by Wyatt North
John Paul was able to further relations with a number of other leaders of Eastern Churches, including Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church; the Syrian Patriarch of Antioch, Mor Ignatius Zakka I; and the Venerable Patriarch of the Ethiopian Church, Abuna Paulos. He was also able to sign a common Christological declaration with the Assyrian Patriarch of the East, Mar Dinkha IV.
In May 1999, he visited Romania on the invitation of Patriarch Teoctist Arapasu of the Romanian Orthodox Church, the first time a pope had visited a predominantly Eastern Orthodox country since the so-called Great Schism in 1054. He followed this up with a visit in June 2001 to the Ukraine, where he spoke to leaders of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations.
To his disappointment, the Russian Orthodox Church continued to be resistant to Vatican overtures, and he was never able to visit either Russia or Belorus. At the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where each Church has staked out its inch of turf and hostilities are open and raw, the aged Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, Diodorus, personally kept the pope from using the main entrance.
Nevertheless, John Paul was willing to endure personal humiliation for the sake of his goal. In 2001, he visited Greece, becoming the first pope to visit in nearly 1300 years. Archbishop Christodoulos, the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church, had been pressured by his government into receiving the pope, and he wasn’t happy about it. The Archbishop observed that many of his faithful were opposed to the pope being there, and he presented John Paul with a list of “thirteen offences” made by the Catholic Church against the Orthodox Church since the Great Schism, including the horrible sack of Christian Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204. The Archbishop then pointed out that no apology had ever been made for any of these offences. John Paul then asked for pardon. The delighted Archbishop clapped his hands. (Actually, he had been told before the trip that the pope planned to apologize.) Thereafter, the two issued a joint statement that included a condemnation of violence in the name of religion, and they prayed the Lord’s Prayer together in private, breaking an Orthodox prohibition on praying with Catholics.
Meeting with such far-flung figures gave the pope a joy somewhat analogous to the biblical ingathering of the exiles.
John Paul II and Buddhism
In 1984, the pope conducted Mass in Bangkok, Thailand, where he praised “the fruits of the ‘peaceable’ and ‘gentle’ wisdom” of Thai Buddhism and the “spiritual quality” of the Thai people. Similarly, during a visit to Sri Lanka in 1995, the pope spoke of his high regard for Buddhists and the virtues of Buddhism, and he affirmed his desire for interreligious dialogue and cooperation.
John Paul he met with the fourteenth Dalai Lama eight times. Since both religious leaders came from Communist-repressed societies, it was to be expected they would have much to discuss. Nevertheless, the Vatican tended to downplay such meetings because of its desire to improve relations with China, a fact the Dalai Lama understood and acknowledged. While most Catholics considered these meetings emblematic of the pope’s expansive heart, rejectionist Catholics who deny Vatican II saw it simply as more cavorting by the “anti-pope” with pagans and idolaters.
Even so, in his 1994 book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he counseled the faithful against incorporating seemingly innocuous Buddhist elements into their personal practices, and he emphasized the differences between Catholicism and Buddhism. As described by John Paul, Christianity and Buddhism are opposing systems of belief. Both revolve around soteriology, but the salvation expressed in Buddhism is a “negative soteriology” seeking detachment from an evil world that causes only sorrow. In addition, the detachment achieved in Buddhism does not have the goal of bringing one closer to God. Thus, Buddhism’s focus is quite different and incompatible with Catholicism. He described Buddhism as being “in large measure an ‘atheistic’ system,” a characterization which some Buddhists found offensive. To soothe those offended, the pope later emphasized again his respect for Buddhism.
John Paul II and Islam
Many Muslims appreciated the overtures John Paul made to improve Catholic–Muslim dialogue. He was the first pope to visit an officially Islamic country at the invitation of its religious leader. This occurred in August 1985, when he visited Morocco at the behest of King Hassan II. During that visit, he enjoyed a visit with thousands of Muslim young people in Casablanca Stadium, emphasizing: “we believe in the same God, the one God, the living God.” In May 2001 he became the first pope in history to enter a mosque, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria, which had formerly been a Byzantine church. At the mosque, he said that Christians and Muslims had often offended one another and needed to offer each other forgiveness, a theme he repeated elsewhere as well.
In 1974, Pope Paul VI had created the Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims as a section within the Pontifical Council for non-Christians, which he had also established. In 1998, during the pontificate of John Paul, a Joint Committee was established between the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the Permanent Committee of al-Ahzar for Dialogue with Monotheistic Religions. The Islamic University of al-Azhar in Cairo is the highest religious institution in Egypt. The joint committee met at least once a year for a number of years, alternating between Cairo and in Rome. In 2000, the pope had a cordial meeting in Egypt with Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the well-respected Grand Imam of al-Azhar whose later denunciations of violence against Christians in Egypt were much appreciated by Christians. (Sheikh Tantawi died in 2010, and relations with the Vatican were suspended by his successor. Many other initiatives with the Muslim world, however, took place both before and after that date.) The annual papal message for World Peace Day, established by Pope Paul VI in 1968, continued to be regularly translated into Arabic, and John Paul continued the tradition begun by Paul VI of addressing an annual message of goodwill to all Muslims for the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
John Paul’s views concerning Islam were rooted in the statement on Islam in Nostra Aetate, which credits Islam with belief in the one God, valuing prayer, and esteeming morality. On numerous occasions, John Paul emphasized the commonality of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as spiritual descendants of Abraham sharing worship of the one God who created the world. He viewed that common witness as a key point of cohesion among the three monotheistic religions against an increasingly secular world. He particularly admired the Islamic fidelity to prayer since prayer was so central to his own life and spirituality, and he called it a model for Christians. He expressed the hope that dialogue would lead to improved knowledge and esteem between the two religions, but he also emphasized the need to renounce violence as a means for resolving any differences.
John Paul preached respect for the rights of Muslims to practice their faith, but he lamented that Christians did not have this right in countries like Saudi Arabia, where even the possession of a Bible is a crime. He was deeply concerned about the persecution of Christians in parts of Africa and Asia under Islamic religious law or influence, and he called for mutual respect and religious freedom in predominantly Muslim countries.
John Paul II and the Jewish People
The effort to improve and maintain Catholic–Jewish relations was a hallmark of John Paul’s pontificate. The realization of the loss of Poland’s Jewish community, including people who had been close to him, seemed to haunt John Paul.
The pope once referred to the Jews of Poland as having “lived arm in arm with us for generations” (Jasna Gora Meditation, September 26, 1990). Indeed, this was true. The Jews in Poland dated back to at least as early as the 10th century. Prior to World War II, Poland held the largest Jewish community in Europe, with 3.3 million Jews. Only 11% survived the war, approximately 369,000 people. A number of those who survived either did not return to Poland or managed to flee as refugees. By 1948, only 100,000 Jews remained in Poland. These, like the Catholics of Poland, had to cope with an anti-religious Communist regime.
During the Stalinist years, Jewis
h culture and religion were brutally suppressed. After Stalin’s death in 1953, there was the beginning of a Jewish cultural revival, and in the years 1958-59, Jews were permitted to emigrate to Israel but nowhere else. Fifty thousand availed themselves of the opportunity. The 1967 Six-Day War in Israel brought another round of suppression in Poland. Today, there are estimated to be only 5,000 to 10,000 Jews in Poland.
As a priest in Poland, Father Wojtila had counseled young Poles to visit and care for the abandoned Jewish cemeteries of Krakow, using it as an opportunity to educate them about the historic presence of the Jews now largely missing from Polish society. As Archbishop of Krakow, he maintained close relations with the surviving Jewish community of Krakow. As pope, however, John Paul was able to paint on a broader canvas.
While Archbishop Wojtila was in Rome participating in the Second Vatican Council, he was able to renew his friendship with his old friend Jerzy Kluger, who he found had survived the war after all, having joined the Polish army in exile. Jerzy had participated in the liberation of Italy from the Nazis and by coincidence was now living in Rome. (His grandmother, mother, and sister—well-known to young Karol Wojtila—had all been killed in the death camps. His father had also survived as an officer in the Polish army, ironically stationed in British-mandate Palestine.) It may be that becoming reacquainted with Jerzy drew interreligious issues back to the forefront of the pontiff’s thoughts, but they had never altogether left the concerns of this deep-thinking and compassionate man.
John Paul became the first pope to visit a Nazi death camp (Auschwitz in 1979), although he had done so earlier, in 1973, as a cardinal. He was the first pope since Saint Peter to visit a synagogue, the Great Synagogue of Rome, which occurred in 1986. In his speech at the Great Synagogue, he affirmed that Christianity had a uniquely close relationship with Judaism, calling Jews “dearly beloved brothers” and “elder brothers” (the latter reference citing the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, a favorite of the pope’s). In addition, he cited “the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, no. 16, referring to Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans (11:28-29), that the Jews are beloved of God, who has called them with an irrevocable calling.”
In 1987, the pope met with the Jewish leadership of Poland, where he called Jewish witness to the Holocaust (using the Hebrew term “Shoah”) a prophetic “warning voice for all humanity.” That same year, while in the United States, he called for Holocaust education to be integrated into every level of Catholic education. He further called for world recognition of the Jewish right “to a homeland.” In 1990, when meeting with the ambassador of the newly reunited Germany, he remarked: “For Christians the heavy burden of guilt for the murder of the Jewish people must be an enduring call to repentance.”
The reemergence of Israel as a state had for some time been doctrinally awkward for the Vatican, but in December 1993, the Vatican and Israel reached a Fundamental Agreement Between the Holy See and the State of Israel, and in 1994 finally exchanged ambassadors and normalized relations.
In his Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente (November 1994), John Paul had asked Catholics to prepare for the new millennium by examining occasions of Christian sinfulness. In response to that call, in 1998, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews promulgated a major document of self-examination, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, with an introduction by John Paul. Calling the Holocaust “a major fact of the history of this century,” it takes responsibility for the relationship between Nazism and the attitudes of Christians toward Jews down through the centuries. Accordingly, the importance of this document for Catholic self-evaluation cannot be overstated.
We Remember was followed in March 2000 by a Day of Pardon Mass, which included confession of sins against Israel. Later that month, the pope made a five-day pilgrimage to the State of Israel, where he visited Yad Vashem and also placed a prayer in the Western Wall in accordance with Jewish custom. The friendly style of that visit (the Israeli code name for the security operations during the visit was actually “Operation Old Friend”) was in marked contrast to the 11-hour visit by Paul VI in 1964, during which he never mentioned Israel by name and refused to address the Israeli president (Zalman Shazar) by his title.
There were numerous other occasions when John Paul met with representatives of Jewish communities in various parts of the world and spoke words of reconciliation.
Not everything the pope did found favor in the Jewish community. John Paul acknowledged that there would be times when Jewish and Catholic interests would not coincide. During his papacy, conflict revolved around three main issues: a group of Carmelite nuns who had located their convent at Auschwitz, audiences granted to people anathema to the Jewish community, and the candidacy for sainthood of Catholics who had been hostile to Jews in their lifetimes.
The controversy of longest duration involved the Auschwitz convent. There was a strong tendency in Poland to “de-judaize” the site, where approximately 1.3 million Jews died. The Polish government subsumed all peoples within the common classification of victims of fascism and failed to make any mention of Jews as particular targets for genocide. Tour guides of Auschwitz did not mention Jews, nor did the official guidebook to the museum. Then, in 1984, a group of Polish Catholic nuns moved into a two-story building that had been used by the Nazis to store the deadly Zyklon B gas used in the gas chambers. Sensitivities on both sides were inflamed. Finally, in 1993, on the fiftieth anniversary of the (Jewish) Warsaw ghetto uprising, the pope personally sent a letter to the Carmelite nuns telling them to move to a new property a short distance away which had been built for them and to which they had thus far refused to move. They complied.
The timing of two papal audiences was particularly unfortunate. Not all Christians were thrilled either when in 1982 PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat met with the pope. At the time it was assumed that it was Arafat’s minions 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 an
d 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.
