Jews
Jewish relationships
We Christians recognize that the Jewish religious heritage is intrinsic to our own faith: you are our elder brothers.Address at the Rome Synagogue, April 1986
Early experiences
John Paul II had known Jewish people from an early age. He had been brought up as a child playing with Jews in Poland. No other pope had had such a close experience of Jewish culture so it was not surprising that he went further than any other pope to restore friendship between the Vatican and the Jewish people.
I remember...the Wadowice elementary school, where at least a fourth of the pupils in my class were Jewish.
I can vividly remember the Jews who gathered every Saturday at the synagogue behind our school. Both religious groups, Catholics and Jews, were united, I presume, by the awareness that they prayed to the same God.
Despite their different languages, prayers in the church and in the synagogue were based to a considerable degree on the same texts.
Crossing the Threshold of Hope
John Paul lost many people he knew during the Holocaust, so anti-Semitism was a reality that he had experienced. Furthermore he had experienced the anti-semitism of the Church, having heard the viciously anti-Jewish remarks made by an earlier Polish Cardinal.
For more than 20 years John Paul II pursued a consistent policy of moving the Church towards a historic reconciliation with the Jewish people. He was the first Pope to visit a Jewish synagogue and Auschwitz. He made a dramatic apology for a history of Christian anti-Semitism, and throughout his papacy spoke strongly against any form of anti-Jewish sentiment. In spring 2000 he went to Israel as a pilgrim.
Institutionalised anti-Semitism
Before the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church had blamed the Jews for the Crucifixion. There are claims that during the Holocaust Pope Pius XII had been less than proactive in his actions to protect the Jews.
The document Nostra Aetate had gone some way to recognise the vast spiritual heritage that Christians and Jews had in common, and John Paul capitalised on this.
He believed that he should work for a new era of reconciliation and peace between Jews and Christians, and he pledged (March 2000) that the Catholic Church would do everything possible to ensure that it was not just a dream but a reality.
First acts of reconciliation
One of John Paul's first acts of reconciliation was to pay a visit to the synagogue in Rome in 1986. (His predecessor, John XXIII had stopped his car outside the synagogue once to bless people leaving the sabbath service.) In 1993, the Vatican gave diplomatic recognition to Israel, and in 1998 he formally apologised for the failure of Catholics to help Jews during the Holocaust.
The apology in March 1998 also acknowledged that Christian anti-semitism might have made Nazi persecution of the Jews easier. The Pope described the Holocaust as "an indelible stain on the 20th century." But many Jewish organisations felt that the apology did not go far enough.
In March 2000 he apologised for wrongs inflicted on Jews down the ages, although he did not explicitly mention the Holocaust.
Visit to Israel, March 2000
During his visit to Israel John Paul said:
We hope that the Jewish people will acknowledge that the Church utterly condemns anti-Semitism and every form of racism as being altogether opposed to the principles of Christianity.
We must work together to build a future in which there will be no more anti-Judaism among Christians or anti-Christian sentiment among Jews.
John Paul II during visit to the Chief Rabbis of Israel, March 2000
As Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth, and love, and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place.John Paul II during visit to Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, March 2000
But although the Pope called for a new relationship between the Christian and Jewish faiths based on their common roots, he stopped short of the apology many Israelis had sought for the silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust. Nor did he condemn explicitly the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
For many, Jew and Catholic alike, the longed-for apology was acted out, even if not spoken, when the Pope walked in the footsteps of uncounted millions of Jews to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and put a prayer for forgiveness and togetherness into the wall...
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 asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant.
Pope John Paul II's prayer at the Western Wall
Mixed messages
Some of John Paul's actions have brought criticism from Jewish groups.
He did not shun the Austrian president, Kurt Waldheim, despite much public disquiet about his role in war crimes.
Many commentators thought that John Paul's apology in Israel did not go far enough, but any stronger apology would have implied criticism of the wartime Pope, Pius XII, and popes do not criticise other popes.
Choice of saints
John Paul was heavily criticised for some of his choices for sainthood.
Pius XII is on the road to sainthood, despite much criticism of his failure to take strong enough action against Nazi anti-semitism.
Nor was Pius XII the only controversial papal candidate for canonisation. Pius IX, pope between 1846 and 1878, was notoriously anti-Semitic: he had forced the Jews of Rome into a ghetto, baptised their children by force, and restricted their rights. He is also accused of kidnapping a Jewish child and raising him as his own son. Some people saw John Paul's apology to the Jews as hypocritical in the context of the Vatican decision to beatify Pius IX.
Another controversial candidate for sainthood whom John Paul II beatified was the Croatian wartime Archbishop, Cardinal Stepinac, whom Jewish groups accuse of collaborating with the Nazi regime in Croatia.
Jews were also offended by the canonisation of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a nun and died in Auschwitz. It was the first occasion since Bible times that a Jewish-born person had been made a saint, but Jewish groups claimed that she had been killed for her Jewish origins, and not as a martyr to her Catholic faith - the reason for her canonisation.
Another controversial saint was Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan monk who died at Auschwitz in the place of another prisoner who had been condemned to death. Kolbe had edited an anti-semitic magazine in Poland before the war.
Abortion and the Holocaust
In 2005 the Pope was involved in controversy when his new book controversially compared abortion and the Holocaust. In his fifth book, Memory and Identity, he said both were the result of governments clashing with divine law.
The Pope wrote that both abortion and the mass murder of six million Jews came about as a result of people usurping the "law of God" beneath the guise of democracy.
It was a legally elected parliament which allowed for the election of Hitler in Germany in the 1930s...
We have to question the legal regulations that have been decided in the parliaments of present day democracies. The most direct association which comes to mind is the abortion laws...
Parliaments which create and promulgate such laws must be aware that they are transgressing their powers and remain in open conflict with the law of God and the law of nature.
John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005
The president of Germany's Central Council for Jews, Paul Spiegel, linked the remarks to statements by Roman Catholic Cardinal Joachim Meisner in January comparing abortions to the repressions of Hitler and Stalin. "The Catholic Church does not understand or does not want to understand that there is an enormous difference between mass genocide and what women do with their bodies."
But Cardinal Josef Ratzinger - the man who later became Pope Benedict XVI - said John Paul II was not equating abortion with the Holocaust.
"He calls our attention to the permanent temptations for humanity, and on the need to take care not to fall into the pitfalls of evil," the cardinal said at the book launch.