The Pope at the Rome Synagogue:
A turning-point in
the Jewish-Catholic dialog
by Massimo Introvigne
Translated from
January 18, 2010
Benedict XVI's visit to the Synagogue of Rome was covered by the media almost exclusively as an event that was preceded by controversy and should be accompanied by controversy.
They have minutely scrutinized every possible reference to disputes regarding the beatification of Pope Pius XII or lifting the excommunications of the Lefbevrian bishops, one of whom, Mons. Rcihard Williamson, had expressed negationist positions about the Holocaust.
In the past several months, Benedict XVI has intervened many times to reiterate that Pius XII - a holy man who is particularly dear to him - acted with discretion but also with wisdom and efficacy, to help, within the limits of what was humanly possible, Italian Jews whose lives were endangered by Nazi racial policy; and that his action towards the Lefebvrians was part of his effort to bring them back into full communion with the Church of Rome, a complicated issue that has nothing to do with negationism (which is an offense that the Pope has denounced in clear and strong words).
But I have to say that the insistence in Jewish circles - even after all the clarifications - on making a big deal of Pius XII and Bishop Williamson in the days leading to the January 17 visit is, frankly, interference in the internal affairs of the Church.
[I agree. For all that the Jewish opponents of Benedict XVI's actions now routinely say "We know it is not our business, but...", they go ahead and make it their business anyway by 1) asking that the Pope delay any further action on Pius XII's beatification; and b) saying that Pius XII as a saint would not be 'acceptable' to them! Not that the Church asks or expects people of other faiths to 'accept' its saints!]
An approach that one might say is
very likely solicited and/or instigated by Catholic elements hostile to Benedict XVI and determined to insist on their interpretation of Vatican-II which the Pope has called a hermeneutic of discontinuity or rupture.
From this point of view, the 'defense' of Vatican-II by Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni in his remarks to welcome the Pope yesterday sppears to be in questionable taste.
He said: "If what Vatican II produced [
Nostra aetate] comes to be minimized in any way, then there will no longer be an opportunity for dialog".
[Also rather insulting to Benedict XVI - as though he would ever think of 'minimizing' a Vatican-II document! Not having seen any full text of Di Segni's remarks, I was not aware of this line.]
But
the greatest objection to the media reporting of the event is that, as usual, it relegates the teaching of Benedict XVI to the background, a teaching which often has elements of novelty.
And at the synagogue, he spoke on two things of great importance. The first - which basically rebuts the polemics against the Church, but soars far above any contingent judgment - has to do with the tragedies of the 20th century and the responsibilty for those errors and horrors.
The Pope indicated clearly where the evil came from: "the terrible ideologies that had at their root idolatry of man, of race, and of the state, which had once more brought brother to slay his brother...
The unique and overwhelming tragedy of the Shoah represents, in some way, the culmination of a journey of hatred which begins when man forgets his Creator and places himself at the center of the universe".
Recalling his visit to Auschwitz on May 26, 2006, Benedict XVI reaffirmed that in killing so many men, the lords of the Nazi ideology ultimately 'intended to kill God".
Here is not just a response to the historically false conclusion that the Holocaust was a consequence of Catholic anti-Judaism, whereas from all accounts, it is the poisonous fruit of a radically anti-Catholic racist ideology.
But there is much more to his argument. The 20th-century ideologies - National Socialism which idolized race, but also Communism, which idolized the State, and secularist Illuminism, which prolaims the rights of man against the rights of God - these are segments in a pluri-century process of distancing from the Catholic truth, in which, to the contrary, it was sought to place man at that 'center of the universe' which is properly God's.
The results of this process, of which Nazism was a part without being its only manifestation, can only be odious and criminal.
The second subject - and here was the element of novelty - was the proposal to the Jews of a dialog that is not principally theological but which starts with reason and natural law.
The Ten Commandments that Jews and Christians have in common were revealed by God but they are also accessible even to the natural reasoning of any person in his right mind.
The decalogue "constitutes a beacon and a norm of life in justice and love, a 'great ethical code' for all of mankind. The Ten Commandments shed light on good and evil, on truth and falsehood, on justice and injustice, and they match the criteria of every human person’s right conscience".
Reason, in particular, is able to recognize the truth in the fundamental aspects of the Decalogue that are specially threatened today: "respect and protection of life" and "the sanctity of the family, in which the personal and reciprocal 'Yes', faithful and definitive, of man and woman, makes room for the future, for the authentic humanity of each, and makes them open, at the same time, to the gift of new life".
Even to "recognize the one Lord, against the temptation of constructing other idols, of making golden calves" - the first commandment - is really a goal which human reason is capable of reaching, since atheism and secularism, which are at the root of ideological horrors, are intrinsically irrational.
One cannot but notice the parallel between this proposal to the Jewish world of a dialog centered on natural law, which, God reminds us, in the Ten Commandments like a 'pro memoria' to mankind, which can understand it with reason - that these norms of nature impose themselves on everyone, believer and non-believer, who is gifted with reason - is the analogoous proposal that Benedict XVI has made so many times to the Muslim world.
The Pontiff does not deny interest in a theological dialog, which for the Muslims is focused on the reciprocal role of the Bible and the Koran, or how Islam views the figure of Jesus Christ, and for the Jews, on the significance of the role of the Ancient Covenant for the Jewish people after the coming of Jesus Christ and the New Covenant with the Church. Topics which are certainly interesting, and not only to specialists.
Nonetheless Benedict XVI has demonstrated several times the limits of a theoretical dialog that is good almost exclusively only for academics and congresses. In a world characterized by so many tragedies and violence, the most urgent and concrete dialog - that which goes beyond specialists and can engage even common people, that which can truly resolve problems and conflicts here and now - can only start from reason.
If every religion argues exclusively from its own faith, a confrontation is certainly possible, but to reach a consensus becomes entirely a matter of chance.
But if everyone argues from reason - which is neither Christian nor Jewish nor Muslim, and which believers and non-believers have in commmon - to find a consensus at least on some minimal principles of natural law is possible.
It is consensus on these principles that could avoid the tragedies and violence which marked the 20th century and continue to mark the 21st.
This is the true turning point in the inter-religious dialog proposed by Benedict XVI, the Pope of reason. Contingent controversies should not obfuscate this great teaching.
Andrea Tornielli had a similar analysis:
The news from the Synagogue:
To undertake a common task
based on the Ten Commandments
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from
Everything can be said of the Pope's visit to the Rome Synagogue yesterday except that it was a 'formal' meeting.
['Formal' in the sense of 'for the sake of appearances'.]
Thee was no formality in the tone and contents of the remarks by the Jewish leaders who addressed the Pope.
There was no formality in the response of the Bishop of Rome, who - having been invited by the Chief Rabbi, it must be recalled - wished to repeat an action by his predecessor to underscore once more that there is no turning back on the 'irrevocable' line set by Vatican II, notwithstanding differences destined to remain differences, notwithstanding problems and difficulties in Jewish-Catholic relations.
The president of the Roman Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici, and the Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni seemed to have divided up their assignments.
The first had a more 'political' perspective, and called for a common fight for religious freedom against fundamentalism, citing the re-emergence of anti-Semitism and Iran, without mentioning it by name.
But he did not avoid saying the name of Pius XII, whom Papa Ratzinger had declared Venerable, promulgating his 'heroic virtues' less than a month ago.
The figure of Papa Pacelli, the decision to proceed with his beatification process, and the contradictory judgments about his actions in World War II, had cast a shadow on the visit, even to the point of risking its cancellation.
Pacifici criticized
Pius XII's 'silence' on the Shoah, a silence that is also denounced by some Italian survivors of the Nazi persecution in a letter that a nephew of one of them, Alberto Mieli, handed to the Pope after his speech.
[I must object to this shorthand - 'silence on the Shoah' - for the simple reason that during the war years, no one outside of the Nazis realized it was a 'Shoah' or Holocaust, not even the Jews themselves, and I daresay, not even those who became victims themselves in the Nazi lagers, whom one can hardly expect to even think of the larger picture when confronted with their own imminent execution. .
No one, outside the Nazi high command and those who were executing their so-called Final Solution of the Jewish problem, was aware of the extent and degree of their persecution by the Nazis - the extermination of tens of thousands in gas chambers, for instance, or that the total number of victims would reach the horrifying total of six million, did not come to light until after the war!
But to say Pius XII kept silent about the Shoah makes his 'silence' appear even more unforgivable in the eyes of his detractors, and so this has been codified into a convenient but erroneously damning shorthand that even someone like Tornielli, who has written the most authoritative biography of Pius XII to date, falls into the trap of using!]
Even Di Segni spoke of the silences of man and the judgment for it which he cannot escape.
[Right - and that judgment can only be made by God. But Pius XII's detractors are arrogating that judgment to themselves, here and now, regardless of facts.
As I commented earlier, does not Judaism believe in the possibility of penance? Who of us can imagine the spiritual torment that a holy man like Pius XII, a Pope no less, had to undergo while weighing the pros and cons of speaking out or not?
Is it not right to ask oneself - If I were Pope in his place, what would I have done? And realize that there is no simple obvious answer when one has to make a moral choice that has extensive practical consequences for tens of thousands, one way or the other?
And what Catholic can doubt that Pius XII would have spoken of this moral dilemma to his confessor, and sought God's forgiveness if his decisions had in any way betrayed God's will and were not done for the greatest good to the greatest number?]
Benedict XVI, in the face of these explicit though not unexpected references, chose not to cite his predecessor by name, but defended him nonetheless, recalling the rescue and assistance extended by the Vatican to the Jew of Italy during the war.
The papal address was not a meditation on the common theological roots of Judaism and Christianity, a subject about which Joseph Ratzinger - a profound connoisseur of Jewish culture and faith - has meditated numerous times before.
Even this is a moot question, and in fact, the Pope was scheduled to meet Monday with Rabbi Jacob Neusner, who was at the Synagogue, visiting from the United States, disputes the idea that Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism.
The novelty of the papal intervention - beyond the ever important and certainly ever expected condemnation of anti-Semitism and the acknowledgment of Christian responsibility for anti-Jewish hatred in the past - lies in Benedict XVI's explicit identification of a common commitment and task to be carried out together in the future.
First, Di Segni, and then the Pope more explicitly, pointed out some features of this commitment.
On the environment, for instance, in favor of a human ecology that does not idolize nature but is conscious that man is the peak of Creation. The defense of the family, fundamental cell of society. The protection of life from its very beginning, the defense of the weakest and the neediest, and of human dignity which is still so downtrodden in many parts of the world.
Jews and Catholics can join hands and hearts on the basis of the Ten Commandments. And they can contribute together, along with Muslims who reject hatred and violence, to the construction of 'a world with a more human face'.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/01/2010 12:28]