Pope Benedict XVI’s personal preacher on April 4 apologized for likening cover-up accusations against the pontiff and the Catholic Church in the sex abuse scandal to “collective violence” suffered by the Jews.
The preacher, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, told the Corriere della Sera daily in an interview that he had no intention “of hurting the sensibilities of the Jews and of the victims of pedophilia.”
“I have sincerely regretted and I ask forgiveness, reaffirming my solidarity with both” lobbies, he was quoted as saying.
Jewish groups had slammed Cantalamessa, the preacher of the papal household, for his remarks made during a Good Friday service in St. Peter’s Basilica attended by Benedict. The pope had not been aware of what he was going to say during the prayer, Cantalamessa told the Italian daily.
Cantalamessa, noting that Passover and Easter fell this year in the same week, quoted during the service from a letter he said was from a Jewish friend. The friend, Cantalamessa said, wrote that he was “following the violent and concentric attacks against the church [and] the pope.”
He quoted the unnamed friend as adding that “the use of stereotypes, the shifting from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”
The chief Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the comparison was not “appropriate,” that Cantalamessa’s statement did not represent official church thinking and that such parallelism can lead to misunderstandings.
“What a sad irony this would be on Good Friday,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “Anti-Semitism was pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions that led to death … What a grotesque comparison.”
Still, Foxman said, the incident would not deal a severe blow to Catholic-Jewish relations, calling it a “blip, an embarrassment.”
Stephan Kramer, the secretary general of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, said that Cantalamessa’s remarks were “repulsive, obscene and most of all offensive towards all abuse victims as well as to all the victims of the Holocaust.”
The New York Times reported that Rome Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, who hosted Benedict during a historic visit to the Rome main synagogue in January, “laughed in seeming disbelief” when informed of Cantalamessa’s comparison.
Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Los Angeles–based Simon Wiesenthal Center called the remarks “hurtful.” They “were made in the presence of the pope, and the pope himself should take responsibility and apologize for them,” he said.
“To invoke the issue of persecution against Jews as a lever to try and deflect attention from the crisis inside the Catholic Church is not only unfortunate but simply stunning,” AJC Executive Director David Harris told Katie Couric on the “CBS Evening News” April 2.
The church and the pope have been under heavy fire in recent weeks for the alleged mishandling of hundreds of cases of sexual abuse by priests and other clergy against children over several decades in several countries. The pope and other church officials have been assailed by accusations of covering up the molestations and for negligence in disciplining some of the perpetrators of the crimes against children in parishes, schools, orphanages and other church-run institutions.
The pontiff maintained his silence on the accusations during his Easter message and never addressed Cantalamessa’s remarks, which did nothing to help often-strained Jewish-Catholic relations.
In 2007, Benedict restored a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews that Jewish leaders deemed offensive. Another sore spot has been the ongoing sainthood cause for Pope Pius XII, whom some Jews believe did not do enough to try to stop the Holocaust.
Rabbi James Rudin, senior interreligious adviser to the American Jewish Committee, said each crisis or catastrophe must stand on its own and that Cantalamessa’s evoking the Holocaust crossed the line.
“It does a disservice to today’s Catholic Church, which has to deal with its problems, and a disservice to millions of people who were murdered because they were Jews,” Rudin said.
Others were more sympathetic to the Catholic Church. Rabbi Jack Bemporad, director of the New Jersey–based Center for Interreligious Understanding, said the church and Benedict are unquestionably under attack.
Comparing anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism was “a little bit of an exaggeration,” he said. But Bemporad said he understands what the preacher was driving at: The Jewish community has often been accused and its people even murdered for things for which they bore no collective or even partial responsibility.
JTA contributed to this report.