John Paul II's Reach
John Paul II is now at rest, but his vision of freedom, interfaith reconciliation, and brotherhood endures. Long may it sustain us. On his famous visit to Poland in June 1979 that led to the unraveling of the Communist empire in Eastern Europe, he urged the Poles, "Be not afraid!" It was a lifelong imperative for him, and not just when it came to geopolitics in Europe and Latin America. He challenged entrenched attitudes in the Roman Catholic Church itself, disavowing discrimination of any kind as "opposed to the very spirit of Christianity." Racism was "a sin against God and humanity."
His embrace of the universal brotherhood of man was manifest long before he became pope. When Karol Wojtyla was one of the youngest bishops present at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in 1965, he played a critical role in the deliberations to produce "Nostra Aetate" --"In Our Age," which fundamentally transformed the Catholic Church's teaching concerning Christianity and Judaism. That encyclical forbade the portrayal of the Jews as collectively guilty for the death of Jesus during his time--let alone in perpetuity; repudiated any suggestions that the Jews are rejected or accursed by God; and affirmed the unbroken covenant between God and the Jewish people. Also implicitly rejected was the notion that Jewish homelessness and exile was proof of divine rejection, an affirmation with political significance for it eliminated a justification for opposing the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland.
The evil of anti-Semitism is rampant in too much of the Muslim world today, but the pope was unafraid to acknowledge and repudiate the role that Christians had played through the ages: "The fact that anti-Semitism has found a place in Christian thought," he declared, requires "an act of teshuvah --repentance." He condemned expressions of anti-Semitism "at any time, by anyone--I repeat, by anyone. " For the first time he drew a line between anti-Semitic interpretations of the New Testament and the failure of Roman Catholics to defend Jews during the Holocaust.
Beyond faith. In all, the pope was borne up by a trinity of faith, reason, and experience: Living in Poland, he knew firsthand how brutality had succeeded brutality. It began with the Nazi destruction of the Jewish community, in which he lost many friends, and moved on to the political and social corruption of Communist rule.
But John Paul II did more than preach. He backed programs of education to teach future generations about the Holocaust so that "never again will such a horror be possible--never again," repeating the very phrase that echoes convictions of the Jewish people.
His commitment to Christian-Jewish reconciliation extended to recognition of their spiritual sharing, referring to the Jewish people as the "elder brother" and to Judaism as "the very root of Catholicism." This was undoubtedly captured in the first visit of a pope to the synagogue in what had been Rome's Jewish ghetto, the separation of Jews having been endorsed or ignored by his papal predecessors for over 300 years. John Paul II's embrace of a rabbi was an image that told millions of people that the pope had come not as a ruler but as a friend.
In an act of equal historic significance, this pope broke with all his predecessors since 1948 and recognized the State of Israel as they had declined to do. As he put it, "It must be understood that the Jews, who for 2,000 years were dispersed among the nations of the world, have decided to return to the land of their ancestors. This is their right. " Contrast an official Vatican publication in 1948: "Modern Israel is not heir to biblical Israel. The Holy Land and its sacred sites belong only to Christianity as the true Israel."
Pope John Paul II was the first to visit Israel, the first to see Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust, in a tearful expression of solidarity with Jewish suffering. At the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, where Christian pilgrims once came to gloat about the fall of the Temple, he prayed and deposited a prayer he had composed for a liturgy of repentance, asking divine forgiveness for the sins Christians had committed against Jews through the ages. This prayer is memorable: "God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations; we are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer and ask your forgiveness; we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant."
When interviewed years ago by the French author Marek Halter, the pope was asked what happened to his Jewish friends when the Nazis overwhelmed Poland. The pope said they were almost all killed. When asked what he did to help them, the pope answered, in effect, "Not enough." Now this man with rare gifts of wisdom, morality, and spirituality has surely done enough.
This story appears in the April 18, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.