In the years that followed this dramatic statement, John Paul had tried to meet Jewish concerns about the Carmelite convent in Oswięcim, and worked to keep the memory of the Shoah alive in the center of world Catholicism. On April 7, 1994, he had hosted a Holocaust Memorial Concert in the Paul VI Audience Hall. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was conduced by Gilbert Levine, a Brooklyn-born American Jew whom John Paul had befriended after he became music director of the Kraków Philharmonic in 1987. The Pope sat in the audience hall side by side with the chief rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff, and Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfero. Rabbi Toaff had brought his congregation with him, the first time that many had been inside the Vatican except as tourists. Two hundred Holocaust survivors from twelve different countries attended, along with diplomats from all over the world.54
John Paul’s call for the Church to cleanse its conscience on the edge of the third millennium certainly included a reckoning with anti-Jewish Christian prejudice and its historical effects during Christianity’s first 2,000 years. At a Roman theological symposium on “The Roots of Anti-Semitism in Christianity,” sponsored in October 1997 by the Theology-History Commission of the Committee for the Great Jubilee of 2000, the Pope acknowledged that “erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their presumed guilt circulated for too long” and had “contributed to a lulling of consciences” among Christians. The results were clear in living memory. During World War II, “when Europe was swept by the wave of persecutions inspired by a pagan anti-Semitism that in its essence was equally anti-Christian,” there had been a failure of “spiritual resistance” by too many Christians. The past had to be revisited, he concluded, in order to purify memories and to prepare a future in which it would be universally recognized that “anti-Semitism is without any justification and is absolutely condemnable.”55
During the 1990s, as John Paul continued to underscore his abhorrence of the Holocaust and his determination to come to grips with the history of Catholic anti-Jewish prejudice, the Holy See’s Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews worked on the official Catholic document on the Shoah that had been promised during the emergency meeting between Catholic and Jewish leaders in 1987, in the wake of the papal audience for Austrian President Kurt Waldheim.56 Eleven years later, on March 16, 1998, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah was finally published. Another controversy immediately ensued.
We Remember described the Shoah as an “unspeakable tragedy” and a “horrible genocide” before which “no one can remain indifferent, least of all the Church, by reason of her very close bonds with the Jewish people and her remembrance of the injustices of the past.” The document acknowledged that, while “the Jewish people have suffered much at different times and in many places” because of their “unique witness to the Holy One of Israel and to the Torah,” the Holocaust “was certainly the worst suffering of all.” The fact that it took place “in countries of long-standing Christian civilization” demanded an examination of conscience on the relationship between the Nazis’ “Final Solution” and “the attitudes down the centuries of Christians toward the Jews.”
Nazi ideology, the document argued, “refused to acknowledge any transcendent reality as the source of life and the criterion of moral good.” Nazi anti-Semitism was also fueled by “pseudo-scientific” theories of racial superiority and inferiority and by “extremist forms of nationalism.” All three of those planks in the ideological platform of German National Socialism—its atheism, racism, and violent nationalism—were anti-Christian as well as anti-Jewish. Thus, the document proposed, a distinction had to be made between this kind of racist anti-Semitism, which rejected “the constant teaching of the Church on the unity of the human race and on the equal dignity of all races and peoples,” and the longstanding “sentiments of mistrust and hostility” that were the basis of Christian “anti-Judaism.” Nevertheless, “it may be asked whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts.” Did historic anti-Jewish prejudice make Christians “less sensitive, even indifferent, to the persecutions launched against the Jews by National Socialism… ?”
We Remember urged that Christians who had risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Shoah not be forgotten. The fact that some resisted, however, did not alter the fact that “the spiritual resistance and concrete action of other Christians was not that which might have been expected from Christ’s followers.” Retrospective moral judgment on what others should have done under the extreme conditions of life in a totalitarian state was not an easy business, the document suggested. Still, the Shoah and the failure of Christian witness during it had left a “heavy burden of conscience” on Christians today that required making “an act of… teshuvah,” or profound repentance, “since, as members of the Church, we are linked to the sins as well as the merits of all her children.” Finally, the Church wished “to turn awareness of past sins into a firm resolve to build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Judaism among Christians or anti-Christian sentiment among Jews, but rather a shared mutual respect, as befits those who adore the one Creator and Lord and have a common father in faith, Abraham.”
Critics of the document compared it unfavorably to a 1995 statement of the German Bishops’ Conference, which admitted a “co-responsibility” for the tragedy of the Holocaust, and a 1997 French bishops’ statement that had asked Jewish forgiveness for Christian failures in the defense of Jews during the German occupation of France. A lengthy footnote in We Remember, defending Pope Pius XII’s actions during the war, was heavily criticized; the executive director of the World Jewish Congress, Elan Steinberg, welcomed the “positive elements [in] the document” while deploring “the gratuitous defense of the silence of Pius XII.” The document’s sharp distinction between Nazi anti-Semitism and Christian anti-Judaism also came under fire, as critics argued that We Remember did not take sufficient account of how historic Christian anti-Jewish prejudices had created the cultural conditions for acquiescence, tacit or overt, to Nazi anti-Semitism; Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem essentially dissolved the distinction by charging that the document “does not unequivocally take responsibility for the teachings of the Church that created the atmosphere that ultimately led to the Holocaust, and to the participation of numerous ‘believing’ persons in that crime.” Still others made the document the occasion to engage in innuendo about John Paul II’s activities during the Occupation. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg described the wartime Karol Wojtyła as “a quiet young man who stayed out of trouble.” Rabbi Hertzberg, who had evidently not studied Wojtyła’s wartime activities very closely, nonetheless had “little doubt that he looks back on that period of his life and wishes he hadn’t lived quietly.”57
The blunt reaction of Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor and the Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel, that We Remember was “too little, too late” was not universally shared among Jewish leaders. Rabbi Jack Bemporad, a longtime leader in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue in the United States, called the document “spectacular,” while Rabbi David Rosen, the Jerusalem representative of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and its co-representative to the Vatican, took a measured line: the document was “a very important statement, but…disappointing in some respects.” No criticisms were registered of John Paul’s preface to We Remember, a letter to Cardinal Edward Cassidy, chairman of the Holy See’s Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews, which described the Shoah as an “unspeakable iniquity” and an “indelible stain on the history of the century that is coming to a close.” But the Pope’s “fervent hope” that We Remember “will indeed help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices” did not seem likely to be realized in the near term.
No fourteen-page document could have satisfactorily analyzed the complexities of 2,000 years of Jewish-Christian relations and their bearing on as complex a historic reality as Nazism
. The gist of the critical reactions to We Remember—that the Church had not “gone as far” as had been expected—suggested that the document suffered from a different kind of omission than its critics had identified.
Had it framed the entire question of Catholicism and the Shoah with a careful theological explanation of why the Church’s remembrance of, and repentance for, the past failures of its sons and daughters was a religious duty rather than a response to political or public pressure, We Remember might have helped deepen the entire debate about Christianity and the Shoah. The discussion of the Church and the Holocaust had too often become an exercise in which one side’s “concession” was regarded as another’s “gain.” This was precisely the model beyond which John Paul was trying to take the Jewish-Catholic dialogue. That intention did not seem sufficiently accounted for in drafting We Remember or among the officials of the Secretariat of State who did the final editing. Thus the deeper disappointment of We Remember was that it failed to set what will assuredly be a centuries-long discussion on a new, more theologically sophisticated, and more religiously compelling foundation.
Justification by Faith
During the mid-1990s, there was widespread expectation that years of ecumenical dialogue between Lutherans and Roman Catholics would result in a joint declaration on “justification by faith,” the core issue of the Lutheran Reformation. In that declaration, it was anticipated, the two communions would acknowledge that, whatever the disagreements of the sixteenth century, they shared common convictions about justification by faith today. And while they might express those convictions somewhat differently, the question of justification should no longer constitute a Church-dividing issue. Such a joint declaration would mark one of the great accomplishments of modern ecumenism.
On June 25, 1998, the text of a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification was released by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. At a press conference, the Council’s president, Cardinal Edward Cassidy, stressed the Joint Declaration’s statement that it represented “a consensus on basic truths concerning the doctrine of justification,” and on the relationship of faith to good works, in the scheme of salvation. That same day, however, the Holy See issued a Response of the Catholic Church to the Joint Declaration of the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation on the Doctrine of Justification, which had been jointly prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
The Response suggested that further clarification on the doctrine of justification and its relationship to other basic truths of Christian faith was required. The second part of the Joint Declaration had laid out the ways in which Lutherans and Catholics understood aspects of the doctrine of justification differently. In the Joint Declaration, for example, Lutherans stated that, from their perspective, “sin still lives” in human beings immediately after their conversion and baptism. As the Response indicated, this was not a position that Catholics could accept, even as a distinctive Lutheran interpretation of a common understanding of justification, for it seemed to deny that God acts through the sacraments in ways that really change a person. It was necessary, the Response said, for this and other matters to be more thoroughly clarified.
Lutherans were not happy with what seemed, at least through media reports, to be Catholic reneging. One ecumenical veteran went so far as to suggest that the Holy See had “betrayed” Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologians, and predicted that it would take decades to reestablish the trust that had been shattered. Cardinal Cassidy wrote Dr. Ismael Noko, Secretary-General of the Lutheran World Federation [LWF] on July 30, reiterating—and underlining in his letter—that “there is a consensus in basic truths on the doctrine of justification.” Cassidy suggested that the reaction to the Response in some Lutheran circles had been exaggerated, and that there were in fact “very few” clarifications required. Cassidy’s letter also stated that these clarifications “do not negate” the consensus on “basic truths of the doctrine of justification,” that the Church was prepared “to affirm and sign the Joint Declaration,” and that there were no “major problems” impeding “further study and a more complete presentation” of the truths of the doctrine of justification.
Dr. Noko wrote the executive committee of the LWF on August 20, enclosing Cassidy’s letter, which, he said, “introduces a new perspective on how to read, understand, and interpret” the Response. At its meeting of November 13–14, Noko indicated, the LWF executive committee would try to determine what the next Lutheran step in the now-threatened process should be. Meanwhile, as a result of private discussions between Cardinals Cassidy and Ratzinger and key Lutheran theologians and officials, the Holy See had proposed that the issue be resolved by attaching an agreed “annex” to the Joint Declaration. The annex would clarify in a definitive way the concerns that had been raised in the Response while emphasizing that those concerns did not invalidate the consensus on “the basic truths of justification.”
The annex was eventually hammered out, and the necessary clarifications were made on the questions of the enduring human propensity to sin, on human cooperation with God’s saving grace, and on the necessity of locating the doctrine of justification within the broader scheme of Christian belief. A further “Official Common Statement” by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church made clear what the two partners understood the Joint Declaration to mean: “The teaching of the Lutheran Churches presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations of the Council of Trent. The condemnations in the Lutheran Confessions do not apply to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church presented in this Declaration.” After Pope John Paul II gave his personal agreement to the clarifications in the annex, it was announced that the Joint Declaration would be signed by Lutheran and Roman Catholic representatives in Augsburg on October 31, 1999— Reformation Sunday.
The process had been much more difficult than anticipated. But Cardinal Ratzinger believed that the difficulties during the summer of 1998 would lead, over time, to a deepened theological dialogue. What had seemed for several months to be a new crisis in the most theologically developed of the ecumenical dialogues turned out to be the unexpected prologue to a historic accomplishment.58
RESTRUCTURING
John Paul II’s preparations for the Great Jubilee of 2000 and for the Church’s life in the twenty-first century were organizational as well as theological. In February 1996, he revamped the rules for the election of a pope. Several months later, John Paul began the third major reorganization of curial personnel in the pontificate, a process that continued through 1998. At the same time, several major episcopal appointments and the Pope’s seventh consistory for the appointment of new cardinals signaled the kind of leadership he hoped would make possible a springtime of evangelization and witness in the first decades of the new millennium.
Electing a Pope
On February 22, 1996, Bernini’s bronze masterpiece, the “Altar of the Chair” in the apse of St. Peter’s Basilica, was ablaze with three-foot-tall tapers, an annual spectacular marking the feast of the Chair of St. Peter. That same day, John Paul signed the apostolic constitution Universi Dominici Gregis [The Shepherd of the Lord’s Whole Flock], which made several important changes in the way papal elections would be conducted in the future.
John Paul designed Universi Dominici Gregis so that the rules governing future conclaves would reflect the fully internationalized situation of the post–Vatican II College of Cardinals and the exigencies of a contemporary papal election. Reams of commentary since the “year of three popes” in 1978 had created the image of a papal conclave as, essentially, a political exercise. John Paul, no naïf about ecclesiastical politics, nonetheless wished to foster conditions under which the inevitable politics involved in electing a pope would be of a different character than the politics of a party convention. The politics of a papal election, according to Universi Dominici Gregis, should have the character of a reli
gious retreat, marked by a common sense of purpose and moral responsibility, under the judgment of God.
The conclave to elect John Paul II’s successor will be in his debt in one very human way: it will be far more comfortably situated than its predecessors. For centuries, the Apostolic Palace had been carved up into cubicles during the interregnum between a pope’s death and the opening of the conclave to elect his successor; the cardinal-electors lived during the conclave in these makeshift roomettes, all of which were furnished with chamber pots but few of which had running water, until their work was finished. Now, with the completion of a new Vatican guest house, the thoroughly modern Domus Sanctae Marthae [St. Martha’s House] behind the Paul VI Audience Hall, more suitable quarters, featuring two-room suites with private baths, were available. The first major change mandated in Universi Dominici Gregis was the use of the Domus Sanctae Marthae as the cardinal-electors’ residence and refectory during the conclave. The actual election would continue to take place in the Sistine Chapel—a place, John Paul wrote, “where everything is conducive to an awareness of the presence of God, in whose sight each person will one day be judged.”59
As in the past, access to the cardinal-electors during a conclave would be strictly limited to the requisite conclave staff. John Paul underscored that the electors should have no contact “with persons outside the area where the election is taking place” (i.e., the Sistine Chapel, the Domus Sanctae Marthae, and the various places where conclave liturgies were celebrated). A contemporary note was struck when Universi Dominici Gregis ordered that the conclave areas should be swept by “two trustworthy technicians” to prevent bugging. The cardinal-electors themselves were strictly forbidden from making audio or visual recordings of the proceedings.60
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