John Paul II reached across religious barriers during time as pope
When John Paul II stepped across the threshold of the Great Synagogue of Rome on April 13, 1986, it marked a milestone analogous to Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon. If not quite “a giant leap for mankind,” it certainly was for the two faiths involved.
For almost 2,000 years, the popes and the heart of Rome’s Jewish community literally had been neighbors. Only a short distance separates Vatican City and Temple Israeletico. Yet until then, no pope had ever entered the synagogue.
Indeed, it had been considered a breakthrough for Pope John XXIII, two decades earlier, simply to stop his car in front of the synagogue and bless worshippers coming out of Sabbath services.
Just as remarkable as John Paul II’s visit were his words on that historic occasion. “The Jewish religion is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain way is ‘intrinsic’ to our own religion,” the pope said. “With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion.”
In this ecumenical age, and especially in a pluralistic society like America’s, that idea might seem unremarkable. But given past relations between Catholics and Jews, the pope’s pronouncement was revolutionary.
‘Our elder brothers’
Until the 1960s, the church’s liturgy included a reference to “the perfidious Jew,” an allusion to the fact that the Jews hadn’t acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah. Then the Second Vatican Council absolved the Jewish people of responsibility for the death of Jesus, signaling a shift in the church’s perspective that John Paul II made a major theme of his pontificate.
In 1994, he dispatched the first Vatican ambassador to Israel, four decades after other countries established diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. When his predecessor Paul VI visited the Holy Land in 1964, he studiously avoided even using the world “Israel.” But when John Paul II traveled there in 2000, he repeated the message of his visit to Rome’s synagogue: “You are our elder brothers.”
The pope’s devotion to improving Jewish-Catholic relations was not limited to grand gestures. He had an eye for the finest details. For example, he suggested the term “Hebrew Scriptures” be substituted for “Old Testament,” which implied something outmoded.
He extended such sensitivity to a broad range of faiths in words that are difficult to imagine his predecessors using. It is one thing to encourage a better understanding of Judaism or Islam, the world’s other major monotheistic faith — and after Sept. 11, the pope quickly urged that any entire religious community should not be blamed for the misdeeds of a handful of terrorists.
Pope John Paul II sits between Islamic Higher Committee member Sheikh Taysir Tamimi, right, and Israel's Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, during an Interfaith gathering at the Notre Dame Roman Catholic Institution in Jerusalem, Thursday March 23, 2000.
But while visiting India, John Paul II praised Hinduism, which not only doesn’t share a biblical heritage, it honors a whole pantheon of gods. “Yours is a land of ancient culture,” the pope said in Bombay in 1984, “the cradle of great religion, the home of a nation that has sought God with relentless desire in deep meditation and silence and hymns of fervent prayer.”
It was in a similar spirit that the pope invited 150 religious leaders to join him at the northern Italian town of Assisi, St. Francis’ birthplace, in 1986. There he led prayers for peace alongside not only representatives of other branches of Christianity but also Buddhists, Shintoists, Sikhs, Muslims and even animists — forest-spirit worshippers the pope had met in Africa.
John Paul II dies at 84
6News video: Catholics celebrate Pope’s life (04-01-05)Caught in the crossfire
John Paul II’s attempt to reach out to other Christian communities also has been confounded by each one’s different theological direction. He has been caught in the crossfire between the generally conservative Orthodox churches and the more liberal Anglicans and Lutherans. Denominations in the latter two traditions ordain women and often reject the conservative Christian condemnation of homosexuality as a sin.
So John Paul II’s overtures to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lutheran leaders raised the hackles of the Patriarch of Constantinople and other Orthodox leaders, whose teaching on such matters, like that of the Vatican, remains traditional.
Liberal Protestants, meanwhile, fault the pope for that same traditionalism. When John Paul II visited Norway, seven of the nation’s eleven Lutheran bishops boycotted an ecumenical service led by the pope. Female Lutheran pastors also shunned him when he visited Iceland because he refused to consider ordaining women to the priesthood.
Some Jewish groups were put off by the nomination for sainthood of Pius XII, the World War II-era pontiff they fault for remaining silent during the Holocaust.
Yet through all the criticism, John Paul II has remained steadfast in his commitment to better understanding among peoples of different faiths.
“The truth is,” he said, “that interreligous contacts, together with ecumenical dialogues, now seem to be obligatory paths, in order to ensure that the many painful wounds inflicted over the course of centuries will not be repeated.”