BENEDICT XVI AND
THE PIUS XII QUESTION
No reaction yet from the Chief Rabbi of Rome, usually quite headstrong and hyper-sensitive on anything he considers to be a mis-step by Benedict XVI with regard to the Jews, but two so far from equally prominent Jewish spokesmen:
Rabbi Laras:
'Decision re-ignites
painful considerations'
Rome, Dec. 19 (Translated from AGI) - The decision of Benedict XVI to sign the decree on the heroic virtues of Pius XII is
not a question that concerns Judaism and the Jews, according to Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, president of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly.
But, he added, "As we have said in the past,
notwithstanding his merits in having saved a certain number of Jews, this Pope did not take an official public position against the Shoah which was the death sentence for all Jews. Because of this, the decision today re-ignites the considerations which are always painful to us".
[Laras's initial reaction is relatively laid back, considering that last year, he initiated a Jewish boycott in Italy of the annual Day for Jewish-Catholic Dialog held in some European countries on January 17 because of some perceived slight over the Gaza Strip conflict in late 2008!
Also, the statement about Pius XII's 'merits in having saved a number of Jews" is something I have not seen before in Jewish statements about Pius XII. More about this later, in comments on Rabbi Rosen's statements below.]
Rabbi David Rosen:
'Decision is insensitive
to the Jews'
ROME, Dec. 19 (Translated from Apcom) - Benedict XVI's decision to sign the decree on Pius XII's heroic virtues "does not show much sensitivity to the concerns of the Jewish community', according to Rabbi David Rosen, adviser for inter-religious dialog to the Grand Rabbinate of Israel.
He added: "I am surprised that this decision was taken just three weeks before the scheduled visit of the Pope to the Synagogue in Rome".
Reached by telephone, Rosen told Apcom, commenting shortly after Sabbath ended, "I hope that today's decision does not mean the Vatican is accelerating the beatification process on Pius XII".
[He misunderstands the process. It can be initiated ahead of schedule, as was done with Mother Teresa and John Paul II, but the process itself cannot be accelerated. It has to take its course, as John Paul II's has done, but it has been rapid for him for the simple reason that almost all the discoverable material about him necessary to be investigated has been readily available for years, if not decades, and that the post-mortem miracle needed for beatification took place rather quickly after his death and was well documented by all concerned.]
He said further: "I also hope that Benedict XVI's position is this: that he cannot abstain from declaring the religious virtues of Pius XII but that
no other steps towards beatification may be taken until there is an objective historical analysis of that period in history - which means making the contents of the Vatican Archives open to scholars".
[Rosen is a scholar and should know better. The process goes on, once it is unblocked, because there is a lot to be investigated - not just what he did during the war - those who have any objections at all to his beatification should write the Congregation of saints and ask to be heard during the investigations.
But the Jewish position, as stated by Rosen, does not make sense. If their objection is that Pius XII did not officially condemn the Shoah, then there is nothing that the unopened archives can tell anyone, because the only proof of an omission is the absence of proof - if it wasn't said and done, it wasn't said and done. Do they expect to find a written Vatican document that says, "The Pope knew about the Holocaust but decided not to speak about it"?
And - without going into the more relevant point of why the Jews expected Pius XII to say something definitive about the Shoah during the war, when no other leader, not even Churchill and Roosevelt, ever indicated official knowledge of it - everything significant relating to Pius XII's actions with regard to the Jews and the situation in Germany was reported in the 12-volume Blet documentation based on available archival material that was produced at the instance of Paul VI in the 1960s.
Very simply, the anti-Pius XII Jews are not acting in good faith at all. If eight years from now, after the Pius XII archives are fully open to the public, and Jewish researchers do not find a smoking gun [hard to imagine what that could be], Pius XII's detractors will still conclude he was an unworthy human being, even if he was responsible for saving hundreds, if not thousands, of Jewish lives. Which is a shameless betrayal of their own standard for what constitutes a 'righteous' person - "He who saves one life is as if he saves the whole world". Why is there a different stadnard for Pius XII?]
Rosen continued: "Historical judgments should be formed with humility. Pius XII lived in a time when no one was completely a saint, except for those who died as martyrs for justice. All I am saying is that because of the enormous complexity of emotions and subjective memory, this subject should be treated with the greatest sensitivity and with a historical distance that requires a longer lapse of time".
[Almost seven decades is not long enough or distant enough? ??He is also ignoring completely the contemporaneous praise of Pius XII during the war and shortly after the war from leading Jewish leaders in gratitude for what he did for Italian Jews during the war.
Why does all this positive concrete evidence count for nothing with the Jews, just because Pius XII 'did not speak out' for the Jews - out of understandable prudence that doing so could mean placing Catholics at even greater risk than they already were? He spoke up for Jews in Holland early in the war, and he saw the tragic consequences as the Nazis took it out immediately against Dutch Jews and Catholics alike.
It is not as if the Jews at that time or in the decades before that thought much about the Popes at al, much less that they thought Popes had any influence at all on world affairs! Suddenly, from hindsight, they claim that the Holocaust would have been averted if Pius XII had spoken out?
All their arguments against Pius XII are simply illogical and make no sense.
"Of course," Rosen says, "the decision of who should become a saint or a blessed one is not the business of the Jewish community. But if the Catholic Church says, as it does, that it wishes to have respectful relations with the Jewish world, then it must take into consideration our sensitivities before taking another step in this matter".
[What crap! Respectful relations have to be mutual. What about Catholic sensitivities that, regardless of how Rosen and his ilk put it, they are interfering in a matter that is purely internal to the Church.
Jews don't even believe Jesus is God - so what difference does it make to them whom Catholics venerate as saints? The Church is not asking them to venerate Pius XII or any other Catholic saint or blessed, any more than it asks them to recognize Jesus as the Son of God.]
John Allen obviously wrote his column one day too early - blissfully unaware of the Pope's decision on Pius XII! But as an Anglophone Vaticanista, he has far less of an excuse than Tornielli and Rodari not to have seen the Australian media reports earlier in the week!
The state of Jewish-Catholic relations
Dec. 18, 2009
On Jan. 17, Pope Benedict XVI will hop across the Tiber River to visit the Great Synagogue in Rome, only the second such occasion after John Paul II’s groundbreaking visit in 1986. (That was the first time a modern Pope set foot inside a Jewish place of worship, although John XXIII once stopped his car outside to bless the Jews as they exited.)
Benedict already has two synagogue visits
under his belt: Cologne in 2005 during World Youth Day, and the Park East Synagogue in New York in April 2008.
[Allen once again uses colloquial language too carelessly - a synagogue visit by a Pope is hardly in the category of an Indian scalp or a championship bout to be put ;under his belt'!]
Benedict’s cross-town journey may not make much of a media splash, which in itself tells us something important: In the span of a quarter-century, a Pope visiting a synagogue has gone from being a sensation to essentially routine.
Naturally enough, there’s a temptation to gauge the state of Jewish-Catholic relations primarily on the basis of events involving the Pope. When he reaches out, things are presumed to be improving; when he does something that stirs controversy, such as his decision earlier this year to lift the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops, including one who’s a Holocaust denier, talk of crisis fills the air.
What such a focus ignores is that inter-faith relations, like politics, are often local. At the grass roots, there are signs of basic health in the relationship between Jews and Catholics, quite apart from whatever the Pope does or doesn’t do.
Last week in New York, I was on hand to witness one such sign: A visit by Archbishop Timothy Dolan to the renowned Temple Emanu-El in order to light the first candle of Hanukkah.
One could make the argument that New York’s Fifth Avenue is among the most evocative pieces of Jewish-Catholic real estate on the planet, home both to Temple Emanu-El and to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Built on the site of the former John Jacob Astor mansion, Temple Emanu-El is billed as the largest Jewish place of worship in the world, with a total capacity of 2,500. Guide books actually claim that the temple is slightly larger than St. Patrick’s, but suffice it to say that both are imposing, and historic, structures.
Among other notables, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a member of the congregation at Temple Emanu-El, which is a Reform synagogue founded in 1845.
The Dec. 11 visit was a last-minute addition to Dolan’s schedule, who was asked to come for the Hanukkah service by the synagogue’s senior rabbi, David M. Posner. The invitation wasn’t a complete surprise, since Dolan said that he gets almost as many requests from synagogues as he does Catholic parishes.
(Last October, Dolan was named the new Moderator of Jewish Affairs for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, replacing Baltimore’s retired Cardinal William Keeler.)
The occasion obviously meant a lot to the folks at Temple Emanu-El. While greeting the congregation, Posner called this a “truly historic Hanukkah celebration” because of the archbishop’s presence, and in his sermon Posner said this was “the first time in Jewish history that an archbishop of New York, or anywhere, has kindled the tapers of Hanukkah.”
(Strictly speaking, that claim was a little overblown, as other archbishops in other places have done this before. San Antonio, for example, has a tradition going back to 2001 in which Catholics and Jews come together to light the Hanukkah candles.
The archbishop typically participates, and this year, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston was also on hand. In any event, the practical translation of what Posner said probably ought to be, “This is a big deal.”)
The congregation pulled out all the stops, including something that you definitely don’t see every day: At the end of the service, the choir performed a toe-tapping, doo-wop version of the classic holiday number “I Have a Little Dreidel,” which could easily be the anchor track on a “Hanukkah goes Motown” album.
After the service, Dolan was mobbed by people wanting to thank him for coming, to get their picture taken with him, and to shove pieces of Hanukkah cake into his hands, all of which felt like an affirmation of the bonds between Jews and Catholics.
Such scenes play out wherever Jews and Catholics find themselves cheek by jowl, even if they rarely have the same media resonance as debates over Pius XII or Vatican/Israeli relations.
The moral of the story is that sometimes you have to be in these situations to appreciate how much ordinary people on both sides want the relationship to work -- not necessarily out of any complex theological or political logic, but a simple human desire for friendship.
A synagogue trustee who showed visitors around before the service explained things best: “We want this to be a normal neighborly thing,” he said. “You live just down the street from us, so why shouldn’t we get together?”
Of course, one warm-and-fuzzy photo op in a synagogue hardly cancels out the very real tensions in Jewish-Catholic relations. Last year, for example, the U.S. bishops deleted a reference in their catechism to the eternal validity of God’s covenant with the Jews, a move that still confuses some Jewish leaders. Simply showing up to light a candle on Hanukkah can’t make those questions disappear.
On the other hand, anybody who was at Temple Emanu-El on Dec. 11 could be forgiven for finding talk of a crisis a bit overblown: At least that night, the foundations of the relationship looked pretty strong.
* * *
For anyone who’s ever been curious as to what an archbishop and a senior rabbi might talk about when they have a few minutes to kill, I can supply at least a partial answer: Money.
As Posner and Dolan stood together on the bima (the elevated platform at the front of the synagogue) waiting for the service to begin, they weren’t talking the fine points of theology, but rather comparing notes about approaches to tapping their congregation’s wallets.
Posner explained that as opposed to the Catholic custom of passing the collection plate every week, most synagogues send out bills for dues to registered members once a year. Posner lamented the costs of operating such a cavernous building on Fifth Avenue, a frustration he knew Dolan could appreciate.
I quipped that maybe this is the real future of inter-religious dialogue, but Dolan later said the idea isn’t entirely a joke. Given that Catholics and Jews often face some of the same practical problems -- clustering smaller congregations, for example, or the rise of Jewish analogs of what Christians call “mega-churches” -- he believes they can share experiences and support one another on those fronts.
That may not be exactly what Benedict XVI has in mind when he talks about a shift from inter-religious to inter-cultural dialogue, but it at least suggests that theological differences don’t have to be the death of conversation.
* * *
A footnote on Benedict’s visit to the Rome synagogue: Jan. 17 is a special day for Roman Jews. It’s celebrated as “Mo’ed di Piombo,” commemorating what local tradition recalls as a miraculous rain that doused a fire set during a pogrom in Rome’s Jewish ghetto in 1793.
In recent years, Jan. 17 has also become an important occasion for Jewish-Christian dialogue, including an annual event organized by Italy’s Catholic bishops. In the past, one way Italian rabbis have signaled displeasure with the Vatican, or the Catholic church, is by pulling out of that Jan. 17 event.
The fact that the Pope is coming to the synagogue on Jan. 17 therefore takes on special significance. (Not to mention, of course, that the visit comes almost exactly one year to the day after the cause célèbre involving the Holocaust-denying bishop.) The event will be closely watched for hints of any new direction in which either side wants to take the relationship.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/12/2009 00:11]