Israel as the Jesus Among Nations

In 1904, a few months before his death at the age of 44, Theodor Herzl met with the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Merry del Val. Herzl asked for Vatican diplomatic support to further the international recognition of the Zionist cause. In response, the cardinal said: “I do not quite see how we can take any initiative in this matter. As long as the Jews deny the divinity of Christ, we certainly cannot make a declaration in their favor. Not that we have any ill will toward them. On the contrary, the church has always protected them. To us they are the indispensable witnesses to the phenomenon of God’s term on earth. But they deny the divine nature of Christ. How then can we, without abandoning our own highest principles, agree to their being given possession of the Holy Land again?”

Despite its harsh tone, this well-known statement by the Vatican secretary of state did not indicate implacable hostility toward Jews. In fact, Cardinal Merry del Val’s declaration that the church has always protected the Jews had a degree of historical validity that was given credence by his actions a few years after his meeting with Herzl. With the revival of European blood libels at the beginning of the 20th century, Cardinal Merry del Val labeled the libels “an incredible myth.” He reminded Catholics that between the 13th and 18th centuries the popes had rejected again and again the veracity of claims that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in religious rituals.

Israel, the land of Christian origins, where Jesus walked and preached, had always been a place of pilgrimage for Christians. What then should Christians make of Jewish claims to the Holy Land? On the question of a Jewish return to Palestine, the religious and political issues were radically different for Catholics and Protestants. Generally, Catholics, until Vatican II, upheld the teaching that the Jews were guilty of “deicide,” and that the punishment for their crime was eternal exile. In keeping with that view, one Vatican official wrote that “Zionism must therefore be regarded as an arrogant presumption, in opposition to the will of God, who has punished His people, condemning them to exile and wandering.”

Concerning Zionism, there is a significant difference between Protestant and Catholic views. In contrast to the diversity of Protestant responses to Zionism, some of which were positive and some negative, the official Catholic response was clearly negative. The Protestant focus on the Bible as the sole source of authority, led to a reevaluation of the Jewish aspiration to return to the land. For the Protestant reformers, the people of Israel were historically relevant. The Vatican opposed Zionism in both its political and cultural manifestations. The prospect of a Jewish state in the Christian Holy Land was threatening to the Vatican, because Zionism, and later the State of Israel, presented the church with a challenge to established doctrines. Renewed Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, and the possibility of a Jewish cultural and religious renaissance in the reclaimed land, challenged the Catholic Church’s view of Judaism as a superseded religion, and its view of Jews as a people condemned to permanent wandering, exile, and powerlessness.

With the advent of political Zionism in the late 19th century, Rome’s necessary yet deeply uneasy relationship with the Jewish people, marked by frequent persecution and humiliation of Jews in Catholic lands, was intensified by the addition of a Jewish territorial claim—a claim that many in the church hierarchy mocked. In the words of mid-20th-century historian Jules Isaac, the essence of Christian anti-Judaism had been “the teaching of contempt.” According to that teaching the old or “carnal” Israel had forfeited its claim to chosenness—and by extension its claim to what the Catholic Church deemed the Christian Holy Land. Why, then, should the church support Zionism, a political movement that aimed to end the exile to which the Jews had been justly condemned, and restore Jewish territorial sovereignty?

Yet after a century of steadfast opposition to Zionism, the church changed its approach to the issue. This radical shift in attitude took place over the course of the 20th century. It culminated in the Vatican’s diplomatic recognition of Israel in 1993 and Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 2000.

Following the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel and its inclusion in the United Nations—both acts that the Vatican opposed—there was a series of low-level diplomatic conversations between Israeli officials and Vatican officials. The church was concerned about both its real estate holdings and its flock in the Holy Land. Contacts between Israel and the Vatican waxed and waned over the subsequent 45 years; it was not until 1993 that the Vatican granted Israel diplomatic recognition.

Two of the most influential Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) and Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), were deeply engaged in reshaping the Catholic Church’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism. These writers and their Jewish interlocutors helped the church and the Zionist leadership arrive at an uneasy but slowly evolving understanding—one that would lead, at the end of the 20th century, to full Vatican diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. The process that led to the transformation of the Vatican’s attitudes toward Israel was complex and burdened by the historical past.

Maritain, like Chesterton, was a Protestant convert to the Roman Catholic Church. He was brought up in a secularized Protestant family and joined the Catholic Church as a young man. As the author of many philosophical works and a scholar of St. Thomas Aquinas’ works, Maritain wielded great influence. By the 1950s and 1960s Maritain’s influence extended to the Vatican and the papacy. His teachings were decisive in changing both official and unofficial Catholic views of the Jews. Maritain helped formulate the Vatican II response to the Shoah and influenced the Vatican’s reformulation of attitudes toward the State of Israel.

Both Chesterton and Maritain also exerted considerable influence on Catholic intellectuals in the United States, particularly on the issue of Zionism. Chesterton, who lived in England, visited the United States in the 1920s and recorded his impressions in What I Saw in America. His influence in the United States has grown greatly in the post-World War II period. And his books for a general readership, such as the Father Brown series, remain popular. Maritain, who was born in France, lived in the United States for long periods between 1940 and 1960, part of that time as a professor at Princeton University. In his long teaching career he made a dual contribution to Catholic intellectual life, first in the more narrowly focused area of the history of ideas, particularly Aquinas studies, and then in the more general liberalization of Catholic attitudes toward other religions, a change reflected in the innovations of Vatican II.

Of those two literary and theological masters, Maritain’s influence on Vatican attitudes toward Jews and Zionism was more direct. While Chesterton exerted his influence through the popularity of his many books, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, foremost among them, and through his wide readership among the Anglican and Catholic laity and clergy, Maritain influenced directly the Vatican hierarchy. Two popes, Paul VI and John Paul II, called Maritain their teacher.

The antagonistic response that the Vatican secretary of state gave Herzl in 1904 was not the first indication of Catholic displeasure with Zionism. Seven years earlier, the Vatican press had greeted Theodor Herzl’s announcement of the First Zionist Congress with scorn. The newspaper Civiltà Cattolica condemned Zionism in theological terms:

1,827 years have passed since the prediction of Jesus of Nazareth was fulfilled, namely that is the Jerusalem would be destroyed ... that the Jews would be led away to be slaves among all the nations, and that they would remain in the dispersion till the end of the world. ... According to the Sacred Scriptures, the Jewish people must always live dispersed and wandering among the other nations, so that they may render witness to Christ not only by the Scriptures ... but by their very existence. As for a rebuilt Jerusalem, which would become the center of a reconstituted state of Israel, we must add that this is contrary to the prediction of Christ Himself.

This article, which summarized the theological grounds for the Vatican’s opposition to Zionism, appeared in Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit newspaper known for its antisemitic tendencies. Founded in 1850, “it came to be regarded as the unofficial voice of the pope himself.” Informed readers understood what it had to say about Zionism as the official Vatican response to Herzl’s request for Vatican support for a Jewish state.

A few weeks after the 1897 condemnation of Zionism in Civiltà Cattolica, Herzl met with the papal nuncio in Vienna. For Herzl, the results of the meeting were discouraging. He recorded the following in his diary: “Result of the conversation: I believe Rome will be against us, because she does not consider the solution of the Jewish question in a Jewish state, and perhaps even fears it.”

Although he was pessimistic about Catholic support for Zionism, Herzl remained optimistic about Anglican and Protestant support. He had been in close contact with Protestant clergymen since the preparations for the First Zionist Congress of 1897. Anglican clergyman Rev. William Hechler, who had articulated support for the restoration of the Jews as early as 1883, helped Herzl obtain an audience with the Duke of Baden and his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm. Other Protestant clergymen and laymen, including a number of Americans, were associated with the seemingly contradictory 19th-century combination of Protestant missions to the Jews and support for a Jewish home in Palestine. In the late 19th century, Christians assisting in the restoration of the Jews to their land were for the most part Protestants of the various denominations; Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians were, for the most part, hostile to Zionist aims.

After Herzl’s 1897 meeting with the papal nuncio, the vexed question of the Christian holy sites came to the fore. If a Jewish state were established, who would control the Catholic shrines? Aware that, aside from its theological resistance to the notion of a Jewish state, the church was deeply concerned about its role in Jerusalem as protector of the Catholic laity and clergy and the Catholic holy sites, Herzl explained to the nuncio that Zionists aimed to make Jerusalem “extraterritorial.” To which the nuncio replied, “You propose, then, to exclude Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, and set up the capital, I take it, more to the north?” To this comment Herzl gave a vaguely affirmative reply, which seemed to mollify the nuncio. If Zionists did not claim the Christian holy places, thought Herzl, perhaps the Vatican might consider Zionist aspirations more positively. But Herzl’s vague assertion did not satisfy Vatican officials, who wanted firm assurances that Christian holy places would not be under the direct control of Jewish authorities.

Seven years after his 1897 meeting with the papal nuncio in Vienna, a meeting at which the topic of control of the Christian holy places dominated the conversation, Herzl obtained an audience with Pope Pius X. This audience, held three days after his discouraging meeting with Cardinal Merry del Val, was equally disappointing. Pius X told Herzl: “We won’t be able to stop the Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we could never favor it. ... The Jews have not recognized our Lord, and so we cannot recognize the Jewish people. ... The Jewish faith was the foundation of our own, but it has been superseded by the teachings of Christ, and we cannot admit that it enjoys any validity.”

When Herzl asked about the church’s attitude toward control of Jerusalem, the pope replied: “I know it is not pleasant to see the Turks in possession of our holy places. We simply have to put up with that. But to support the Jews in the acquisition of the holy places, that we cannot do.” Herzl’s hope that the Vatican would prefer Jewish rule in Jerusalem to Turkish rule was dashed. As distasteful as it was for the Catholic Church in Jerusalem to be subject to the dictates of the local Muslim authorities, it was less objectionable than reversing the church’s age-old relationship with the Jews, a relationship in which Judaism was understood as vanquished.

In the 1920s, Zionist leaders recognized that some Catholic intellectuals might be sympathetic to Zionist aspirations, despite the official position of the Vatican. One dissenter from the then dominant Catholic view of Zionism was G.K. Chesterton. As historian Patrick Allitt has noted: “Among the English Catholics whose work was widely read in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nearly all were converts. ... Chesterton was widely recognized in his day and since as a master of English prose, and he gave to this convert generation much of its distinctive voice and mood.” Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, Chesterton’s ideas and attitudes have influenced Americans of all religious traditions.

Chesterton’s early books are sprinkled with derogatory comments about Jews. Today, Britain’s G.K. Chesterton Institute is very sensitive to charges that Chesterton was an antisemite. On its website the institute directors note that the author “certainly made anti-Jewish remarks. ... These need to be understood in their social and historical context, not in order to whitewash Chesterton, but to see how they do not invalidate his entire intellectual or spiritual legacy.”

Yet Chesterton’s The New Jerusalem, an account of his 1919 tour of Palestine, concluded with a spirited defense of Zionism. That within the very same book Chesterton made antisemitic remarks should not surprise us. Chesterton admired the “new Jew” of Palestine and hoped that British Jews would move to Palestine and transform themselves into the Middle Easterners they really were. It was the “old Jews of Europe” that he disdained.

The New Jerusalem, published in 1920, was a very popular book in both England and the United States. On one level, it is an extended meditation on the history of the monotheistic religions, composed on the eve of Chesterton’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism. Chesterton stated that Jews, caught between the idea of chosenness and the harsh reality of exile, can be redeemed only by a return to their homeland. His condemnation of the old “ghetto Jew” and his praise of the “new Jew” exemplified by the Zionist pioneers, endeared Chesterton to Chaim Weizmann and other Zionist spokesmen, who also valorized the emergence of the “new Jew” and the decline of the “old Jew.” In this formulation, Jews, freed from the burdens of exile, would no longer exhibit the traits that made them objectionable to Christians. Thus through Zionism, the “Jewish question” would be solved to the satisfaction of both Christians and Jews (Muslims were never brought into consideration in this European-oriented calculus.)

Chesterton found support for his critique of Jews in the Zionist analysis of Jewish life in exile. Zionists, he noted, offer “a diagnosis and a remedy.” The diagnosis is that “any abnormal qualities in the Jews are due to the abnormal position of the Jews ... for exile is the worst kind of bondage.” The remedy, for Zionists as for Chesterton, is a return to the land and to physical labor. For Chesterton, this return to the land might not bring Jews to Jesus, but it would “cure them of their attachment to urban landscapes, scholarly pursuits, and financial chicanery.”

The remarkable context of Chesterton’s advocacy for Zionism was that in the early 1920’s, the years in which he published The New Jerusalem and wrote pro-Zionist articles, the Vatican was engaged in a vigorous diplomatic campaign to stop the League of Nations from assigning to Britain the Palestine mandate, a mandate that the Vatican feared would enable the emergence of a Jewish state. In a May 1922 letter to the League of Nations, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the Vatican secretary of state, wrote, “The Holy See is not opposed to the Jews in Palestine having civil rights equal to those possessed by other nationals and creeds, but it cannot agree to the Jews being given a privileged and preponderant position in Palestine vis-à-vis other confessions.” In contrast, Chesterton, who had recently converted to Catholicism, advocated giving Jews a privileged position in Palestine. The Zionist movement welcomed his support warmly.

When The New Jerusalem was published, some American Jewish leaders, familiar with Chesterton’s earlier diatribes against Jews and alarmed by echoes of this hostility in his new book, condemned the book’s “Jew baiting.” Chesterton’s support of Zionism was cited by Jewish leaders as a way of countering these charges of antisemitism. Ultimately, this argument seems to have won out. Prominent Jewish spokesmen declared Chesterton “a friend.”

Chesterton’s support of Zionism in the 1920s and his condemnation of Hitler in the early 1930s earned him the gratitude of prominent American Jewish leaders. Soon after Chesterton’s death in 1936, Rabbi Stephen Wise, then among the country’s leading Zionists, wrote, “Indeed I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. ... Apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you know, a great religionist. When Hilterism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great unabashed spirit. Blessing to his memory.”

Chesterton’s work also exerted great influence on the Anglican and Catholic laity. Many in the clergy praised his work, particularly The Dumb Ox, his book on Thomas Aquinas, though Maritain, Chesterton’s younger contemporary, had greater influence on the Catholic hierarchy. Both writers also wrote books on the continuing relevance of the works of Thomas Aquinas, helping to lead the neo-Thomist revival in early 20th-century Catholicism. In Chesterton’s immensely popular book, published in 1933, the older writer approvingly cites the young Maritain’s early work on Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor.”

Chesterton died at 62 in 1936; a few years earlier he had condemned Nazi persecution of the Jews and distanced himself from his friend Hilaire Belloc’s vitriolic anti-Jewish statements. Perhaps the most perceptive assessment of Chesterton’s relationship with Jews is from Anthony Read and David Fisher’s Kristallnacht: The Nazi Night of Terror: “Belloc, like his friend Chesterton, like so many of the English Middle class, was prejudiced against Jews. He did not like them. ... Chesterton, nevertheless, was not antisemitic, certainly not in the Nazi sense, and the idea of employing physical brutality against a single Jew would have appalled him. He was an honourable man, uneasily aware that there was something going on in Germany of which, in conscience, he could not approve.”

Chesterton, who was considered by many in the English-speaking world a leading unofficial spokesman for Catholicism, condemned Nazi persecution of the Jews in a way that the official spokesmen of the Catholic Church of the time could or would not. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Vatican concluded a series of agreements with Italian and German fascists, creating the perception that the church supported the antisemitism of the fascist regimes. While some in the church protected and saved Jews from Nazi persecution, the Vatican did not issue an unequivocal condemnation of Nazi racial policy. And, as we have seen, the Vatican was clearly opposed to Zionism. Meanwhile, Chesterton advocated for a Jewish state in Palestine in the same period that the Vatican was doing all it could to prevent that state from coming into being.

Like Chesterton, Jacques Maritain helped transform Catholic attitudes toward the Jewish people and the State of Israel. His great standing as a scholar of Catholic thought and doctrine—including his early work on Aquinas—brought him into close contact with members of the Vatican hierarchy. On the establishment of Israel in 1948, Maritain wrote this about the new state and its place among the nations: “Israel is the Jesus among the nations, and the Jewish diaspora within Europe is one long Via Dolorosa.”

A concern for and interest in Jews occupied the philosopher throughout his intellectual life. From before his conversion to Catholicism in 1906 to shortly before his death in 1973, Maritain wrote often about Catholicism’s relationship to the Jewish people.

Maritain had married Raissa Oumansoff, a Russian Jewish woman, in 1904. She was one year his junior. Soon after they met, they made a pact that they would commit suicide if they could not live a meaningful religious life. Jacques was from a secularized French Protestant family. Raissa’s parents were from a secular Jewish family; her grandparents were Hasidic Jews. Did Maritain’s marriage to Raissa sensitize him to Jewish concerns? It seems so. Both students at the Sorbonne, they were married in a civil ceremony. Each had cut their ties to the religious traditions of their families. Together they embarked on a spiritual journey that led to their baptism into the Catholic Church two years after their marriage.

In their writings the Maritains often make reference to their early life outside of the church and of the solace they found within it. The strongest early influence on young Jacques and Raissa were the teachings of the French Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson. Raissa’s close reading of Bergson and of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, to which she introduced her husband, led Jacques to write his first monograph, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, in 1914. Their mutual study of Aquinas’ teachings, which would be their intellectual focus and anchor for the rest of their lives, allowed the couple to “reconcile their artistic interests with their religious activities ... intellectually, as Christians, they could thereby be devotees of the latest poetry, the latest music, and the latest literature.”

What makes Maritain’s later advocacy for Jews and Israel so remarkable is that early in his career he supported the ideology of Léon Bloy and other conservative French Catholic thinkers of the 1920s. In a 1921 essay influenced by Bloy’s work, Maritain wrote that Jews “fatally play a subversive role in the world.” He called for the Jewish renunciation of Zionism. Like Bloy, Maritain saw the “good Jew” as a convert to Catholicism. The context here is the French Catholic right’s fear of Jews as agents of liberalism and subversion, a fear that the young Maritain was caught up in.

At the end of the 1920s, Maritain dissociated himself from Léon Bloy and his colleagues in Action Française, the French Catholic reactionary movement which was condemned by the Vatican. From then on, Maritain allied himself with political liberals. During the Spanish Civil War, he spoke out in defense of the Republican cause, although many other Catholic intellectuals supported Franco. During World War II, Maritain condemned Catholic leaders and thinkers who allied themselves with fascism. In the postwar period, his ideas were considered too liberal for mainstream Catholic institutions in Europe and the United Staes. During his sojourn in the United States, the University of Notre Dame, wary of Maritain’s liberalism, declined to invite him to teach. Princeton, with its Protestant roots, was more receptive to his political and religious views and invited Maritain to join the faculty.

To today’s Jewish reader, much of what Maritain wrote in his early years about Jews and Judaism remains deeply disturbing. Like Chesterton, his early view was that Jews’ “contrary” nature was immutable. The Jewish refusal to accept Jesus was a stumbling block to any Christian embrace of the Jewish people. But in the 1930s, Maritain changed his attitude toward Jews and Judaism. In response to rightist French criticism of Jews, Maritain wrote: “Israel is a priestly people. I have met arrogant Jews; I have also encountered high-minded Jews of generous heart, men who were born poor and died poorer still, whose happiness was in giving, not acquiring.”

With the rise of Nazism in Germany, Maritain joined other French intellectuals in a call to distance the church from political antisemitism. In 1935, responding to the Nuremberg Laws, Oscar de Ferenzy, one of Maritain’s close colleagues argued: “I defend Israel because Jesus was the descendant of David. I defend Israel because I am a Christian; as a Christian, I have the duty to come to its aid.”

In his 1939 book A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question, Maritain condemned the Nazi persecutions: “If the world hates the Jews, it is because the world clearly senses that they will always be outsiders in a supernatural sense, it is because the world detests their passion for the absolute and the unbearable stimulus which it inflicts. It is the vocation of Israel which the world execrates. To be hated by the world is their glory, as it is also the glory of Christians who live by faith.”

Despite his harsh critique of Christian persecution of Jews, Maritain was insistent on maintaining the Vatican’s often-expressed distinction between antisemitism and anti-Judaism. In a postwar letter to Sir Robert Mayer, dated Nov. 9, 1954, Maritain wrote: “Christianity is not, and cannot be, anti-Semitic ... but any kind whatever of Christian civilization is neither the Church, nor Christianity. Medieval anti-Semitism ... was totally different from racist anti-Semitism.”

Among Maritain’s Jewish interlocutors was Maurice Samuel, author of The Great Hatred, a 1940 study of antisemitism in European Christian history. Maritain quoted approvingly from Samuel’s analysis of Nazi antisemitism as a thinly disguised hatred of Christianity: “We shall never understand the maniacal, world-wide seizure of anti-Semitism unless we transpose the terms,” Maritain wrote. “It is of Christ that the Nazi-Fascists are afraid. ... Therefore, they must, I repeat, make their assault on those who were responsible for the birth of the spread of Christianity. They must spit on the Jews as ‘Christ-killers’ because they long to spit on the Jews as Christ-givers.”

During and immediately after World War II, the Vatican remained adamantly opposed to the creation of a Jewish state, a position that popes, cardinals, and papal nuncios had expressed from the time of the First Zionist Congress of 1897. In a 1943 letter to Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, Amleto G. Cicognani, the apostolic delegate to the United States, reiterated Vatican opposition to plans to create a Jewish state in Palestine:

Catholics the world over are piously devoted to this country (Palestine), hallowed as it was by the presence of the Redeemer and esteemed as it is as the cradle of Christianity. If the greater part of Palestine is given to the Jewish People, this would be a severe blow to the religious attachments of Catholics to this land. To have the Jewish People in the majority is to interfere with the peaceful exercise of these rights in the Holy Land already vested in Catholics.
It is true that at one time Palestine was inhabited by the Hebrew race, but there is no axiom in history to substantiate the necessity of a people returning to a country they left nineteen centuries before.
If a “Hebrew Home” is desired, it would not be too difficult to find a more fitting territory than Palestine. With an increase in the Jewish population there, grave new international problems would arise. Catholics the world over would be aroused.

After the liberation of France in 1944, Maritain served as French ambassador to the Vatican and in that capacity worked to improve Vatican-Jewish relations. After World War II, Maritain attempted to influence Pope Pius XII to confront and transform church policies toward the Jewish people. As French historian P. Cheneaux has noted, “After the horrible fate that struck the people of Israel, Maritain hoped that the church, through the voice of the pope, would make itself heard and condemn anti-Semitism solemnly.” Maritain worked through Cardinal Montini (the Vatican secretary of state who would be elected Pope Paul VI in 1963) to influence Pius XII, but to no avail.

The full impact of Maritain’s teachings on Jews and Israel would be felt during the pontificate of John XXIII, Pius XII’s successor, who initiated the process that led to a radical change in the church’s relationship with Jews, Judaism, and Zionism as part of the larger liberalizing project of the Second Vatican Council. The deliberations about Catholic-non-Christian relations in general, and Catholic-Jewish relations in particular, were influenced by Maritain’s teachings. John XXIII directly acknowledged Maritain’s influence, as did his successor, Paul VI, who was Maritain’s friend and student.

According to one observer, Maritain was “embraced by Pope Paul VI at the time of Vatican II and honored as a major source and inspiration of the Council’s teachings.” In the years leading up to the publication of Nostra Aetate (In Our Time), the Vatican’s document on relations with other faiths, Maritain met often with the church hierarchy. His access rested on his eminence as a Catholic philosopher and his diplomatic service as French ambassador to the Holy See. Maritain’s influence was affirmed by Paul VI’s gesture at the closing ceremony of the council—in which he chose Maritain to deliver the Vatican’s message.

However the framers of Nostra Aetate were careful to dissociate their call for a new relationship with the Jewish people from the question of Zionism. The ideology of secular Judaism, especially as espoused by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, disturbed Maritain. As Paul Merkley has noted, Christian supporters of Israel “would have preferred, other things being equal, to find believing Jews at the helm of the new state. But this was not to be ... the leading figures in the new government itself were all secularists.” Jewish secularism had long disturbed Vatican officials. In 1921 Cardinal Gasparri conveyed Vatican concern to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann: “The Zionists are not religious and are even antireligious, and therefore Zionism cannot be regarded as the fulfillment of prophecy. Zionism has no connection with the promised return of the Jews to the Holy Land.”

The process initiated by John XXIII in the early 1960s was continued by his successor, Paul VI. A remarkable sign of growing Catholic grappling with Jewish concerns was the 1965 publication of Father Edward Flannery’s The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-three Centuries of Anti-Semitism. The first book on antisemitism written by a Catholic priest, it shows the influence of Jacques Maritain’s ideas. In a chapter titled “The Roots of anti-Semitism,” Flannery cites Maritain’s work directly: “Jacques Maritain has justly warned against a certain ‘blasphemous impersonation of Divine Providence,’ whereby the woes of the Jews are accepted or encouraged as willed by God. ... However, it is not to the divine plan but to the study of human perversity that we must look first for explanations of these manifestations of inhumanity.”

Between 1963, when the text of Nostra Aetate was first drafted, and 1993, when the Vatican granted Israel full diplomatic recognition, the papacy signaled its intent to change the church’s relationship to the Jewish people in a number of large and small ways. Pope John XXIII wrote in 1963: “We are conscious today that many, many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer see the beauty of thy chosen people nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren. We realize that the Mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in the blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting thy love. Forgive us the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying them a second time in their flesh. For we know not what we did.”

This dramatic statement, and others like it, reflected Maritain’s influence. John Paul II expanded on this teaching by explicitly linking the Shoah to the need for a Jewish state. In 1980, the pope noted that Jews, having undergone “tragic experiences connected with the extermination of so many sons and daughters, were driven by the desire for security to set up the State of Israel.” In 1985, the Vatican issued “Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews to Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis on the Roman Catholic Church.” Not only did this decree withdraw the charge of “deicide” imputed to the Jews; it redefined the church’s understanding of its relationship to Judaism: “Because of the unique relations that exist between Christianity and Judaism—linking together at the very level of their identity—relations founded on the design of God of the Covenant, the Jews and Judaism should not occupy an occasional and marginal place in Catechesis: Their presence there is essential and should be organically integrated.” These were powerful words; official acts that backed them up would soon follow.

Prior to Pope John Paul II’s millennium pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the most dramatic act signaling a shift in the Catholic Church’s relationship with the Jewish people was the pope’s visit to Rome’s Great Synagogue in April of 1986. On this visit, the pope spoke of the Jewish people as “the beloved elder brothers of the church.” At the ceremonies, the chief rabbi of Rome, Rabbi Toaff, asked the pope to establish diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the State of Israel. The pope did not reply to this request. In his speech to Jews and Christians assembled in the Rome synagogue, the pope noted the full implications of Vatican II’s reassessment of the church’s relation with the Jewish people: “Once again, speaking through me, the church deplores, in the words of ‘Nostra Aetate,’ the hatreds, the persecutions, and all the manifestations of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time by whomever.”

The Madrid peace talks of 1991 led to the Oslo Accords of 1993, in which Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) granted each other diplomatic recognition. The public demonstration of this accord was the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn. It was only after these accords were signed that the Vatican established full diplomatic relations with Israel. Aharon Lopez, Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, quoted a church diplomat as saying, “If the Palestinians can sit down formally with the Israelis, why can we not do it?” When in 1994, the first Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, Shmuel Hadas, met the pope, John Paul II told him of his long-standing wish to visit Israel.

In 2000, the Vatican finalized its diplomatic agreements with the PLO only a few days before the pope’s visit to Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. Thus, Pope John Paul II’s visit to Israel—part of his millennium pilgrimage to the lands of Christian origins—was preceded by and enabled by the Vatican-Israel accords of 1993 and the Oslo accords of the same year. The 2000 papal visit to Israel signaled the full implementation of the 1993 Vatican-Israel accords. The Vatican had changed its approach to the State of Israel. It had moved from nonrecognition to the implementation of full diplomatic relations. Jacques Maritain’s understanding of Zionism had exerted its influence in the church hierarchy. And G.K. Chesterton’s books had influenced the Catholic laity.

For Israeli Jews, the pope’s mastery of Christian and Jewish religious symbolism was remarkably effective. There were highly positive reactions to the Mass at Corazim/Mount of Beatitudes, an event broadcast on television in Israel and around the world. During the pope’s visit to Israel, according to Dan Segre, “Forty-two percent of Israeli Jews told pollsters that they liked the pope more than they did former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, the spiritual leader of the largest religious party, Shas. No less significant is the fact that throughout his visit, the pope was referred to in Hebrew, as ‘His Holiness.’”

Most effective and masterful was the symbolism that attended the pope’s visit to the Western Wall, where he placed a written prayer in a crack in the wall. The note that he offered as a prayer read as follows:

God of our fathers,
You chose Abraham and his descendants
To bring your Name to the Nations:
We are deeply saddened
By the behaviour of those
Who in this course of history
Have caused these children of yours to suffer,
And ask your forgiveness.
We wish to commit ourselves
To genuine brotherhood
With the people of the Covenant.

Jerusalem 25, March 2000
Signed: John Paul II

The American writer James Carroll, a modern disciple of Maritain, saw the pope’s visit to the Western Wall as a great historical moment:

For the pope to stand in devotion before that remnant of the Temple, for him to offer a prayer that did not invoke the name of Jesus, for him to leave a sorrowful Kvitel, a written prayer, in a crevice of the wall, in Jewish custom, was the single most momentous act of his papacy. ... The pope’s unprecedented presence in Jerusalem has said in effect, that the Catholic Church honors Jews at home in Israel—a rejection of the ancient Christian attachment to the myth of Jewish wandering, even if Catholic ambivalence about the Jewish state seems less than fully resolved.