One of the first official acts of the newly installed Pope
Francis was to reach out to the Jewish community of Rome, as his
predecessor Pope Benedict had done, and he is being greeted warmly by
many Jewish leaders worldwide. For most of the last 1,500 years, though,
Catholic-Jewish relations have not been so warm. In fact, there was a
time when the Catholic Church was rocked with a scandal: It was alleged
that the Pope himself was Jewish.
But that was almost 1,000 years ago, and the first order of business
is to note how well received Pope Francis has been by Jews around the
world.
The Religions News Services
reported on March 14
th
that “Jews worldwide see an ally in Pope Francis,” pointing “in
particular to his sympathetic and strong reaction to the 1994 bombing of
a Jewish center in his native Argentina -- the deadliest bombing in the
country’s history.”
Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome, said, “As far as I have
heard and read in the few minutes since he was elected pope, he has
shown deep signs of respect and friendship towards the Jews. It’s a good
starting point.”
According to Rabbi David Rosen, international director of
interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, as Cardinal
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis “has had a
warm relationship with the Jewish community of Argentina, and enjoyed
close friendships with many prominent rabbis.”
And David Novak, a professor of Jewish Studies and philosophy at the
University of Toronto, expressed his hopes that Francis would improve
“on his predecessor’s prioritization of Jewish-Catholic relations,”
pointing back to the papacy of John Paul II as the highest point
achieved in these relations. It was John Paul who recognized the State
of Israel in 1997 and was the first pope “to visit Auschwitz, to bless
Israel, and to apologize for Christian acts against Jews.”
“If the Catholics don’t canonize him,” Novak said, “the Jews should.”
Sentiments like this, of course, were not always the norm for the
Catholic Church and the Synagogue (to put it mildly), as Matt, a
listener to my radio show, reminded me last week via email. With evident
passion, he told me that, “You Jews are Christ-killers on the road to
eternal condemnation,” referring to me as a “blasphemer and murder[er]
of the Lord God Jesus Christ.” (This is because I am both Jewish and a
follower of Jesus, but in Matt’s mind, the former must cancel out the
latter.)
He also noted that, “There is Absolutely No Salvation Outside of the
Catholic Church you killer of God Lord Jesus Christ.” To back up his
vitriol, he supplied a series of apparently anti-Semitic quotes from
previous popes, including Pope Clement VIII, Pope Innocent IV, Pope
Gregory IX, and Pope Saint Pius V.
I honored his hard work and thoughtfulness (sarcasm intended) by
reading excerpts of his letter on the air, which, I imagine, gave him
further assurance of my alleged perfidy. Perhaps I should have offered
to send him a free copy of my book
Our Hands Are Stained with Blood,
written in 1992 but continuously in print since then, outlining the
horrible history of “Christian” anti-Semitism. (But wait. I have a
sneaking suspicion that he might not be looking for dialogue. And it
turns out the website he links in his email warns against Pope Francis
too!)
Putting Matt’s email aside, there really have been many tragic
episodes in Catholic-Jewish history, some of them deadly (think of the
Crusades and the Inquisitions; Catholics, of course, do not have a
monopoly on persecuting Jews in Jesus’ name, just to be fair). But there
is one episode that might be the most telling of them all.
In the 1130’s, there were two rival popes, Anacletus II and Innocent
II, and it seems that the most serious charge brought against Anacletus
was that he was Jewish. How could this be? A Jewish pope? The
Jewish Encyclopedia
noted that Bernard of Clairvaux, a zealous supporter of Innocent,
“poured forth his indignation in a vehement epistle to Lothaire, to the
effect that ‘to the shame of Christ a man of Jewish origin was come to
occupy the chair of St. Peter.’”
What? Did Bernard forget that Peter himself was a Jew, as were Paul
and all the other apostles? (This is not the place to debate whether
Peter was the first pope; for the record, I reject that he was.) Did
Bernard forget that Christ himself was a Jew (“Christ” is simply the
Greek way of saying “Messiah”) and that his mother’s name was actually
Miriam, not Mary?
Catholics around the world are embracing the fact that, for the first
time, a Jesuit has been installed as pope, something far less dramatic
than having a Jewish pope. But from a Catholic perspective, that has
already happened, not once, but twice, first with Peter and then with
Anacletus.
I wonder how the Jewish world would react if the next pope turned out
to be a Jew as well? For that matter, I wonder how the Catholic world
would react. Talk about a story worthy of the news!
