BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Pope Benedict XVI
and 'our older brothers'
by Luigi Accattoli
Translated from

Sept. 18, 2009


Once again, a Pope in Rome's Great Synagogue. The event could have been accelerated by the polemics last winter followed by the Holocaust-negationist statements of the Lefebvrian bishop Richard Williamson, or the earlier dispute over the Good Friday prayer in the Catholic liturgy.

Regardless, the visit is of primary importance and must be judged as an event by itself, before linking it to contingent circumstances.

The great Synagogue of Rome is the nearest synagogue geographically to the Vatican. It is the spiritual seat of the oldest Jewish community in Europe, which also keeps tragic memories of centuries of persecution by the temporal power of the Popes.

These reasons alone give unusual weight to a papal visit, even if this is the second, after John Paul II's historic visit 23 years ago. We are about to witness a new gesture that is laden with significance and hope.

Looking back at the last half century, which has seen an unexpected and fairly rapid rapprochement between Christians and Jews, there are about a dozen events that have seen the Church of Rome and Judaism converging towards mutual encounter.

First of all was the correction of the Good Friday prayer by John XXIII at Easter 1959. [If the revision, which consisted only in taking out references to the 'blindness' of the Jews, was welcomed by the Jews at the time, why did they raise hell 48 years later when Benedict XVI improved on it further by making it clear that the prayer referred to the eschatological future, not to missionary intentions in earthly time?]

It is the starting point for the road to rapprochement that the former Chief Rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff would sum up in a book entitled Da perfidi giudei a fratelli maggiori (From faithless Jews to older brothers)(Mondadori 1987), which was published shortly after the visit of John Paul II to his synagogue.

The second event - which is the major step in this story - was the conciliar declaration on relations with non-Christian religions, Nostra aetate(In our time), which was approved by the Second Vatican Council, with a vote of 2,221 for and 88 against, on October 28, 1965.

With regard to the Jews, Nostra aetate affirms that "the death of Christ cannot be attributed indiscriminately to all Jews who lived in his time, nor to the Jews who live today".

John Paul II subsequently carried out four creative gestures to recapitulate Vatican II's message of brotherhood: his visit to Auschwitz in 1979, when he stopped in front of the memorial stone "with an inscription in Jewish"; his visit to the Rome Synagogue in 1986, when he addressed the Jews as 'older brothers'; the Day of Forgiveness on March 12, 2000, when he recognized the historical responsibility of Christians for, among other things, persecution of the Jews; his visit to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem on the 26th of the same month, during which, like a Jew among Jews, he left in a fissure of the wall a written version of the 'request for forgiveness' that he had pronounced in St. Peter's Basilica earlier.

For his part, Benedict XVI has done at least two analogous gestures: In August 2005, he visited the Synagogue in Cologne - which had been destroyed in the Nazis' Kristallnacht of 1938; and last May 12, he prayed at the Wailing Wall. [And also left a prayer. Strangely, Accattoli omits Benedict's own visit to Auschwitz in May 2006; and the visit of both Popes to Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.]

Before his visit to the Holy Land, Benedict XVI addressed the confederation of presidents of the major American Jewish organizations in February, echoing his predecessor's 'mea culpa' on anti-Semitism, adding:

"The hatred and contempt for men, women and children shown during the Shoah were a crime against God and against humanity. It is obvious that any negation or attempt to minimize this terrible crime is intolerable and completely unacceptable".

In 'returning' to the Synagogue of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI will be making a very important act that confirms and reinforces what has predecessor has done.

TWo years ago, he personally revised the Good Friday prayer used in the traditional liturgy to refer to an eschatological convergence - that is, beyond history - between Christians and Jews in the single Church of Christ, which indicated his concern to keep the faith in an invocation that has a Biblical matrix without contradicting the Conciliar declaration of renewed brotherhood. His visit to the Synagogue of Rome is yet another proof of this Conciliar brotherhood.

Like his predecessor, he too will pray together with 'our older brothers', and that prayer together will sound an invitation to the entire Catholic community to follow the example of the Bishop of Rome.