If we cited all the times Pope Benedict XVI has been described as walking some tightrope or other, one might say the media see him as a highwire circus performer perpetually trying to juggle balls while trying to stay on the tightrope.
After all the metaphors for tightropes, land mines, arctic ice gaps, etc. preceding his pilgrimage to the Holy Land last May, the tightrope has been strung out for him once again, this time with regard to his visit to the Rome Synagogue next Sunday. CNS joins the circus watchers.
A tightrope act? Pope prepares
to visit Rome synagogue
By Cindy Wooden
Some of the signs read: 'Stop the negationists', 'Enough with the Good Friday prayer!', 'Remember the Shoah!, and 'Respect diversity'.
VATICAN CITY, Jan. 8 (CNS) -- A cartoon in the January edition of an Italian Jewish newspaper showed Pope Benedict XVI crossing the Tiber River on a tightrope, trying to balance himself using a pole labeled "dialogue" on one end and "conversion" on the other.
As he prepared to cross the river and travel from the Vatican to Rome's main synagogue Jan. 17 no one pretended the journey was going to be easy.
There is continuing unease in the global Jewish community over Pope Benedict's decisions to advance the possible beatification of Pope Pius XII, to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust-minimizing traditionalist bishop and to issue a revised prayer for the Jews in the Tridentine-rite Good Friday liturgy. The sensitivity to these actions is heightened in Rome.
Jews lived in Rome before Christ was born, and centuries of interaction between the city's Jewish community and the popes means Jewish-Vatican relations in the city have a unique history, much of it sad.
The staff of the Jewish Museum of Rome, located in the synagogue complex, is planning a special exhibit that will illustrate part of that history for Pope Benedict and for other visitors in the coming months.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is comprised of 14 decorative panels made by Jewish artists to mark the inauguration of the pontificates of Popes Clement XII, Clement XIII, Clement XIV and Pius VI in the 1700s.
For hundreds of years, the Jewish community was obliged to participate in the ceremonies surrounding the enthronement of new popes -- often in a humiliating manner.
Various groups in the city were assigned to decorate different sections of the Pope's route between the Vatican and the Basilica of St. John Lateran. The Jewish community was responsible for the stretch of road between the Colosseum and the Arch of Titus, which celebrates the Roman Empire's victory over the Jews of Jerusalem in the first century.
The Roman victory included the destruction of the Temple, Judaism's holiest site, and the triumphal arch depicts Roman soldiers carrying off the menorah and other Jewish liturgical items.
Rome's main synagogue is located less than two miles from the Vatican in the neighborhood that was once the city's Jewish "ghetto," a word originally coined by the Italians and used to describe a section of a city where Jews were forced to live.
In 1555 -- when Jews already had been expelled from Spain and Portugal, England and France -- Pope Paul IV issued a formal edict ordering that Jews in Rome and throughout the Papal States "should reside entirely side by side in designated streets and be thoroughly separate from the residences of Christians."
He said that it was "completely absurd and improper" that the Jews should prosper in a Christian land when they were "condemned by God to eternal servitude" because of their lack of belief in Jesus.
Rome's Jews were forced to live in the ghetto until the fall of the Papal States in 1870. The population inside the four square blocks of the ghetto fluctuated between 1,750 and 5,000 people.
The Pope's visit to the synagogue was scheduled to coincide with the Italian Catholic Church's celebration each Jan. 17 of a day for Catholic-Jewish dialogue. This year, the date also coincides with Shevat 2 on the Jewish calendar, which is the day Rome's Jewish community commemorates a miracle in the old ghetto.
Convinced that members of the Jewish community were working to import the ideals and freedoms espoused by the French Revolution -- including separation of church and state -- a mob set fire in 1793 to one of the gates of the ghetto, apparently planning to burn all the houses down as well. But the skies suddenly grew dark and a heavy downpour put out the flames and sent the mob home.
Most of the buildings were torn down after the ghetto gates were opened in 1870; a new major synagogue -- the one the Pope will visit -- was constructed in the area between 1901 and 1904.
Just a few yards away from the synagogue stands a church whose history is closely tied with that of the ghetto. A plaque above the entrance bears a quote -- in Latin and in Hebrew -- from Isaiah: "I have stretched out my hands all the day to a rebellious people, who walk in evil paths and follow their own thoughts."
The Church of St. Gregory faced the entrance to the ghetto and the plaque reflected an attitude held by Catholics for centuries that despite all that God had done for them, the Jews rejected the savior.
Between 1572 and 1848, churches next to the ghetto also were used for the "forced sermons" aimed at convincing the Jews to convert to Christianity.
Each Saturday evening, a specified portion of the Jewish community was obliged by papal edict to listen to a priest preach about Christ using the same Scripture readings the congregation had heard that morning in the synagogue.
Legend has it that many of the Jews plugged their ears with wax during the sermons.
While Catholic-Jewish relations have improved enormously over the past century -- especially because of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and the outreach of Pope John Paul II -- the cartoon of the tightrope-walking pope in the
Pagine Ebraiche newspaper made it clear the unique history of Rome's Jewish community and the popes has not been forgotten.
While there is a long history of Christian and specifically Catholic maltreatment of the Jews, there is also a history of Jewish persecution of Christians (especially with the early Church).
Perhaps, the only reason that this anti-Christian history is not as long and as event-filled as Christian anti-Jewish practices, the difference is a function of the fact that Christianity went on to expand and become the world's leading religion, whereas the exclusiveness inherent in the Jewish religion (and in some way, killings during periods of persecution) kept their numbers low - culminating in the Nazi genocide last century that killed 6 million of them. For a comparison scale, consider that the total Jewish population in the world today is about 13.5 million.
The whole point of Nostra aetate - and John Paul II's specific and much-publicized apologies to the Jews - was that this historical enmity between the two religions was a catastrophic and collective human error that should never occur again, and that people of both religions should start anew with mutual forgiving and what the Church calls 'purification of memory'.
Obviously, it has been far easier for contemporary Catholics to discard prejudices in this regard than it has been for the Jews. Perhaps what saddens me most about the apparently prevailing anti-Christian resentment, if not hostility, among militant Jews, is that it makes them dwell needlessly and uselessly in the past rather than look ahead - worse, it makes them mean and nasty to the Pope and the Church.
It is the same resentment pushed to the ultimate 'victim complex' that drives what has become for some of them a morbid cult of the Shoah. Yes, the Jews lost 6 million during the Holocaust - and the world must never be allowed to forget this - but they were not the only victims of Hitler.
Most recent estimates of World War II dead range from 62-78 million.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
If we subtract the estimated 20-25 million military dead, that still leaves, using the lower estimates, 42 million civilian dead, of which six million were Jews.
Hitler was just as intent on killing all those non-Jews to achieve his ends, even if he did not have a specific Final Solution for them. He perpetrated an even bigger Aryan Holocaust.
Germany itself lost 5.5 million in military deaths alone - almost as many as the Jews Hitler killed. The Soviet Union alone lost 24 million in the war.
I do not understand why most reporters and commentators - and of course, the Jews themselves - do not take a more objective look at the casualties of Hitler's war - not to diminish the Jewish loss in any way, but to emphasize that the Nazis unleashed their blood lust equally and far more on their fellow 'Aryans'.
P.S. I must add that I have no animus towards the Jews at all - except against the militants who irrationally attack Benedict XVI, Pius XII and the Church. I became a World War II/Holocaust buff after reading the Diary of Anne Frank at age 10, and in my late teens, during a year when I was assigned to Washington, D.C., I was accepted to join a kibbutz in the Negev at a time when I was not averse to the idea of conversion to Judaism. The only reason I did not go through with it was that Pope Paul VI was to visit Manila, and i chose to go home for that occasion - and that was the end of my 'Jewish' phase.
Here's a contribution by Austin Ivereigh, who takes it for granted that Jewish-Catholic relations are 'set to chill' - though I doubt they were ever genuinely warm ('The Deputy' came out two years before Nostra aetate, after all, so a toxin had been introduced into the Jewish bloodstream, so to speak).
Jewish-Catholic relations
set to chill in 2010
by Austen Ivereigh
January 9, 2010
An online petition has been launched to protest the beatification of Pope Pius XII,
expected next October together with that of Pope John Paul II.
[How can someone like Austin Ivereigh make that assumption???? And BTW, I read somewhere that the online petition was targeting 15,000 signatures, but after three days when they had only about 1% of that quota. they lowered it to 10,000. I don't know what they expect the petition to produce!]
The decision by Pope Benedict XVI to proceed with the beatification, made just before Christmas, has led to a spate of Jews spitting at Christians in Jerusalem.
[As I understand the news reports, the spitting has been chronic, not brouhgt on by Benedict's decision!]
The evidence is, in fact, considerable that Pius XII did an enormous amount to assist Jews facing Nazi persecution, both practically and prophetically -- but Jewish sceptics insist that only when the relevant Vatican archives are made available can that conclusion be reached.
Their case rests on the myth that Vatican archives are being kept "secret". The new petition for example calls on the Pope "to suspend the beatification process for Pope Pius XII until still-secret Vatican archives from World War II are declassified and made fully accessible".
But they are not secret, and they do not need to be declassified. The problem is that they have not yet been catalogued -- a massive exercise which has only recently been completed for the pontificate of Pius XI.
In spite of this, and in order to satisfy Jewish demands, the Vatican
[Pope Paul VI, in particular] fast-tracked the cataloguing of 12 volumes of Pius XII archives [in the 1960s] and made them available to a joint Catholic-Jewish panel of six historians to study. But the panel fell apart after its Jewish members complained that they weren't being given access to the "full" records.
(See the statement in Osservatore Romano, 8/1/2001, by the Pius XII relator, Fr Peter Gumpel SJ,
www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/P12HISTO.HTM
Pope Benedict has not been rushed into the decision to beatify Pius XII: he has studied the evidence and taken advice for two years. He knows that the archives, when they are finally catalogued and studied, will not contradict the evidence that Pius XII assisted the Jews.
But that won't stop Jewish-Catholic relations becoming more tense in 2010, with likely repercussions (because everything here is interrelated) on Vatican-Israeli relations. That may make it harder for Rome to speak out more forcefully against the Israeli strangulation of Bethlehem and the annexation of Palestinian Christian lands.
On the other hand, a little tough talking on both sides may make it easier to name a few uncomfortable truths.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/01/2010 00:36]