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Another
Perspective
Ratzinger and the
Jews
By John Tabin

Published 4/21/2005
12:08:44 AM

We Jews have every reason to be pleased with
the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI. John Paul II was
the best pope in history as far as Catholic-Jewish
relations are concerned; Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
played an important role in building that legacy,
and as pope can be expected to carry it
on.

Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the
World Jewish Congress, said Tuesday that the new
pontiff is "our most serious partner in the
Catholic Church, and he has been for the last 26
years," crediting him as a key force behind the
Vatican's recognition of Israel in 1993 and John
Paul II's atonement at the Western Wall in
Jerusalem in 2000 -- an act that affirmed the
validity of a uniquely Jewish method of communication
with God, placing a written prayer in a crack of
the wall. "I believe that he is the man who
created the theological underpinnings for the good
relations between Catholics and Jews during the
last papacy," said Singer of Ratzinger. "He writes
what's kosher and what's not kosher for Catholics.
He said, 'Not only is it kosher to like Jews, but
it's kosher to like the state of
Israel.'"

But some people can't be
satisfied. Michael Lerner, the San Francisco Rabbi
who edits the lefty Jewish bimonthly
Tikkun, greeted the "Habemus Papam"
announcement with an unhinged rant on the tikkun.org website,
declaring that "The New Pope is a Disaster for the
World and for the Jews."

Throughout, Lerner
pretends to speak for all Jews. He writes that
"Jews have a powerful stake and commitment in
ending global poverty and oppression," as if we
all agreed that his prescriptions could accomplish
that, and that "it was with great distress that we
watched as Cardinal Ratzinger led the Vatican in
the past twenty-five years on a path that opposed
providing birth control information to the poor of
the world, thereby ensuring that AIDS would spread
and kill millions in Africa," as if we all
ascribed to Rome such mystical powers over a
continent filled not only with Catholics but with
Protestants, Muslims, and animists. If Lerner
means "leftists," he oughtn't write
"Jews."

This pope has been a menace to the
world since "the days in which he served in the
Nazi army," according to Lerner, who is mangling
the facts. Ratzinger wasn't an SS officer, he was
a conscript in the regular German Army -- and he
deserted. Yes, he was a member of the Hitler
Youth, as was compulsory at the time, and like
most Germans he did little to resist Nazism. But
no less vigilant (some would say alarmist) an
observer of gentiles' attitudes toward Jews as
Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham
Foxman has noted that Ratzinger has "never denied
the past, never hid it. His whole life has been
atonement for those few years. His whole life is
an open book of sensitivity against bigotry and
anti-Semitism." On the Church's behavior during
the Holocaust, Lerner claims that "Ratzinger has
sought to whitewash this disgraceful moment in
Church history." Not true. Ratzinger strongly
condemned Christian complicity in the Holocaust
head on in a 2000 column for L'Osservatore
Romano: "It cannot be denied that a certain
insufficient resistance to this atrocity on the
part of Christians can be explained by an
inherited anti-Judaism present in the hearts of
not a few Christians," he wrote.

It's easy
to see why a liberal Catholic would object to
Benedict XVI for "his role as the leader of the
forces that suppressed the liberatory aspects of
Vatican II," as Lerner puts it. But why on Earth
is a rabbi inserting himself into doctrinal
disputes among Catholics? No rearrangement of the
details changes the fundamentals, after all. As
Jews, we believe that Christians worship a false
Messiah. We usually don't put it like that, just
as Christians don't normally make a habit of
instructing us on what sort of postmortem
nastiness they believe we have in store. But we
all know the score, don't we?

Perhaps not.
Lerner seems to think Jews should be deeply
worried that the Pope believes exclusively in
Christianity -- that he "publicly critiques all
those inside the Church who are tolerant enough to
think that other religions may have equal validity
as a path to God." This, in Lerner's mind, is "a
slippery slope toward anti-Semitism and a return
to the chauvinistic and triumphalist views that
led the Church, when it had the power to do so, to
develop its infamous crusades and inquisitions."
Lerner goes on to denounce Ratzinger's views on
Hinduism and Buddhism (i.e., that Catholicism is
better than either of them).

One might be
tempted to ask who's on the slippery slope toward
anti-Semitism here. The fear that attempting to
convert gentiles to Judaism would provoke an
anti-Semitic backlash, after all, is a primary
reason for Jews' traditional reluctance to
proselytize. And yet here's Rabbi Lerner,
proselytizing not merely for Judaism but for
everything and nothing. Indeed, the ecumenical
leftism he seems to be advocating has little to do
with Judaism per se at all.

Lerner rightly
blasted his own comrades when
they banned him from speaking at an antiwar rally
two years ago for the crime of believing that
Israel has a right to exist. There, on the fringe
of the Left, is the place to watch out for the
ugly head of Jew-hatred to be reared. From the
philo-Semitic Pope Benedict XVI, we have no such
thing to fear.

John
Tabin is a frequent online contributor to
The American Spectator.

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