New pope hailed for strong Jewish ties

By David Brinn

The choice of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new pope on Tuesday, Jewish religious leaders say, is a sign that the warming ties initiated by Pope John Paul II between the Vatican and Jews will continue.

The Roman Catholic Church's leading conservative, the German Ratzinger was elected the new pope in the first conclave of the new millennium by cardinals intent on sticking to conservative policy. Ratzinger is the first Germanic pope in roughly 1,000 years.

"His election is confirmation of the cardinals on the issue of continuity," Rabbi David Rosen told The Jerusalem Post Tuesday. "There's not a single issue in which the new pope will not be in complete accord with his predecessor. After all, his predecessor appointed him to the most important theological post in the Catholic Church.

"This continuity will be reflected in Catholic-Jewish relations. He has a deep commitment to this issue. And his own national background makes him sensitive to the dangers of anti-Semitism and the importance of Jewish-Catholic reconciliation," said Rosen, the international director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

"He was also supportive of the establishment of full relations between the Holy See and Israel, and he cares deeply about the welfare of the State of Israel," added Rosen.

Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, called Ratzinger the architect of the policy that John Paul II fulfilled with regard to relations with the Jews.

"He is the architect of the ideological policy to recognize, to have full relations with Israel," Singer said.

In one indication of his respect for Judaism, Ratzinger authorized in 2002 the publication of a report that stated that "the Jewish messianic wait is not in vain." That document also expressed regret that certain passages in the Christian Bible condemning individual Jews have been used to justify anti-Semitism.

The 210-page document, titled "The Jewish People and the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible," says Jews and Christians share their wait for the Messiah, although Jews are waiting for the first coming and Christians for the second.

Upon his election, Ratzinger chose the name Pope Benedict XVI and called himself "a simple, humble worker." He emerged onto the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, where he waved to a wildly cheering crowd of tens of thousands and gave his first blessing as pope. Other cardinals, clad in their crimson robes, came out on other balconies to watch him after one of the fastest papal conclaves of the past century.

Pilgrims chanted "Benedict! Benedict!" as the church's 265th pontiff appeared.

"Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me – a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord," he said after being introduced by Chilean Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estivez.

The new pope had gone into the conclave with the most buzz among two dozen leading candidates. He had impressed many faithful with his stirring homily at the funeral of John Paul II, who died on April 2 at age 84.

White smoke poured from the Sistine Chapel and bells tolled earlier to announce the conclave had produced a pope. Flag-waving pilgrims in St. Peter's Square chanted: "Viva il Papa!" or "Long live the pope!" The bells rang after a confusing smoke signal that Vatican Radio initially suggested was black but then declared was too difficult to call. White smoke is used to announce a pope's election to the world.

It was one of the fastest elections in the past century.

"It's only been 24 hours, surprising how fast he was elected," Vatican Radio said, commenting on how the new pope was elected after just four or five ballots.

The timing, more than one hour before the end of the afternoon session, indicated that the pontiff may have been chosen on the fourth ballot, although it was not immediately known. Voting began Monday night with a single ballot, and there were two ballots to be held Tuesday morning and afternoon.

The cardinals took an oath of secrecy, meaning they are forbidden to divulge how the voting went. Under conclave rules, a winner needs two-thirds support, or 77 votes from the 115 cardinal electors.

Niels Hendrich, a 40-year-old salesman from Hamburg, Germany, jumped up and down with joy at St. Peter's and called his father on a cell phone. "Habemus papam!" he shouted into the phone, using the Latin for: "We have a pope."

Some have questioned whether the new pope was pro-Nazi during his teenage years in Germany during World War II.

In his memoirs, the new pope speaks openly of being enrolled in Hitler's Nazi youth movement against his will when he was 14 in 1941, when membership was compulsory. He writes that he was soon let out because of his studies for the priesthood.

Two years later, he was drafted into a Nazi anti-aircraft unit as a helper, a common fate for teenage boys too young to be soldiers. Enrolled as a soldier at 18, in the last months of the war, he barely finished basic training.

Ratzinger has several times gone on record about his "problematic" past. In the 1997 book Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger is asked if he was ever in the Hitler Youth.

"At first we weren't," he says, speaking of himself and his older brother. "But when the compulsory Hitler Youth was introduced in 1941, my brother was obliged to join. I was still too young, but later as a seminarian I was registered in the Hitler Youth. As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back. And that was difficult because the tuition reduction, which I really needed, was tied to proof of attendance at the Hitler Youth.

"Thank goodness there was a very understanding mathematics professor. He himself was a Nazi, but an honest man, and said to me, 'Just go once to get the document so we have it...' When he saw that I simply didn't want to, he said, 'I understand, I'll take care of it' and so I was able to stay free of it."

In Traunstein, the southern German town where the pope had studied for the priesthood decades before, 13-year-old boys at St. Michael's seminary jumped up and down, cheered and clapped as the news was announced.

"It's fantastic that it's Cardinal Ratzinger. I met him when he was here before and I found him really nice," said Lorenz Gradl, 16, who was confirmed by Ratzinger in 2003.

"We are certain that he will continue on the path of reconciliation between Christians and Jews that John Paul II began," Paul Spiegel, head of Germany's main Jewish organization, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Throughout his service in the church, Ratzinger has distinguished himself in the field of Jewish-Catholic relations. As prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger played an instrumental role in the Vatican's revolutionary reconciliation with the Jews under John Paul II. He personally prepared Memory and Reconciliation, the 2000 document outlining the church's historical "errors" in its treatment of Jews.

Abraham H. Foxman, Anti-Defamation League National Director, said that having lived through World War II, Ratzinger has great sensitivity to Jewish history and the Holocaust.

"He has shown this sensitivity countless times, in meetings with Jewish leadership and in important statements condemning anti-Semitism and expressing profound sorrow for the Holocaust. We remember with great appreciation his Christmas reflections on December 29, 2000, when he memorably expressed remorse for the anti-Jewish attitudes that persisted through history, leading to 'deplorable acts of violence' and the Holocaust.

"Cardinal Ratzinger said: 'Even if the most recent, loathsome experience of the Shoah (Holocaust) was perpetrated in the name of an anti-Christian ideology, which tried to strike the Christian faith at its Abrahamic roots in the people of Israel, 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.'"

Ratzinger's grasp of Judaism is reflected by this passage from that document.

"I think we could say that two things are essential to Israel's faith. The first is the Torah, commitment to God's will, and thus the establishment of his dominion, his kingdom, in this world. The second is the prospect of hope, the expectation of the Messiah – the expectation, indeed the certainty, that God himself will enter into this history and create justice, which we can only approximate very imperfectly. The three dimensions of time are thus connected: obedience to God's will bears on an already spoken word that now exists in history and at each new moment has to be made present again in obedience. This obedience, which makes present a bit of God's justice in time, is oriented toward a future when God will gather up the fragments of time and usher them as a whole into his justice."

Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks congratulated Ratzinger on his election Tuesday, saying, "We hope that he will continue along the path of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II in working to enhance relations with the Jewish people and the State of Israel."

Welcoming Benedict XVI

Johann Christoph Arnold


I happened to be on the road when the first broadcasts announced the election of a new Pope, and I pricked up my ears when I heard who it was: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now known as Benedict XVI. I have known this man for nearly a decade. As a non-Catholic and on behalf of the Bruderhof Communities, I want to extend to him my best wishes and congratulations, and to let him know that he will be in our prayers in the busy days to come.

My friendship with Brother Joseph, as I called him right from the start, began when I presented him with my book Sex, God, and Marriage in 1995. Already then, we formed a common bond when he wrote to me:

I was glad to deliver your manuscript to the Holy Father. He was very happy for this ecumenical gesture and, more than that, for the contents and for the harmony of moral conviction that springs from our common faith in Christ. Such conviction will inevitably arouse hatred, and even persecution. The Lord has predicted it. But with Him we must continue in trying to overcome evil through good.

Since that first meeting ten years ago, I have met him three more times—one of those times just by chance, on a street outside the Vatican, where we immediately recognized one another and ended up speaking for several minutes.

On another encounter I was told that he was not well and would have only a few minutes for me; that he was tired and might seem inattentive due to his physical condition. We had come to Rome with a delegation from the United States and Germany to talk about the role of the Catholic Church in the persecution of Anabaptists four hundred years earlier. Much of this persecution had occurred right in the area of Munich, where Ratzinger comes from, and our delegation included people whose forefathers had been burned at the stake.

At first he did seem tired, but as our conversation progressed, he became more and more attentive, and I will never forget how by the end of the meeting, he had tears in his eyes, and how he encouraged us with words of love and reconciliation: “When hatred can be overcome and forgiveness be given, that is the work of the Holy Spirit. Then we know that we are in Christ.”

It is just this message that the world needs today. With the many challenges that face him now—from poverty and AIDS in the developing world to sex scandals in the United States and the decline of faith in Europe and America, the church needs a man like Ratzinger. Clearly he is not popular in some circles: many prayed and hoped for someone more lenient, someone who would give in to their wishes and complaints. But in selecting Ratzinger the cardinals made a brave and bold choice, because the answers to the challenges and crises of our present age will not be found in compromise, but in returning to the simple and age-old truths of Jesus.

Cardinal Ratzinger with the writer's daughter, Annemarie Keiderling, and her son, T. J., in Rome, June 1995.

The press has been quick to characterize Ratzinger as an inflexible and mean-spirited theologian, but I know him to be different. On one visit to him I was accompanied by one of my first grandsons, a boy who is healthy now but who had been born prematurely and had a very rough beginning. I asked Brother Joseph to bless him, and he is now a strapping fourth grader who throws a ball, plays chess, and proudly strums on a guitar. Who knows how much the heartfelt prayer of this old man helped?

I cannot agree with the new Pope on every point—for example, on his views of liberation theology—but I still respect and admire him. I have always tried to see the best in others, and I believe that the only way to effect change is by uniting with each other in what is positive.

The writer with Cardinal Ratzinger and Traudl Wallbrecher of the Integrierte Gemeinde, a Catholic community in Munich (Rome, June 1995).

People think that the Church can give them peace and freedom by releasing them from every obligation of marriage, family, and education; by throwing away as old-fashioned any reverence for the holiest moments of living and dying. But Jesus offers us a far better way, as Ratzinger so eloquently said when I met with him in Rome in 1995:

The church must renounce worldly principles and standards in order to accept the truth, and the way it must go will always lead to some form of martyrdom. It is important for us to realize that we cannot bring about unity by diplomatic maneuvers. The result would be a diplomatic structure based on human principles. Instead, we must open ourselves more and more to God. The unity that he brings about is the only true unity. Anything else is a political construction, and it will be as transitory as all such constructions are. This is the more difficult way, for in political maneuvering, people themselves are active and believe they can achieve something. But we must wait on God, and we must go to meet him by cleansing our hearts.

These are difficult words—as Ratzinger rightly says, following Jesus is a difficult way—but if we want lasting peace and unity, they point us to the only answer.