Pope sends pre-visit message
to the Chief Rabbi of Rome
Translated from
the Italian service of
In a telegram sent to the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, signed by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, Benedict XVI expressed the wish that his visit to the Rome Synagogue on Sunday will constitute "a further step in the irrevocable journey of concord and friendship" between Jews and Catholics.
The telegram, in response to Di Segni's Christmas greetings, also expressed the Pope's 'sincere gratitude' to the Rabbi and reciprocated his 'fervent wishes' for the new year.
The Pope will visit the Synagogue on Sunday afternoon, January 17, on the occasion of the Day for Jewish-Catholic Dialog observed by the Church of Italy and the Jewish community for the past two decades.
The Pope concluded his message by expressing the hope that the visit "would manifest and increase the fraternity between Jews and Catholics".
The Pope's visit will begin with
a tribute to Holocaust victims
by Salvatore Izzo
VATICAN CITY, Jan. 12 (Translated from AGI) - The Pope's visit to the Rome Synagogue on Sunday will last at least two hours.
Benedict XVI is expected to arrive in the Jewich quarter [still called the Ghetto] at 4:25 p.m. at the Portico Ottavia on Largo XXVI Ottobre, where he will be welcomed by Riccardo Pacifici, president of the Jewish Community of Rome, and by Renzo Gattegna, president of the Italian Jewish Communities.
And the first gesture will be to offer flowers at a marker commemorating the deportation of Roman Jews to Nazi Germany on October 16, 1943.
The Pope and his entourage will then walk down Via Catalana towards the Synagogue. He is expected to stop briefly at another marker honoring 37 Jews who were injured and a two-year-old boy who died as a result of an attack as they were leaving the Synagogue.
At the entrance to the Synagogue, the Pope will be welcomed by the Chief Rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, while a choir will chant Psalm 126.
In the prayer hall itself, The Pope will walk through the central aisle towards the front dais, and along the way, will greet other personages present including the Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno.
The Pope and the Rabbi will take their seats in the center of the dais. On their left will be the Catholic and Jewish members of the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism, and on the right, the members of the Pope's entourage.
Speaking first for the hosts will be Pacifici, Gattegna and Di Segni.
The Pope's address will be followed by an exchange of gifts, as the choir sings the hymn 'Ani' Maamin'.
The official encounter in the Synagogue ends at 5:35, after which the Pope and the Chief Rabbi will proceed to the Synagogue garden, where an olive tree has been planted to commemorate the visit, then to the nearby Jewish Museum of Rome to inaugurate an exhibit "Et ecce gaudium" of 14 designs prepared in the 18th century by the Jewish community of Rome to mark the coronation of the Popes.
At 6 p.m., the Pope will meet other representatives of the Jewish community in the Spanish Synaogogue, returning to the Vatican at 6:15.
The Vatican Press Office has listed the members of both 'official delegations' on Sunday:
For the Jews - Shear Yashuv Cohen, Chief Rabbi of Haifa; Ratson Arussi, Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Ono; David Brodman, Chief Rabbi of Savyon; David Rosen, director of the American Jewish Commitee; David Sperber, president of the Institute of Advanced Torah Studies at the University of Bar-Ilan (Israel); Oded Wiener, secretary-general of the Grand Rabbinate of Israel; and Josef Levi, Chief Rabbi of Florence.
The Vatican delegation includes Cardinal Jorge Mejia, who organized the visit of John Paul II in 1986; Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Vaticna Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism, along with the Commission Secretary, Fr. Norbert Hoffman; Mons. Fouad Twal, Patriarch of Jerusalem; Mons. Antonio Franco, Apostolic Nuncio in Israel; Mons. Elias Chacour, Bishop of Akka (historic Acre in north Israel); Mon, Bruno Forte, Bishop of Chieti (a noted Biblicist and theologian); the Auxiliary Bishop of Galilee, Mons. Giacinto Boulos Marcuzzo; the Custodian of the Holy Lnad, Franciscan Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa; and the Prefect of the Ambrosian Library, Mons. Pierfrancesco Fumagalli.
The Pope will be accompanied, as usual, by the Prefect of the Pontifical Household, Archbishop James Harvey, and his deputies, Mons. Paolo De Nicolo and Fr. Leonardo Sapienza, and the Pope's private secretary, Mons. Georg Gaenswein.
Posted today by Benetus on
some background on the feast observed by the Roamn Jews on January 17, which falls this year on the date of the Pope;s visit to the Rome Synagogue:
The Jewish writer Sam Waagenaar in The Pope’s Jews, anti-papal with a light-hearted cynicism, points out some needed context, which is further filled in by histories of the Eternal City.
...By January 17, 1793, the French Revolution was in full swing, with martyrs already executed and many exiled French clerics living in Rome and recounting what they knew of the situation.
Revolutionary propaganda was passing the frontier into Italy, and the local colony of Frenchmen attached to their government’s embassy in Rome was noteworthy for its public support of the anti-Catholic revolution.
Many of these French took great pleasure in riding around the city of the Popes sporting tricolor emblems of the regime that was opposed to all traditional authority both civil and ecclesiastical. Many Romans were fed up with the arrogant provocations of the French, and on January 13 they decided they would not put up with it any longer.
Some Frenchmen doing their usual thing in a Roman thoroughfare were set upon by a mob and one was killed. (A priest arrived in time for him to repent and confess before expiring.) There is no doubt that much of the Roman populace, if not the great majority of it, was at that time thoroughly loyal to the Pope as their prince.
And due to the centuries-old vicious circle of provocations, economic struggle and governmental restrictions on the Jews, the populace naturally suspected the Roman Jews of being a fifth column in league with revolutionary France.
The papal police forces surrounded the ghetto and began conducting searches for evidence of such collaboration. It was providential for the Jews that they were there, because when a crowd began to light and feed a fire at one of the ghetto’s two gates, it was a papal officer who stopped them with something like the following appeal to their better side: “My children, my dear children, the Pope is sure to be highly pleased by your attachment to his dignity, but he does not want the oppression of these poor people, because they are innocent. If you love the Pope, then let us together burn this wood in his honor, and this will be the sign and expression of your love for him.” (The Pope’s Jews, p. 240.)
With that, the accumulating wood for the fire was transferred to the square in front of the Church of San Gregorio della Divina Pietà, as a bonfire in the Pope’s honor.
A Roman aristocrat shouted into the still endangered ghetto, “Don’t be afraid! Trust in God and in your Holy Prince who only wants to protect you!” And with that, a rainstorm suddenly broke out and the Jews’ miserable wooden apartments were saved.
The Church of San Gregorio della Divina Pietà, where a papal officer persuaded an angry crowd to honor their papal sovereign rather than burn out the nearby Jews, still stands, but now dwarfed by the imposing synagogue across the street, constructed under the liberal and Masonic-influenced regime that seized Rome some decades after Pius IX freed the Jews from his predecessors’ legal restriction of their residence to the walled ghetto.
On the façade of San Gregorio della Divina Pietà, a lovely painting of the Crucifixion over an inscription in Hebrew and Latin, drawn from the passage of Isaiah (65:2) which inspired St. Paul’s reproach about the unbelieving Jews in his epistle to the Romans: “I have spread out my hands all day to a rebellious people, which walketh in the way that was not good, after their own thoughts.”
This blogger is overjoyed that the inscription still survives in today's climate of politicamente e religiosamente corretto. On the other hand, a Catholic’s exultant feelings should turn bittersweet with a little knowledge of what life was like for the mainly poor Jews whom three centuries of Popes did not allow to reside outside the now vanished walls of the ghetto....
This is one of those items I am obliged to post no matter how outrageous and - in some ways, wilfully ignorant - it is, because it demonstrates a most lamentable drift by militant Jews not just to perpetrate their mortal hostility to Pius XII but, in the process, to make Benedict XVI just as much an object of their hostility because he is German and because he is an advocate of Pius XII.
Israel rabbi asks Pope
to halt Pius's beatification
ROME, Jan. 13 (AP) – Pope Benedict XVI should be welcomed when he visits Rome's main synagogue, but he should halt moves to beatify wartime pontiff Pius XII, criticized for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust, a former chief rabbi of Israel said Tuesday.
Israel Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor and now chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, said Benedict's synagogue visit Sunday would be "appreciated and blessed." But in an interview with Italy's Sky TG24 television, he said he was "surprised" by Benedict's decision last month to move the controversial World War II-era pope closer to sainthood.
Benedict sparked outrage among some Jewish groups by signing a decree on Pius' heroic virtues, paving the way for him to be beatified once a miracle attributed to his intercession is confirmed.
Some Jews and historians have argued that Pius, pope from 1939-1958, was largely silent on the Holocaust and should have done more to prevent the deaths of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.
The Vatican insists Pius used quiet diplomacy to try to save Jews and that speaking out more forcefully would have resulted in more deaths.
It said last month the decree on his heroic virtues wasn't so much a historical assessment of his pontificate as a confirmation that he had led a deeply Christian life.
In the past, Jewish leaders had asked the Pope to put the beatification on hold until archives on Pius's pontificate are opened to outside scholars. The Vatican has said those archives won't be catalogued and ready until 2014 at the earliest.
In the interview broadcast Tuesday, Lau said Benedict should halt the process for this generation, saying that beatifying Pius would offend Holocaust survivors.
Lau urged the Pope "not to take the next step for the beatification of Pius XII, not in this generation," adding this would "hurt the feelings of those Holocaust survivors who are still alive."
Lau spoke in Hebrew and his words were mostly covered by an Italian translation. Calls to the rabbinate to confirm his comments were not answered Tuesday evening.
Asked by Sky's reporter how Jews compared Benedict to his predecessor, the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, Lau said
the biggest contrast was in their wartime record.
[This is outrageous - the difference he cites is not out of something either man chose, but entirely as a consequence of what country they belonged to. It is an obvious and shameless ploy to link Benedict XVI to the Nazis, thus implying his complicity in the Holocaust because of his nationality.]
"John Paul II spent the Holocaust on the side of the victims, while Benedict XVI spent World War II on the other side of the barricade, and this can be a big difference," he said according to the translation.
John Paul suffered through the Nazi occupation of his country. The German-born Benedict was forced to join the Hitler Youth and then served in the army before deserting near the end of the war.
I have to wonder: If, for some reason, it had been possible for the Congregation on the Causes of Sainthood to approve a decree on Pius XII's heroic virtues during John Paul II's Pontificate, and John Paul II had promulgated it - there would have been no reason, according to all the rules of canonization in the Church, for him not to do so - what would the reaction of the Jews have been?
And my second question: Was there a specific reason why the decree on heroic virtues was not acted on during the 27 years of John Paul II's Pontificate, seeing as Paul VI had introduced the cause in 1965? Or was there some behind-the-scenes guru of political correctness in the Roman Curia who decided it would be very impolitic to even consider the issue- after all the Jewish goodwill following the Pope's apologies for Christian anti-Jewish actions in the past?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/01/2010 23:37]