Vatican City, January 15: Pope Benedict XVI will visit Rome’s main synagogue on Sunday as he struggles to mend frayed ties with the Jewish community angered over moves to make World War II-era pope Pius XII a saint.
The long-planned visit appeared at risk of being cancelled after the pope last month put his controversial predecessor one step away from beatification en route to sainthood with a papal decree bestowing the title “venerable”.
While the event will go forward, Jewish dissenters include the president of Italy’s assembly of rabbis, Giuseppe Laras, who has said he would stay away, while Israel’s ambassador to the Holy See said “Catholic anti-Judaism still exists.”
To defend the new honour for Pius XII, the Vatican said it concerned the wartime pope’s piety and not his historical role.
The Catholic Church has long argued that Pius XII, who was pope from 1939 to 1958, saved many Jews who were hidden away in religious institutions, and that his silence was born out of a wish to avoid aggravating their situation.
Rabbi Arthur Schneier of New York, who hosted Benedict at the Park East Synagogue during the pope’s visit to the United States in 2008, is in Rome for the event and hailed its symbolic value.
“Crossing the bridge over the Tiber (coming to Rome from the Vatican) is a very, very meaningful and symbolic act,” Schneier said. “Particularly in this day and age, symbolism plays a very important role in changing hearts and minds.”
Asked about the timing of the new honour for Pius XII just four weeks before the synagogue visit, Schneier, himself a Holocaust survivor, said: “I’m sure that it raised eyebrows, to put it lightly.”
The 79-year-old added: “We have come a long way, and we still have a long way to go together to establish a firm foundation in terms of dialogue and cooperation.”
Rome’s Grand Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, for his part, said the upcoming visit was a sign that Benedict wants to “continue the dialogue”.
Benedict’s predecessor John Paul II established January 17, which commemorates an anti-Semitic attack against Rome’s Jewish ghetto in 1793, as a day of Judeo-Christian reflection.
Last year, the day that Jews view as a symbol of their survival in the face of persecution came at the height of an outcry over a move to bring a Holocaust-denying bishop back into the fold of the Catholic Church.
Italian rabbis boycotted Jewish-Catholic observances of the day en bloc.
The conservative German pope, now 82, has had a number of diplomatic rows with the Jewish community since his election in 2005.
Many Jews were upset by Benedict’s decision to rehabilitate the Latin version of the Catholic Church’s Good Friday mass, which contains a prayer for the conversion of the Jews.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, has said that the pope’s landmark visit to the Rome synagogue would be aimed at seeking common ground.
“We have a new atmosphere with Judaism even if there are difficulties,” he said Wednesday, adding: “I have full understanding for the sensitivity of the survivors of the Holocaust, and we must respect this sensitivity.”
“On the other side, we have to tell them also what Pius XII did in favour of the Jews during World War II, and this is not known enough,” he added.
“Many thousands of Jews were saved here in Rome and elsewhere in the world,” he said.
Catholic-Jewish relations have improved with a series of fence-mending statements and gestures by the Vatican and the pontiff, notably Benedict’s trip to Israel in May last year during which he prayed at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall.
Before entering the Rome synagogue, Benedict is to place a wreath before a plaque recalling the deportation of Italian Jews by the German army in 1943.
–Agencies