4.20.2005

Jewish Groups Mostly Praise Pope as a Partner

The New York Times, April 20, 2005

By ANDY NEWMAN

Despite his wartime membership in the Hitler Youth movement, the German now known as Pope Benedict XVI won strong praise from Jewish leaders yesterday for his role in helping Pope John Paul II mend fences between Catholics and Jews.
"I view him as our most serious partner in the Catholic Church, and he has been for the last 26 years," said Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, which has led the fight for reparations for Holocaust survivors as well as the Jewish community's dialogue with the Vatican.
As head of the Vatican office that enforced church doctrine under John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a leading force behind the Vatican's recognition of Israel in 1993 and John Paul II's atonement at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2000, Rabbi Singer said.
"I believe that he is the man who created the theological underpinnings for the good relations between Catholics and Jews during the last papacy," Rabbi Singer said. "He writes what's kosher and what's not kosher for Catholics. He said, 'Not only is it kosher to like Jews, but it's kosher to like the state of Israel.' "
In his memoirs, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote of being forced into the Nazi youth movement when he was 14 in 1941, when membership was compulsory, and of being drafted into the German Army in 1943.
"He's never denied the past, never hid it," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "His whole life has been atonement for those few years. His whole life is an open book of sensitivity against bigotry and anti-Semitism."
Mr. Foxman cited a column that Cardinal Ratzinger wrote for L'Osservatore Romano in 2000 attacking Christian complicity in the Holocaust. "It cannot be denied that a certain insufficient resistance to this atrocity on the part of Christians can be explained by an inherited anti-Judaism present in the hearts of not a few Christians," the cardinal wrote.
Mr. Foxman said that as a European of the World War II generation, Cardinal Ratzinger would probably be more sensitive to Jewish concerns than many other cardinals who were on the short list for the papacy. Many others expressed similar thoughts.
"This pope, considering his historical experience, will be especially committed to an uncompromising fight against anti-Semitism," Israel's foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, said in a statement.
Rabbi David Rosen, the international director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, praised Cardinal Ratzinger's elevation as "an obvious confirmation of the ideological orientation of the previous papacy."
"I don't think there's one single issue on which the new pope will depart from the previous pope," Rabbi Rosen said, "and that includes a strong commitment to Catholic-Jewish relations."
Not surprisingly, more liberal Jews were less impressed with Cardinal Ratzinger, who was the force behind a 2000 church document, "Dominus Jesus," that called for new Catholic evangelization and argued that beliefs other than Christianity were lesser searches for truth.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, wrote yesterday on the magazine's Web site that the cardinal's criticism of other religions "is a slippery slope toward anti-Semitism and a return to the chauvinistic and triumphalist views that led the church, when it had the power to do so, to develop its infamous crusades and inquisitions."

Greg Myre contributed reporting from Jerusalem for this article.
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