NEWS ADVANCE: Pope Trip Marks Advances in Catholic-Jewish Relations

c. 2000 Religion News Service JERUSALEM _ When Pope Paul VI became the first Catholic leader ever to visit the Holy Land in 1964, he slipped into Israel via the back door, arriving at the northern Israeli Megiddo road junction via an improvised crossing from the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. Israel’s chief rabbis boycotted the welcome […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ When Pope Paul VI became the first Catholic leader ever to visit the Holy Land in 1964, he slipped into Israel via the back door, arriving at the northern Israeli Megiddo road junction via an improvised crossing from the Jordanian-controlled West Bank.

Israel’s chief rabbis boycotted the welcome ceremony and never once did the prelate mention the word “Israel” during his brief 12-hour tour of the Galilee’s Christian sites.


More than 35 years later, the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Israeli preparations for next week’s arrival of Pope John Paul II are unparalleled in the state’s history. And if anything, the elaborately planned six-day schedule of events demonstrates how much progress has since been made in healing at least some of the scars of deep-seated conflict between Jew and Christian as well as Arab and Israeli.

“There is no doubt that there has been an incredible theological revolution between Jews and Catholics, which Israelis are only just now beginning to understand,” said Rabbi David Rosen, of the Israel office of the Anti-Defamation League and one of the longtime leaders of the Israeli-Vatican dialogue.

Indeed, it was the 1993 establishment of diplomatic ties between the two political entities, even more so than the earlier Vatican theological renunciations of anti-Jewish teachings, that has really laid the groundwork for the present papal tour.

“We here in Israel tend to see almost everything via our political-national identity,” Rosen said. “So while there will be many important moments in the pope’s visit, I think the most meaningful will be the upcoming visit between the pope and President Ezer Weizman. That’s the litmus test.”

In other respects, as well, the script of this visit is full of so many “firsts,” it would have been dismissed as pure fantasy a generation ago.

If all goes well, the pope is expected to arrive in Israel on Tuesday evening (March 21) via a Royal Jordanian airplane to an official welcome ceremony at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport.

Wednesday, Israeli security will escort him to the new Palestinian self-ruled area of Bethlehem, where he will not only celebrate Mass in Bethlehem’s ancient Church of the Nativity but meet with President Yasser Arafat and make a high-profile visit to a Palestinian refugee camp, underscoring Palestinian political demands connected with the peace process, especially the Palestinian refugees “right of return.”


“The message of the Palestinian refugees, and their yearning to return to their homes, this is what the world will see when the pope visits Dehaisshe,” said Emil Jarjoui, head of the Palestinian Authority ministerial committee organizing the Bethlehem leg of the tour.

Thursday, the pope will meet with Israel’s chief rabbi Israel Meir Lau on his home turf for the first time in history despite ultra-Orthodox attempts to dissuade the Jewish leader from agreeing to the event. The pope will then make an unprecedented visit to the Israeli Holocaust Memorial at Yad Veshem. There, Jewish leaders fervently hope the Polish-born pope will issue a bolder statement of regret and sorrow for the church’s silence in the face of the World War II genocide than he has so far expressed.

Friday and Saturday will bring the pope to the Sea of Galilee. On Friday, tens of thousands of young people from around are expected to attend a huge outdoor Mass celebrated overlooking the Mount of the Beatitudes, where Jesus was said to have given his Sermon on the Mount.

Israel’s government has undertaken to organize the event, hopeful the Israeli sponsorship will better showcase the country’s openness to Christian pilgrims, as well as displaying the spectacular landscape and Christian tourism treasures in the region.

Yet beneath that ecumenical polish, there are also those Israeli Jews who are wholly disenchanted with the idea of a six-day papal visit here. A recent Israeli Gallup poll indicated nearly 60 percent of Israeli Jews have a positive view of the pope’s visit as a pilgrimage or mission of peace. But a significant 12 percent still view it far more negatively as a Christian missionary effort or a cynical manipulation of the peace process.

The naysayers have ranged from the ultra-Orthodox, who are inherently suspicious of any official contact with the non-Jewish world, to ultra-nationalist Jews like the prominent settler and attorney Elyakim Haetzni.


Haetzni, like other nationalists, has been particularly vociferous in protesting the language of a recent Vatican-PLO accord. That accord set out terms for mutual recognition and called for international guarantees to protect Jerusalem’s holy sites as well as for a “just solution based on international resolutions” to the dispute over Jerusalem.

“This is the calling card which John Paul has sent us,” wrote Haetzni in a recent op-ed piece, “the espousal of all the intermediate objectives which our enemies pursue in the quest for our liquidation.”

Other potential diplomatic land mines lurk around almost every corner of the complex six-day tour.

Indeed, Catholic officials have stressed the desire of the pope to tread the path of a simple pilgrim in prayer. But the papal leader is really embarking on a kind of religio-diplomatic mission to a predominantly non-Christian region, still wracked by explosive sensitivities.

While the political agenda will remain unspoken, it is clear that in symbol and gesture, the Vatican is seeking to balance its recognition of Israeli and Jewish legitimacy against recognition of Palestinian demands for statehood, with a capital in Jerusalem.

Here, the pope’s homilies, statements and encounters will be examined and assessed in terms of how well they balance the oft-competing expectations of rival Jews, Muslims and Christians.


In particular, the series of planned papal meetings with Muslim and Jewish religious figures the pope has proven to be full of special sensitivities.

For example, when John Paul originally asked to meet Rabbi Lau at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, Lau refused and insisted the pope come to his office.

Meanwhile, delicate talks are still under way over the question of whether the Islamic Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, will agree to meet with Lau and the pope in a three-way dialogue. Sabri, regarded as an Islamic hard-liner, has so far balked at the encounter, although he will meet the pope separately on Sunday.

“We live in a very political environment,” lamented Wadie Abu Nassar, chief spokesman to Jerusalem’s Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah. “I understand why the mufti would decide not to come to the interreligious encounter, but we still hope he will change his mind.”

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Logistically, meanwhile, the trip is also a nightmare for the tiny, overcrowded country and the neighboring Palestinian Authority. Israel’s Ben Gurion airport is gearing up for the “express” processing of some 50,000 tourists who began arriving this week to follow the pope’s trail through the country. But nobody knows yet if the incoming tourists won’t be met with unnecessary bureaucratic delays and obstacles.

The police are mobilizing tens of thousands of reserve forces to control crowds and strengthen security in the remote event terrorists would seek to strike at a papal target.


Yet in order to achieve both aims, access to the pope will probably be more severely restricted than in similar visits elsewhere. Both Palestinian and Israeli police are preparing to close off large portions of central Jerusalem and Bethlehem to traffic for hours and even days. Admission to key outdoor events in the two cities, like the mass at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, will be by invitation only.

And already, the recent collapse of a metal and fabric tent structure that was to shade the papal stage still under construction at the Mount of Beatitudes, has demonstrated how one weak screw can provoke unexpected chaos in a whole set of arrangements.

DEA END FLETCHER

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