'06
PARTISAN REVI EW
historic debates over Vatican II in Rome, which would open up a new
page in Catholic-Jewish relations. Nominated Archbishop of Krakow in
1964,
Woytyla emerged at the Vatican Council as a modernizer, with a
particular enthusiasm for Rome's pruning of doctrinal deadwood about
Judaism in its epochal
Nostra Aetate.
It
was in the same year that Jurek
Kluger, now living in Rome (having completed his studies in ltaly after
demobilization), first read of a speech given in his new adopted home
by the archbishop of Krakow, one Karol Woytyla-his former class–
mate and closest friend, whom he had not seen for twenty-seven years.
The renewal of their friendship would, ironically enough, bring Jurek
back to his Jewish roots, as well as enable him to know the Catholic
clergy not just as priests but as human beings.
In the immediate postwar years Jurek married a Catholic and began
to move in predominantly gentile circles. He had virtually no connec–
tion with Jewish communal life in Rome. But under the prodding of
Karol Woytyla (since
1967
a cardinal, and hence a more frequent visi–
tor to Rome) the Jewish past began to come more alive for him. There
were even issues over which he now disagreed
as a .lew
with his old
friend-such as the beatification of Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish
Franciscan priest who had been martyred in Auschwitz in
1941.
Woytyla had been one of the most active advocates of his beatification
in
1971
(later, as Pope, he would elevate Kolbe to sainthood) despite the
fact that the Franciscan had been the founder and director of a publish–
ing house that issued
Maly Dziel1nik-the
most anti-Semitic Church–
affiliated daily newspaper in pre-war Poland. Kolbe was arguably more
of a passive than a militant anti-Semite; he was undoubtedly an anti–
Nazi (whose outspokenness had landed him in Auschwitz), and his
heroic, sacrificial death made him a Polish national symbol. But for
Kluger, as for most Jews, a priest who had abetted anti-Semitic hatred
in Poland, however indirectly, could not be a worthy candidate for saint–
hood unless his martyrdom had involved the saving of Jewish lives–
which was not the case. Moreover, this beatification took place at a time
when the Polish communist regime refused to acknowledge that the
Jews constituted the majority of the victims murdered at Auschwitz.
O'Brien does not gloss over such differences and generally handles
them with tact and fairness. At the same time he emphasizes that only
after Cardinal Woytyla became Pope John Paul II in
1978
did it become
apparent that he "would make the reversal of a lamented Catholic record
Ion Judaism, lsrael and anti-SemitismJ the major theme of his papacy."
Possibly O'Brien goes a little too far in insisting on the present Pope's
"unprecedented Catholic affirmation of the eternal validity of Judaism,
