new york | As the College of Cardinals prepared to begin secret deliberations next week to choose a successor, the question remained to what extent John Paul II’s exceptionally proactive policy regarding Jews would endure.
“It seems unlikely that the next pope will have the same interest in the church’s relations with the Jews, and the same sense of responsibility in combating Christian anti-Semitism,” said Professor David Kertzer of Brown University, an expert on papal relations with the Jews.
Much of John Paul’s teachings about the Jews have been promulgated as church doctrine and thus technically are official church policy.
But even before John Paul died there were indications that his policies had not been accepted unanimously among church leaders — or that they had trickled down to the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics.
Rabbi David Rosen, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, said, “in many parts of the world there are even bishops who are ignorant of the teachings on this subject, let alone the rank and file. Ignorance of this and the concomitant residual anti-Jewish attitudes still prevail in many parts of the Catholic world, and there is still an enormous job to do in this regard.”
Not only that, he said, but “the younger generation of bishops who have not been through the period of the Shoah and were not part of the official transformation of Vatican II do not necessarily appreciate the historical as well as theological imperatives involved.”
Brown University’s Kertzer said he already had noted “backsliding in the last few years when the pope had become infirm and no longer really in control. There has clearly been an important reactionary movement within the church that resents much of the legacy of the Second Vatican Council, and with it the sense that the church has a historic problem with anti-Semitism.”
At a January conference in Washington, for example, Cardinal Avery Dulles, a major Catholic theologian, affirmed the traditional belief that Christians will want “all men and women, Jewish and Gentile” to “benefit from Christ’s teaching” and convert to Christianity.
Also, Kertzer said, “Even John Paul II was unwilling to criticize any of his papal predecessors, nor directly rebuke past versions of canon law. He was thus unwilling to fully come to terms with the church’s institutional responsibility for anti-Semitism in the past. There is little likelihood at the moment that this history will be seriously revisited by John Paul II’s successor.”
Nonetheless, Jewish leaders hope his legacy will prevail.
“I hope that there is neither a slowing nor an inversion of the road that was opened by the Second Vatican Council and consolidated by John Paul II in the course of his pontificate,” said Tullia Zevi, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities. “It was a pontificate characterized by a dialogue relationship with the Jewish world that was very satisfactory, and I hope that in the future this relationship could extend also to the other great monotheistic religion, Islam, and to the secular world.”
JTA staff writer Rachel Pomerance contributed to this story.