Rabbis egg Benedict

Editorial

In the "friends like that" category, along comes a revival of the oldest blood feud in theological history, that of the Catholic Church against the Jews.

Since the 1960s – and especially under the authority of the late Pope John Paul II – Catholic-Jewish relations reached a 2,000-year peak. Last month, they saw a Wall Street-like drop. Was it the inevitable "correction"?

In January, Pope Benedict lifted two-decades-old excommunications from four bishops who are members of an arch-conservative group, the Society of Saint Pius X. One of these bishops is Richard Williamson, a Holocaust denier who maintains that the notorious anti-Semitic fable The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a factual historical record, but that the history of the Holocaust is not. Williamson, whose excommunication and rehabilitation were determined, evidently, in a vacuum from his despicable views of Jews, as recently as last month called the facts of the Shoah "lies, lies, lies." Williamson denies that any more than 300,000 Jews perished in that dark period and insists there were no gas chambers. In other news, Williamson contends that the Sept. 11 attacks were the work of the U.S. government. This week, Williamson apologized to the Pope – not for any of his intellectual atrocities, but because his ideas and words had caused controversy.

In apparently unprecedented internal dissent, senior Catholic clergy, particularly in Germany, are condemning Williamson's rehabilitation. One Catholic theologian went so far as to suggest that the Pope stand aside.

As a member of Hitler's Youth in his early years, Pope Benedict, the former Joseph Ratzinger, had a special obligation to demonstrate that he was not affected by, or had been rehabilitated from, his early associations. It was, on the one hand, hoped that the Pope might compensate for such suspicions by reaching out with extra compassion to the Jewish people. On the other hand, the world watched to see if the exceptional outreach begun by his predecessor was an institutional reform or the work of a single man.

Since the revolutionary changes of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which altered 2,000 years of theology, removing from the liturgy the prayer for the conversion of the Jews and rescinding the Church's millennia-old verdict of guilt against the Jewish people for the crime of deicide, relations between the Catholic church and the Jewish people have improved. Pope John Paul II had close personal and theological relations with individual Jews, from his best childhood friend to the chief rabbi of Rome, who was the first individual outside of Vatican officials to be notified of his passing.

The first signs that things were going off the rails was Benedict's reintroduction of the Tridentine Mass, which includes the odious prayer to bring Jews "from darkness to Catholicism."

It is also believed that Benedict is expediting the canonization, the process of bestowing sainthood, on Pope Pius XII, the Second World War-era pope whose actions during the Holocaust were not what one would have hoped from a moral leader. In defence of Pius, Benedict claimed Pius "acted in a secret and silent way because, given the realities of that complex historical moment, he realized that it was only in this way that he could avoid the worst and save the greatest possible number of Jews." Maybe.

Israel's Chief Rabbinate has come to its conclusion on the Williamson affair, breaking off relations with the Vatican this week. It will be interesting to see what the Catholic Church will do next.

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