c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When he came to the Vatican from his native Germany in 1981, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, soon became John Paul II’s closest theological colleague. But their elections to the papacy could not have been more different.

When his fellow cardinals chose Karol Wojtyla of Poland in October 1978, much of the world, including the Jewish community, knew little about the 58-year-old archbishop of Krakow. Back then, Poland was a Soviet satellite located behind the Iron Curtain. Many Jews, including members of my family, were convinced John Paul II was an anti-Semite given the long and often bitter relationship between Catholics and Jews in Poland.

It did not take long to recognize the inaccuracy of that preconceived notion. John Paul II became a surprising pioneer in building mutual respect and understanding between his church and the Jewish people. His achievements are historic.

Unlike Cardinal Wojtyla, we know a great deal about his successor. During his nearly quarter-century of Vatican duties, the 78-year-old Cardinal Ratzinger was liken to the “police chief” of Catholic doctrine. But now he is the church’s “mayor.” Will Catholic conservatives still adore him in his new role? Will progressives remain apprehensive about the man called “The Vatican Enforcer”? It will be interesting to see how this plays out within the Catholic community.

I met the new pope in 1994 at an international interreligious conference that brought Jews and Christians together in Jerusalem. Ratzinger, a world-class scholar and theologian, delivered an excellent paper. I found him both eloquent and elegant, something the world has already discovered.

Ratzinger’s membership in the Hitler Youth movement has been widely mentioned and he has even been compared to the older Kurt Waldheim, the disgraced former Austrian president. But Waldheim, who was also United Nations secretary general, deliberately hid his Nazi past and the wartime crimes he committed as a German office in the Balkans.

The new pope has never hidden his past, and Jewish leaders and organizations in Israel and the United States have long been aware of Ratzinger’s personal history as a youth growing up in Nazi Germany.

It is important to remember two former German chancellors, Helmut Kohl and Helmut Schmidt, were also Hitler Youth members. Coming from a staunchly anti-Nazi Catholic family in Bavaria, Ratzinger deserted the German Army toward the end of World War II when he was about 18 years old.

In a major article published in 2000 in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, Ratzinger confronted Christian responsibility for anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: “Even if … the … loathsome experience of the Shoah was perpetuated in the name of anti-Christian ideology, … 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.”

For those unfamiliar with “Vaticanspeak,” Ratzinger is saying the Holocaust, fueled by the centuries of Christian teachings, cannot be merely dismissed as the work of pagan Nazis. On the contrary, many Christians, filled with anti-Semitic church teachings, failed to resist Nazism. The result was the murder of 6 million Jews.

In the same article, Ratzinger called for a “new relationship between the Church and Israel … a sincere willingness to overcome every kind of anti-Judaism” existing among Christians. Ratzinger also worked on “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” in which the church outlined the historical “errors” of its treatment of Jews.

Ratzinger says he “watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth … their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them.”

I believe Benedict XVI will continue the extraordinary work in Catholic-Jewish relations that is the legacy of his teacher and mentor, John Paul II, but I hope he will do even more. It is past time to fully implement the church’s positive teachings on Jews and Judaism that began 40 years ago at the Second Vatican Council with the bishops’ adoption of the “Nostra Aetate” (“In Our Time”) declaration that repudiates all forms of anti-Semitism and rejects the reprehensible charge that God punishes the Jewish people for the death of Jesus.

New crises between Catholics and Jews will surely arise in future years. But as Benedict XVI said in his first remarks as pope, he seeks “an open and sincere dialogue with other faiths.” As they say in “Texasspeak,” the new pope has talked the talk in Catholic-Jewish relations; hopefully he will now walk the walk.

MO/PH END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)