The Vatican has just released its promised document expressing repentance for the failures of Christians towards Jews (see page 390 and leading article). A journalist and historian looks at the ?tormented? story of the relationship between the Church and the Jewish people. Now, on the verge of the third millennium, there is a new dialogue. THIRTEEN years ago, Pope John Paul II promised that before the millennium the Catholic Church would publish a declaration on the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people. He has kept his word. The document, issued this week by the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and confirmed by a letter from the Pope, is clear beyond doubt in the deep sorrow it expresses. On the threshold of the third millennium this Pope and the Church are bound to look back on the second millennium and what the Pope calls, using the Jewish word for the Holocaust, the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah.

The Pope hopes the document may enable memory to play its necessary part in the process of shaping a future in which such an iniquity will never again be possible. He appeals to the Lord of history to guide the efforts of Catholics and Jews . . . as they work together for a world of true respect for the life and dignity of every human being, for all have been created in the image and likeness of God. A very different sentiment from that which, for example, Cardinal Manning famously voiced when after the proclamation of papal infallibility at the end of the First Vatican Council he hailed the victory of the dogma over history and over the historians who had sought to deny its validity.

As far as the relationship between Christians and Jews are concerned, the plea to the Lord of history is only too justified. This was tellingly recognised when, in 1985, the Holy See?s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews described the balance of this relationship over 2,000 years as quite negative. The Vatican document, which recalls this judgement, calls the relationship tormented.

When last October John Paul II addressed a Roman symposium on anti-Semitism he said: In the Christian world ? I do not say on the part of the Church as such ? erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people. Such interpretations have of course been definitively rejected by the Second Vatican Council, whose declaration Nostra Aetate stressed that what happened in Christ?s Passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today.

It was nevertheless felt by some Catholics and Jews that in excluding the Church as such from blame, the Pope was back- pedalling. The same distinction between the Church and the Christian world is found in the Vatican document, which repeats the Pope?s statement. There are many in the Vatican and in the Catholic world who think that the Church has gone far enough in apologising for past sins. What more could this Pope do than describe anti-Semitism as damnable?

The German Catholic bishops, for their part, have clearly gone beyond what the Pope and Vatican have said. In view of their admitted responsibility for the sins of omission and commission in the Nazi years, that is understandable. They have recognised that anti-Judaism is not an aberration limited to prejudiced individual Christians but a deeply ingrained trend in the Church. They have twice thought it necessary, in 1988 and 1995, to remind their people of the persistence of anti-Judaist attitudes. The Church we venerate as holy and a mystery, they said, is also a Church of sinners with a need for conversion.

The distinction in terminology between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism is important and necessary, and is a central concept in the new Vatican document. Anti-Judaism is an attitude stemming from the references in the Scriptures to the provocation constituted by God?s chosen people who then rejected the Saviour and became a stumbling block, a scandal, an alien factor in the history of the Church. Rushing somewhat hastily down the centuries and generalising the discrimination against Jews by murder, expulsion and forced conversion, the Vatican document defines anti-Judaism (by the end of the nineteenth century) as essentially more sociological and political than religious, although this seems to minimise the responsibility of the Catholic Church and its influence on education throughout Catholic Europe.

Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, which is quite clearly contrary to Christian teaching, means hostility to the Jews as members of an alleged Semitic race; it largely originated in the nineteenth-century racialist theories. Whereas throughout the history of the Church baptism and conversion to Christianity, enforced or voluntary, were regarded as removing, more or less, the traditional social stigma of being a Jew, this traditional escape clause was virtually and disastrously removed by Hitler?s legalised racialist genocide for six million victims.

Hitler absorbed his anti-Semitic theories in the Catholic Austria of his youth. Ever since the Holocaust, the use of the term anti-Semitism has come to dominate, perhaps because it is useful to express revulsion at the unspeakable crimes committed in its name.

In their recent statement the French bishops have also gone very far, even though apologists could argue that France, after all, had not produced Hitler but merely been guilty with the rest of the Christian world of the glib and mixed anti-Judaist attitudes which have been characteristic of all societies in Christian history. French Catholics, the bishops said, should have done more to help the Jews under the Vichy regime of the Second World War. The French bishops of the time were blamed: they were not allowed the excuse that they were children of their age. The statement specifically said that the silence of the Catholic authorities of the time was a fault.

Some would like the Church to go much further by way of reform. Every year in Catholic churches the drama of the Passion is re-enacted, with priests and people taking part in the gospel readings. These ceremonies are deeply moving; but without explanation or commentary, for which there is often thought to be no need, old prejudices can be confirmed. The biblical studies about the interpretation of the Passion story take a long time to seep down to the level of those in the pew or even religious instruction; nor are most priests sufficiently encouraged to follow up what they have learned in the seminary.

Liturgical practice hallowed by long usage can be dangerous. A glaring example of the anti-Judaist tradition of the Church is the centuries-old custom that, during the petitions on Good Friday, congregations did not kneel when the turn came to pray for the perfidious (ie unbelieving) Jews. At some point in the Middle Ages, devout Catholics refused to kneel for the murderers of the Saviour and for centuries that refusal was part of the liturgy. It took the coming of John XXIII to abolish it.

A dialogue between Christians and Jews is now, in the light of this history, recognised by all concerned as a necessity. But there is much unresolved business, as Bishop Richard Harries of Oxford, chairman of the board of the Council for Christians and Jews, put it with regard to the attempts to widen the council?s scope by including Islam in its remit. The dialogue between Christians and Jews, Bishop Harries said, is still very new indeed. A major obstacle to Jewish-Christian understanding is a general remoteness at local level. These faith communities still lack knowledge of each other, which jeopardises any possibility that a way can be found round the problem: that the Christians believe the Messiah has come, whereas Jews still await him.

THE need to co-exist in what nominally remains a Christian society ought, nevertheless, to make for more mutual understanding. The two faiths could unite in the joint defence of human rights and respect for unborn life, as urged recently by Cardinal Hume at a meeting of Christians and Jews in the Wimbledon synagogue. For, as John Paul II has repeatedly emphasised, Christians and Jews have more in common with each other than they have with any other religion. As Pius XI put it, spiritually we are all Semites. For Christians, indeed, understanding the Jews is a precondition for understanding themselves. The sentiment has been reciprocated by some enlightened Jews, such as the eminent German rabbi Leo Baeck, who at the very time the Nazis were burning the synagogues published a book in which he described Christian revelation as the justification of the history of the Jewish faith.

The part played by John Paul IIin changing attitudes remains crucial. The removal of two particular obstacles to dialogue between Catholics and Jews is credited by Jewish opinion to the Polish Pope?s good will in this field. In 1994 came the Vatican?s long-delayed recognition of the state of Israel, which served also as an occasion for an unambiguous rejection of anti-Semitism in the documents signed by the Vatican. The Pope was also instrumental in bringing to an end the running controversy over the Carmelite convent established at Auschwitz, foremost site of the Holocaust. The Carmelite nuns pleaded that Auschwitz had originally included also Polish and other non-Jewish victims, but for the Jews that extermination ground must be left in stark silence. The Pope exerted his influence to persuade the Carmelites to bow to world opinion and relocate outside the perimeter of the camp.

Human relations are generally acknowledged to be this Polish Pope?s particular forte. He remembers Jewish schoolfriends from his own childhood, with whom he has remained in contact. And as a Pole, from a nation which suffered so severely in the war, he is able, at least in part, to identify with the fate suffered by the Jews. Two significant Jewish-Catholic encounters stand out in this pontificate.

One is the meeting with German Jews in Mainz in 1980, when he first spoke of the unbroken bond between God and Israel, which is referred to by St Paul in the famous passage in chapter 11 of the letter to the Romans. Paul speaks there of the olive tree of Judaism into which wild branches ? the Gentiles ? are grafted. The passage definitively reveals St Paul?s belief that the present exclusion of Israel from the salvation of the Messiah must not be regarded as final, a point of view which, unfortunately, the Church has ever since done much to reject and which goes to the heart of the anti-Judaist tradition in Christianity.

The other memorable occasion was the Pope?s visit to Rome?s Jewish synagogue in 1986. Italian Jews had not forgotten the black day in October 1943 when some 1,000 Roman Jews were herded by police out of the ghetto, to be put on a train destined for Auschwitz. Could not Pius XII, they asked, have driven to Rome?s main railway station and stopped that train from leaving? Before being transported, those unfortunate men, women and children were kept for several days confined virtually under Pius XII?s Vatican windows. There is no doubt that he was fully aware at that time of the extent of Hitler?s final solution, and the fate awaiting them.

The possibility that the Pope might have made some gesture of protest recalls to mind the symbolic demonstration by Bishop von Galen of M?nster when the Gestapo came to arrest him for criticising the Nazis for the practice of euthanasia and other medical experiments, and their attacks on the Church. The bishop, a tall and impressive figure, waited for them in his ceremonial robes. The policemen were cowed. Had they driven the popular prelate away, demonstrations on his behalf might have followed in that intensely Catholic region of Germany.

Would the Italian police have dared to stop Pius XII if he had done something similar? But he had eschewed dramatic gestures of that sort. And his silence remained an open wound, until John Paul II attempted to bring healing. Now in the new Vatican document the Church has expressed her wish to turn awareness of past sins into a firm resolve to build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Judaism among Christians and anti-Christian sentiment among Jews, but rather a shared mutual respect, as befits those who adore the one Creator and Lord and have a common father in faith, Abraham.

Whatever actions are likely to follow, they must take note of what so far seems not to have penetrated Catholic consciousness despite repeated affirmations by this Pope: that the Christian religion is closer to Judaism than any other. The indifference of Catholics is evidently because they are not fully aware that without the Jews and their historical background there would be no Christian religion at all.

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