Pope Francis in the Middle East

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Pope Francis I visited Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank, and Israel in May. The three-day pilgrimage was his second trip outside Rome since becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.

In Bethlehem, Francis called for “a stable peace based on justice, on the recognition of the rights of every individual, and on mutual security,” and for intensified efforts for the creation of two states, Palestinian and Israeli, before moving on to Israel.

He also invited Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli and Palestinian presidents, to pay a symbolic visit to the Vatican to pray for peace.

To say that the Church historically had a contentious relationship with the Jewish people is an understatement.

For some two millennia, the Church considered itself the successor to the Biblical covenant between the Israelites and God and, as the “new Israel,” the proper heir to the “promised land.”

The Jewish people were doomed to a diasporic existence; their very lives would be circumscribed and they would remain at the mercy of their Christian neighbors.

Clearly, for the Church, the rise of Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, with its program of reconstituting a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, was theological anathema.

But the Zionist movement sought allies wherever it could find them, and the founder of the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, even made entreaties to the Vatican. In 1904, he asked Pope Pius X for help in his efforts to establish a modern Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish nation. Pius rejected the request.

At the time of the 1947 UN decision to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the Vatican expressed its support for Jerusalem to become a “corpus separatum” under an international regime. And when Pope Paul VI visited Israel 50 years ago he never once uttered the name of the Jewish state, preferring to call it the Holy Land. He avoided meeting with Israeli statesmen.

But things would begin to improve. “Nostra Aetate,” the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions,” was passed by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The document absolved the Jewish people as a whole of deicide: “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God,” it asserted.

This theological pivot led to a sea change in Church relations with the Jewish state, especially under John Paul II, the Polish pope. In 1985 the State of Israel was for the first time mentioned by name in a public Vatican document, and the Holy See established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993.

By 2000 John Paul had prayed at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. He met with the president, the prime minister and the chief rabbis of Israel. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI followed the same itinerary.

In February 2013, a papal conclave elected the Argentinian Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, as Benedict’s successor.

As archbishop, the future pope had cultivated closer relations with Argentina’s large Jewish community. He attended services at a synagogue in 2007 and told the congregation that he was there to examine his heart “like a pilgrim, together with you, my elder brothers.”

In 2012 he hosted a Kristallnacht memorial event at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, commemorating the Nazi destruction of Jewish lives and property in Germany in November 1938.

As Francis I, the pope has followed in the footsteps of his two predecessors. Addressing a delegation in Rome in June 2013, Pope Francis described “Nostra Aetate” as a “key point of reference” for Catholic relations with the Jewish people.

“A Christian cannot be anti-Semitic,” he declared, due to “our common roots” with the Jewish people. And he has praised the Jews for remaining faithful to God “despite the awful trials of these last centuries.”

In Jerusalem, Pope Francis laid a wreath on the grave of Theodor Herzl. The symbolism was evident to all.