ROBERT S. WISTRICH
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John Paul !l's message went beyond proposing mere coexistence, or
more intellectual exchange between Jews and Catholics. It was an
appeal from the heart for a religious dialogue "animated by fraternal
love." He also saw a special role for Jews and Christians in the modern
world as "the trustees and witnesses of an ethic marked by the Ten Com–
mandments," to confront a society which is "often lost in agnosticism
and individualism and which is suffering the bitter consequences of self–
ishness and violence." A more problematic reference during his visit was
the passing reference to the "high price in blood" paid by the Jewish
community of Rome during World War II. John Paul II chose only to
remember that the Holy See had thrown open Vatican City "to offer
refuge and safety to so many Jews of Rome being hunted by their per–
secutors." This was a somewhat selective remembrance, which, though
true as far it went, ignored the public silence of Pope Pius XII even as
Roman Jews were being deported under his windows to the death
camps in Auschwitz.
This contentious issue, which increasingly provokes aggressive and
militant rejoinders from some very conservative Catholics in the United
States-especially those who are dedicated at all costs to presenting
Pius XII as a hero of Catholicism-has been profoundly damaging to
Catholic-Jewish relations. The present Pope, by describing his contro–
versial predecessor as "a great Pope and a wise diplomat" and seeming
to push him on to the fast track for sainthood, has in my judgment made
a regrettable error. This is not an internal Catholic issue alone since the
sanctification of Pius XII would have symbolic meaning for Jews as well
as Catholics. It might well prove to be a disaster for the Catholic-Jewish
dialogue, whose achievements are surely not worth risking over such a
controversial and historically unresolved issue.
It
was left to the presi–
dent of Rome's Jewish community, Professor Giacomo Saban, to point
quietly to the dark centuries during which John Paul II's Papal prede–
cessors had ghettoized and discriminated against Jews. This was a point
all too frequently overlooked in Vatican documents, including the most
recent one of March
1998.
But in one veiled though unmistakable ref–
erence to Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, Saban aptly commented:
"What was taking place on one of the banks of the Tiber could not have
been unknown on the other side of the river, nor could what was hap–
pening elsewhere on the European continent." This single, terse sentence
sums up a whole history of antagonistic Catholic and Jewish memories
of the past that find their symbolic reference-point in the story of Pius
XII and the Holocaust.
