A Repentance, Sort Of

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

It was a long wait everyone had assumed would be worth it. Back in 1987, when Pope John Paul II first told a group of American rabbis he intended to commission a study on Catholicism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, an aide warned it might take two years. That span became a decade, but Jewish hopes remained high. Who could doubt that this Pope, who had lived in Poland as it became a killing ground and had lost childhood playmates to the camps, understood the glories and agonies of the Jews? In 1986 he became the first Pontiff to visit a synagogue; in 1994 he prompted the Vatican's recognition of Israel; and that same year he was host at the Papal Concert to Commemorate the Holocaust, to which he invited 200 of the Shoah's survivors.

And yet last week, when the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews released its 14-page report, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, the Jewish reaction was decidedly mixed--as was the report itself. Its opening and closing segments were irreproachable and historic. Calling the Shoah an "unspeakable tragedy, which can never be forgotten," the report styles itself an act of teshuva, the Hebrew word for repentance, voicing the church's desire to "express her deep sorrow for the failures of her sons and daughters in every age" and "turn awareness of past sins into a firm resolve to build a new future." However, We Remember's middle section is oddly parsimonious about the sins it admits. It includes an unexpectedly blunt denial that Christian anti-Judaism contributed to the Nazis' racial anti-Semitism, quarantining the latter as the product of a "thoroughly modern pagan regime." Similarly, its assertion that the question of whether persecution "was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian hearts" can be answered only "case by case" finesses the sad fact that in many cases the answer was yes. We Remember also steadfastly refuses to assign any blame to the church as an institution, a notable retreat from recent explicit apologies made by the German and French bishops that acknowledged what the Germans called "the church dimension" of the cataclysm.

Especially perturbing to Jews is a clause on Pope Pius XII, who is up for sainthood but whose failure through the war to denounce the Nazis, say his critics, may have cost millions of lives. His defenders reply that he employed more effective "quiet diplomacy," and on Saturday John Paul called him a "great Pope." (Next month a U.S. State Department report will address links between the Vatican and gold in the state treasury of the Croatian regime allied with Hitler's Germany. The Holy See has so far refused to make its records on the matter public.)

In Rome the statement's authors explained that they wrote for a church whose large non-European realms should not have to shoulder too much Holocaust guilt. They believe We Remember's good bold strokes will be remembered long after its disputed details. Even the report's critics obviously wanted to like it. American Jewish Congress official Phil Baum, who released a statement predicting that the historical record will eventually show a "deliberate failure of the church generally to respond" to the Shoah, adds on the phone, "We are not disparaging of the Pope's efforts to live with this responsibility." Sighs Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust-studies expert at Emory University: "It points out more of the failing, to say 'half empty' rather than 'half full.' But I would have expected a more full glass from this statement. This was such a long-awaited statement."

--By David Van Biema. With reporting by Greg Burke and Jodie Morse/New York

With reporting by Greg Burke and Jodie Morse/New York