Free The Life and Legacy of Pope John Paul II by Wyatt North

Jewish witness to the Holocaust (using the Hebrew term “Shoah”) a prophetic “warning voice for all humanity.” That same year, while in the United States, he called for Holocaust education to be integrated into every level of Catholic education. He further called for world recognition of the Jewish right “to a homeland.” In 1990, when meeting with the ambassador of the newly reunited Germany, he remarked: “For Christians the heavy burden of guilt for the murder of the Jewish people must be an enduring call to repentance.”
     
    The reemergence of Israel as a state had for some time been doctrinally awkward for the Vatican, but in December 1993, the Vatican and Israel reached a Fundamental Agreement Between the Holy See and the State of Israel , and in 1994 finally exchanged ambassadors and normalized relations.
     
    In his Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente (November 1994), John Paul had asked Catholics to prepare for the new millennium by examining occasions of Christian sinfulness. In response to that call, in 1998, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews promulgated a major document of self-examination, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah , with an introduction by John Paul. Calling the Holocaust “a major fact of the history of this century,” it takes responsibility for the relationship between Nazism and the attitudes of Christians toward Jews down through the centuries. Accordingly, the importance of this document for Catholic self-evaluation cannot be overstated.
     
    We Remember was followed in March 2000 by a Day of Pardon Mass, which included confession of sins against Israel. Later that month, the pope made a five-day pilgrimage to the State of Israel, where he visited Yad Vashem and also placed a prayer in the Western Wall in accordance with Jewish custom. The friendly style of that visit (the Israeli code name for the security operations during the visit was actually “Operation Old Friend”) was in marked contrast to the 11-hour visit by Paul VI in 1964, during which he never mentioned Israel by name and refused to address the Israeli president (Zalman Shazar) by his title.
     
    There were numerous other occasions when John Paul met with representatives of Jewish communities in various parts of the world and spoke words of reconciliation.
     
    Not everything the pope did found favor in the Jewish community. John Paul acknowledged that there would be times when Jewish and Catholic interests would not coincide. During his papacy, conflict revolved around three main issues: a group of Carmelite nuns who had located their convent at Auschwitz, audiences granted to people anathema to the Jewish community, and the candidacy for sainthood of Catholics who had been hostile to Jews in their lifetimes.
     
    The controversy of longest duration involved the Auschwitz convent. There was a strong tendency in Poland to “de-judaize” the site, where approximately 1.3 million Jews died. The Polish government subsumed all peoples within the common classification of victims of fascism and failed to make any mention of Jews as particular targets for genocide. Tour guides of Auschwitz did not mention Jews, nor did the official guidebook to the museum. Then, in 1984, a group of Polish Catholic nuns moved into a two-story building that had been used by the Nazis to store the deadly Zyklon B gas used in the gas chambers. Sensitivities on both sides were inflamed. Finally, in 1993, on the fiftieth anniversary of the (Jewish) Warsaw ghetto uprising, the pope personally sent a letter to the Carmelite nuns telling them to move to a new property a short distance away which had been built for them and to which they had thus far refused to move. They complied.
     
    The timing of two papal audiences was particularly unfortunate. Not all Christians were thrilled either when in 1982 PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat met with the pope. At the time it was assumed that it was Arafat’s minions