With all due respect to the world’s religious leaders, most of them are not very quotable.
They traffic in the realm of complexities and abstractions, big ideas that are not easy to pin down in a sound bite. They try to be measured and generous in their speech.
And if they do come up with a good line, they’re going to save it for next week’s sermon, not waste it on a newspaper interview.
So pithy comments on this beat merit notice. And for a quick, honest summation of fact and feeling, few top Rabbi Leon Kenicki’s reaction in March to the Vatican’s long-awaited document on the Holocaust.
“Tomorrow morning when my Jewish neighbors in my building read the paper, they’ll come to me and say, `Didn’t I tell you, they ain’t going to change?’ And they may be right,” said Kenicki, a veteran interfaith negotiator for the Anti-Defamation League in New York.
In that one, workaday image, Kenicki captured all the disappointment, resignation and told-you-so mistrust that greeted the document, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” issued from the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church.
After a decade of anticipation–10 years in which Pope John Paul II had made strong statements about Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, years in which the bishops of France, Germany and Poland had made dramatic apologies on behalf of their churches–the document was seen by many Jews as a step backward.
Where they wanted to see an admission that the Christian church sowed, or at least fertilized, the seeds of genocide, the Vatican emphasized that Nazi Germany was a “neo-Pagan” regime.
Where some Jews hoped to see wartime Pope Pius XII held accountable for his silence, the Vatican pointed out the many ways in which he helped rescue Jews.
In short, after 30 years of phenomenal progress in Catholic-Jewish relations, many Jews saw the document as a stopper.
But even as that backlash made headlines, one of Kenicki’s colleagues was on his way to Rome for previously scheduled talks with church officials.
Rabbi David Rosen, who works for the Anti-Defamation League in Jerusalem and specializes in interfaith affairs, was part of the Jewish delegation that arrived at the Vatican less than a week after “We Remember” was released.
Clearly their regular agenda was out the window. Feelings ran high. But far from feeling that the ensuing talks were a waste of time, Rosen believes they were some of the most productive yet.
“The real hallmark of how far we’ve come is the candor, the brutal frankness of our discussion,” Rosen said this week during a visit to Chicago. “I didn’t see (the document) as a setback. I saw it as a spur.”
One of the initiatives the document and its perceived shortcomings spurred was a renewed effort to find out what actually happened half a century ago.
Though Pope Paul VI commissioned a quartet of Jesuit scholars to research the church’s actions at the time of the Holocaust, ultimately releasing a 12-volume report, many have felt that the Vatican was holding back information in its archives.
Now a team of Catholic and Jewish scholars has been appointed to re-examine that report and delve further into the archives, if there is more to be found.
And though Rosen is not a fan of the “We Remember” document–he sees it as the ungainly work of a committee held back by the church’s most conservative elements–he does see a basic value in it.
“This will be one of the most powerful bulwarks against Holocaust denial,” he said.
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Meanwhile, both sides are focused on moving ahead on cooperative ventures between the two faiths, promoting their shared beliefs on issues such as the importance of the family and the environment.
Perhaps the most important issue on the table is the one that was temporarily set aside this spring, education. Rosen said that while both faiths have made great strides, Catholics and Jews have to examine critically how each presents the other in its schools and houses of worship.
The problem at this point has less to do with official teachings and statements than with residual attitudes and habits.
“Tremendous progress has been made. But much of what has transpired has been on the Olympian heights,” he said.
That’s hard to see from an apartment building in New York, or a million other, less lofty vantage points from which Christians and Jews make their observations. It’s easy, especially after 1,900 years of rancor, to assume nobody ever changes.
But the truth is that something fundamental and profound is going on in interfaith relations, nowhere more evident than in Catholic-Jewish dialogue. It doesn’t fit into a sound bite, but the big stories seldom do.
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