Vatican

Pontiff had significant impact on Catholic-Jewish relations

By Michelle Martin | Staff writer
Sunday, March 25, 2012

To do justice to the contributions Pope John Paul II made to Jewish Catholic relations would take reams of pages and many, many hours, according to both Jewish and Catholic scholars.

But John Paul II’s role in the relationship between the two faiths can be crystallized in one moment: when the aging pontiff prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land on March 26, 2000, said Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, Judaic Scholar, Jewish United Fund of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.

“Pope John Paul II’s prayer at the Western Wall was remarkable, for it proclaims to Christendom that the children of Abraham and his descendants, the Jewish people, continue to have a sacred religious purpose to bring the name of the One God to the nations,” Poupko wrote in an article before Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

In the same prayer tucked between the stones of the wall, Pope John Paul II also said anti-Semitism was an offense against God, because it has caused “these children of Yours to suffer”; Christians need forgiveness for the suffering that has been brought to the Jewish people; and that Catholics “wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant,” acknowledging a special relationship between Christianity and Judaism.

That moment, however, grew out of John Paul II’s lifelong personal relationships with Jewish people and a long-developed theological understanding of the relationship between the two faiths that grew out of Nostra Aetate, the document from the Second Vatican Council on the relation of the church to non-Christian religions.

“He had been moving on that path for a long time, since World War II, since he was a kid in Wadowice,” Poland, where he grew up, Poupko said.

Indeed, growing up in pre- World War II Poland gave Karol Wojtyla a view of Jewish life and culture that was not available anywhere else, said Father Thomas Baima, vice rector for academic affairs and dean of the graduate school and professor of systematic theology at University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary. In Poland, Jews found a homeland where they had the space to develop their own culture.

“Because he was Polish, he has an experience of Jewish culture that wasn’t available in many other places in the world,” said Baima. And because he lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, he had first-hand knowledge of the horror of the Holocaust.

Added to his personal background was the legacy of the Second Vatican Council, Baima said, and his emphasis on preparing the church to enter the third Christian millennium, in part by showing repentance for the sins committed by Christians in the past — especially sins against the Jewish people, whom he referred to as “our elder brothers in faith.”

All of that played out against a local background of interfaith cooperation in Chicago that started during the civil rights movement, said Baima, who is also former director of the archdiocese’s Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. Catholic and Jewish clergy members forged professional relationships in the 1950s and 1960s, and they, along with clergy from other denominations, formed the group that in 1983 would become the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin served as the council’s first president.

Over the years, parish-based Catholic-Jewish dialogue groups began, Baima said, and in 1987 the Spertus Institute of Jewish Study established the Cardinal Bernardin Center for the Study of Eastern European Jewry. Spertus joined with the Chicago Board of Rabbis, the Jewish Federation and the American Jewish Congress to sponsor Cardinal Bernardin’s 1995 visit to Israel, which started the ongoing annual Jerusalem lecture (see related story, Page 20).

All of that was only possible because of the personal relationships that were developed, Baima said, much as Pope John Paul II’s work on Catholic-Jewish relationships grew from his personal relationship with Jewish people.

What’s more, the interfaith relationship and dialogue have continued to flourish because of the energy that Cardinal George, as well members of the Jewish community, continue to put into it, Baima said. “It’s like the cardinal says. It all comes down to relationships.”

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