The controversy about the visit of Pope Benedict XVI is indicative both of the general political tension in our area, and of the loaded Catholic-Jewish relationship. Among its many paradoxes is the fact that this is a relationship between a small people of some 13 million, an ethno-religious group the majority of whom do not follow the religion of their ancestors anymore in any meaningful way but rather maintain a culture based on an ancient tradition in which that religion played a central role, and a worldwide religious body of some 1.5 billion members. We are talking about the relations between a gnat and an elephant, but the elephant, amazingly, developed from the gnat, and the gnat is a rare insect of tremendous importance.
The visit of John Paul II was an act that was hard to follow, and the present pope did his best in accordance with his personality and the tremendous pressures to which he is constantly subjected. It was not good enough. In his speech at Yad Vashem he used the term “compassion,” which was mistranslated into the Hebrew hemla (pity). Compassion means an effort to take part in someone else’s (harsh) experience, and is much more than top-down pity. It has a theological resonance in Christian thought and reflects Christian beliefs about the attitude of Jesus to human suffering.
THE POPE MEANT WELL, and tried to walk the tightrope between Arab-Palestinian-Muslim and Palestinian-Christian enmity to Israel and the Jews on the one hand, and the collective trauma of Jews in Israel and elsewhere regarding the Holocaust on the other.
That’s [b]Y[/b]ehuda Ba[b]u[/b]er, I believe, rather than what is posted.
So I read the whole thing. After an engaging discussion of purported mis-steps in the Pope’s visit, the historian author’s prejudice finally gleams through a crack in the final lines when he describes the Catholic tradition as ‘deeply anti-Jewish’ [i]from its beginning[/i]. But reading the Book of Acts for example, one could hardly find evidence for persecution of the Jews by Christians (many of whom were Jewish!) at the beginning of the tradition. In fact, quite the contrary.
And at the end the author hurls the mis-translation into Hebrew of the word ‘compassion’ as mere ‘pity’ instead, back at his subject, to suggest that compared to JPI, Benedict XVI is a theoretical and un-feeling man who stubbornly refused to tell things the way that, well, that Israeli Jews wish he would, exalting their supreme victimhood. Sad that they cannot recognize the Paschal Victim has already been sacrificed.
Clearly I meant to type ‘JPII’ , not ‘JPI’ in the last paragraph of comment 1.
The ONLY people who do not understand the true heart of this Pope are those unwilling to read what he has written or heard his homilies. I’m pretty forgiving of your standard anti-Catholic material, but Joseph Ratzinger is about as well-published as you can be. If you read everything that he’s written and can come away without knowing that he is a profound follower of Jesus and a saint of His heart, then you might want to go back and re-read.
[Slightly edited by Elf]
It seems that this Pope is being expected to shoulder the entire burden of the Nazi horrors because he is German, and of an age to have been automatically listed on the rolls of the Hitler Youth, something really impossible to avoid late in WWII in Germany. “You are guilty because you’re German” is not any more convincing than “You are a Christ-murderer because you are Jewish.” In this case Israeli Jews have not judged fairly. One can see why they are touchy, living in a sea of people who want them dead.