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As a young Pole, John Paul II saw the Holocaust up close, and he grasped its radical significance for the church. Healing the ancient breach with Judaism became the most important project of his pontificate: rooting out anti-Semitic themes from Christian educational materials; visiting synagogues; lifting up the Holocaust as a permanent point of moral reckoning; affirming the right of Jews to be at home in Israel, which he formally recognized in 1994. In reverencing the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2000, the Pope reversed the ancient Christian denigration of the Temple of Israel, renouncing forever the idea that because Jesus is the "new Temple," Judaism is "replaced" by Christianity. And through that, the Pope affirmed a new Catholic principle of religious pluralism, with future significance for its relationship with other faiths as well.
At the millennium, John Paul II expressed sorrow for the two historic crimes of Christianity--the use of coercion in defense of the truth and the tradition of contempt for the Jewish people. But this Pope did more than say he was sorry. He put in place new structures of belief and practice, affirming peace and advancing tolerance, changing the Roman Catholic Church forever. •
James Carroll, a columnist for the Boston Globe, is the author of Constantine's Sword