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

who were responsible for the assassination only days before of Bachir Gemayel, the Christian president-elect of Lebanon. The assassination further inflamed the interreligious civil war in Lebanon, resulting in the slaughter by the Christian Phalangist militia of Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
     
    Pope John Paul met with Arafat a total of twelve times during his pontificate. Over that time the pope was disappointed about the lack of progress in peace talks. In his meetings, the pope stressed to Arafat that a solution “excluded recourse to violence in any form.” One reason for the meetings was the pope’s concern for the approximately 40,000 Christians who resided in the disputed territories and would require religious protections under any future Palestinian government.
     
    The second controversial audience was in 1987 with Kurt Waldheim, former secretary general of the United Nations and recently elected president of Austria. Waldheim’s long concealed past as a Nazi officer had recently come to light during the Austrian election.

    This would be Waldheim’s first official visit outside Austria since being elected president, a largely ceremonial role. Most of Europe responded to his election by making it clear he would not be welcome in their countries, while the United States Justice Department barred him from entry. Unlike Germany, Austria had done little to acknowledge, confront, and purge its Nazi past. It preferred to think of itself as having been forcibly occupied by the Nazis and not complicit with them, despite all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the pope had this in mind when on a trip to Austria in 1986 he had called anti-Semitism “sinful.”
     
    Waldheim had always asserted that he never belonged to any Nazi-affiliated groups, but in fact, only one month after the Anschluss (the German entry into Austria), at the age of nineteen, he joined the National Socialist German Students League, a Nazi youth organization. Then in November 1938, he enrolled in the SA, Nazi storm troopers. Waldheim further denied personal knowledge of wartime atrocities, yet he was a lieutenant in army intelligence attached to brutal German military units that executed thousands of (non-Jewish) Yugoslavian partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps from 1942 to 1944. He served on the staff of Gen. Alexander Lohr, who was hanged for war crimes in 1947. Yet in his memoirs Waldheim wrote that he was a law student in Vienna at the time.
     
    Waldheim’s version of events was disproven by a mass of evidence: witnesses, photographs, medals, commendations, and his own signature on documents connected with massacres and deportations.
     
    There was considerable speculation about why John Paul would receive Waldheim. Prior to becoming pope, he had been instrumental in post-war rapprochement between German and Polish Catholic bishops, and perhaps some gesture towards healing or redemption was involved in his meeting with Waldheim, but the pope failed to make his reasoning clear. The Vatican denied Waldheim had been invited, saying that audiences were always sought and that the pope never made invitations. They stressed that this was an official meeting, not a private one, and that Waldheim was returning a visit the Pope made to Austria in 1983. They further emphasized that the pope's meetings did not imply approval or disapproval because he was prepared to meet with people whose behavior he did not necessarily condone. Nevertheless, in a thoroughly puzzling move, John Paul followed up the audience several years later (1994) by awarding Waldheim a knighthood in the Order of Pius IX.
     
    At the time of the audience, one American Jewish leader called Waldheim’s visit “morally and politically incomprehensible.” Others used harsher words. A number of Catholics were also bewildered. A demonstration took place outside the gates of the Vatican. One of the protestors was a