We Jews have every reason to be pleased with the arrival of Pope
Benedict XVI. John Paul II was the best pope in history as far as
Catholic-Jewish relations are concerned; Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
played an important role in building that legacy, and as pope can
be expected to carry it on.
Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, said
Tuesday that the new pontiff is “our most serious partner in the
Catholic Church, and he has been for the last 26 years,” crediting
him as a key force behind the Vatican’s recognition of Israel in
1993 and John Paul II’s atonement at the Western Wall in Jerusalem
in 2000 — an act that affirmed the validity of a uniquely Jewish
method of communication with God, placing a written prayer in a
crack of the wall. “I believe that he is the man who created the
theological underpinnings for the good relations between Catholics
and Jews during the last papacy,” said Singer of Ratzinger. “He
writes what’s kosher and what’s not kosher for Catholics. He said,
‘Not only is it kosher to like Jews, but it’s kosher to like the
state of Israel.’”
But some people can’t be satisfied. Michael Lerner, the San
Francisco Rabbi who edits the lefty Jewish bimonthly
Tikkun, greeted the “Habemus Papam” announcement with an
unhinged rant on the tikkun.org website, declaring that
“The New Pope is a Disaster for the World and for the Jews.”
Throughout, Lerner pretends to speak for all Jews. He writes
that “Jews have a powerful stake and commitment in ending global
poverty and oppression,” as if we all agreed that his prescriptions
could accomplish that, and that “it was with great distress that we
watched as Cardinal Ratzinger led the Vatican in the past
twenty-five years on a path that opposed providing birth control
information to the poor of the world, thereby ensuring that AIDS
would spread and kill millions in Africa,” as if we all ascribed to
Rome such mystical powers over a continent filled not only with
Catholics but with Protestants, Muslims, and animists. If Lerner
means “leftists,” he oughtn’t write “Jews.”
This pope has been a menace to the world since “the days in
which he served in the Nazi army,” according to Lerner, who is
mangling the facts. Ratzinger wasn’t an SS officer, he was a
conscript in the regular German Army — and he deserted. Yes, he
was a member of the Hitler Youth, as was compulsory at the time,
and like most Germans he did little to resist Nazism. But no less
vigilant (some would say alarmist) an observer of gentiles’
attitudes toward Jews as Anti-Defamation League national director
Abraham Foxman has noted that Ratzinger has “never denied the past,
never hid it. His whole life has been atonement for those few
years. His whole life is an open book of sensitivity against
bigotry and anti-Semitism.” On the Church’s behavior during the
Holocaust, Lerner claims that “Ratzinger has sought to whitewash
this disgraceful moment in Church history.” Not true. Ratzinger
strongly condemned Christian complicity in the Holocaust head on in
a 2000 column for L’Osservatore Romano: “It cannot be
denied that a certain insufficient resistance to this atrocity on
the part of Christians can be explained by an inherited
anti-Judaism present in the hearts of not a few Christians,” he
wrote.
It’s easy to see why a liberal Catholic would object to Benedict
XVI for “his role as the leader of the forces that suppressed the
liberatory aspects of Vatican II,” as Lerner puts it. But why on
Earth is a rabbi inserting himself into doctrinal disputes among
Catholics? No rearrangement of the details changes the
fundamentals, after all. As Jews, we believe that Christians
worship a false Messiah. We usually don’t put it like that, just as
Christians don’t normally make a habit of instructing us on what
sort of postmortem nastiness they believe we have in store. But we
all know the score, don’t we?
Perhaps not. Lerner seems to think Jews should be deeply worried
that the Pope believes exclusively in Christianity — that he
“publicly critiques all those inside the Church who are tolerant
enough to think that other religions may have equal validity as a
path to God.” This, in Lerner’s mind, is “a slippery slope toward
anti-Semitism and a return to the chauvinistic and triumphalist
views that led the Church, when it had the power to do so, to
develop its infamous crusades and inquisitions.” Lerner goes on to
denounce Ratzinger’s views on Hinduism and Buddhism (i.e., that
Catholicism is better than either of them).
One might be tempted to ask who’s on the slippery slope toward
anti-Semitism here. The fear that attempting to convert gentiles to
Judaism would provoke an anti-Semitic backlash, after all, is a
primary reason for Jews’ traditional reluctance to proselytize. And
yet here’s Rabbi Lerner, proselytizing not merely for Judaism but
for everything and nothing. Indeed, the ecumenical leftism he seems
to be advocating has little to do with Judaism per se at all.
Lerner rightly blasted his own comrades when they banned him
from speaking at an antiwar rally two years ago for the crime of
believing that Israel has a right to exist. There, on the fringe of
the Left, is the place to watch out for the ugly head of Jew-hatred
to be reared. From the philo-Semitic Pope Benedict XVI, we have no
such thing to fear.
