesday meeting, there was a suggestion that priests in training and rabbinical students meet to exchange views and study Hebrew Scriptures together.

Speakers on Wednesday evening said they looked forward to more such interaction.

“Peace and tolerance--dare we even hope genuine joy at each other’s company--will come when the hope for peace and tolerance we speak of at official gatherings will become the realities of our day-to-day lives,” said Daniel Smith-Christopher, professor of Hebrew Scriptures at Loyola-Marymount University.

“Peace and justice will come when speaking of tolerance and peace becomes as familiar and as easy and as ubiquitous as ancient prejudices seem to be even now.”

Despite the good feelings, both sides acknowledged that more needs to be done.

The church’s new openness in addressing its role during the Holocaust is to be commended, Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of B’nai David-Judea, an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles, told the audience.

But he repeated concerns about the pope’s 1998 statement of repentance for the “errors” of Roman Catholics in failing to help Jews during the Holocaust. The statement, for all its courage, still fell short of the mark, he said.

Titled, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, the statement unequivocally condemned anti-Semitism and past Christian persecution and violence against Jews. But it also defended Pius XII, the pope during the war years, who has been faulted by many for his public silence during the Holocaust.

“Yes, in the document there is recognition of wrong actions,” Kanefsky said. “There is a very strong suggestion that Christian teachings were misunderstood so that they generated indifference to the suffering of Jews. And, yes, there is an acceptance that this must not happen again.” But he said the critical element of an explicit confession was absent.

Confession requires “an absolutely unequivocal” recounting of the specific wrong, he said.

Mahony said later, in an interview, that the Vatican statement could have done without “all those subjunctive tenses.”

“I think it [needs] to be just a little bit more clear and right to the point,” he said.

It is known that the pope has asked the Vatican to prepare additional statements that may be unveiled as the church begins its Jubilee Celebration of the new millennium.

Speaking generally about the Catholic-Jewish dialogue, Mahony told the audience: “My own personal hope is that such candor will be expressed in ever greater tones of mutual care and compassion as we move into the next century.”

Members of the audience said they were hopeful that relations will continue to improve between Jews and Catholics.

One woman, Chaya Charlup, who recalled being taunted as a child in the Bronx by Christians, said she took three buses to get to Wednesday’s meeting.

“Catholic-Jewish relations have to be very strong, very tight,” she said. “We have to be kind to each other.”

Burton Sokoloff of Tarzana said he “sort of knew what to expect.” But “I was still overcome, at times to the point of tears,” he said.