Condolences for late Pope

Condolences

his holiness pope John Paul II

Speech

Melbourne Ports (11.27 a.m.)—It is appropriate that the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition lead this parliament’s reflections on the death of Pope John Paul II. John Paul was the leader of the world’s one billion Catholics for almost 27 years, the longest papacy of modern times and the third longest in the 2,000-year history of the church. He exercised, in my view, a greater influence on world events than any other recent religious leader. It is fitting that the House notes his passing and reflects on the place he occupies in the history of our time.

As the only Jewish member of this House and perhaps the only member who is an adherent to a non-Christian religion, I wish to chronicle some remarks about this pope, the first pope who stood inside a synagogue since Peter. When Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow, was elected pope in October 1978, there was some unease around the world about his election. Poland had been the scene of a long and unhappy history of anti-Semitism, fostered for many years by the teachings and actions of the Catholic church. Poland was the scene for the murder of more than three million Jews by the Nazis. Although many Poles risked their lives saving individual Jews during the holocaust, it is a sad fact that the Nazis chose Poland to carry out this vast criminal enterprise.

John Paul II turned out to be a man of greater vision and courage than he was given credit for at the time of his election. Despite his conservatism on many issues, he was a child of the Second Vatican Council. He fully supported the church’s historic declaration Nostra Aetate of 1965 which repudiated Catholicism’s traditional view that the Jews had killed Jesus Christ and that Jewish people were collectively and eternally responsible for this. This declaration condemned anti-Semitism and apologised to the Jewish people for church’s historic fostering of anti-Semitism.

What those who feared a Polish papacy did not realise was that Karol Wojtyla had never forgotten the terrible things that took place around him in his youth. Wadowice, the town near Cracow where he grew up, was more than 25 per cent Jewish when Karol was a child. He grew up with Jews, he lived in the same street as Jews and went to school with Jews. One of these was Jerzy Kluger, a Jew who many years later would play a key role as a go-between for John Paul II and Israel when the Vatican established diplomatic relations. Many years later, Kluger told the New York Times that the young Karol often went to the Kluger’s apartment overlooking the town square and listened to music performed by a string quartet comprising two Jews and two Catholics. ‘Previous popes did not know Jews,’ Jerzy Kluger told the New York Times, ‘but this pope is a friend of the Jewish people, because he knows Jewish people.’

In 1939 the Germans occupied Poland. In the next four years the great majority of Wadowice Jews were transported to the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where they were killed. The young Wojtyla, meanwhile, went to work in a stone quarry and later a chemical factory, thus avoiding being deported as a slave labourer for Germany. At the same time, he secretly studied for the priesthood. He knew the Jews of Wadowice were being deported to their deaths and, while he survived the war himself, most of the people whom he knew from that background in his youth did not. It might be said that, in many ways, he spent the rest of his life atoning for the fact that he survived but his friends did not.

In the years between the Second World War and his election as Pope, Father Wojtyla was more concerned with saving the Polish Catholic Church, which suffered decades of persecution under the communist regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka, which Stalin imposed on Poland after the war. Poland remained a Catholic country under the rule of an atheist regime, and life for Catholics there was not easy. Wojtyla became a bishop in 1958 and the Archbishop of Cracow in 1963. He became known as one of the brightest of the church’s new generation of leaders and was made cardinal in 1967. The communists certainly underestimated him when they described him as a ‘poet and a dreamer’, just as Stalin’s contemptuous comment on ‘how many divisions does the Pope have’ was certainly a profound misjudgment of Catholicism.

He attended the Second Vatican Council and, while he was not among the most outspoken reformers, he supported the reforms made by the council, including some of the changes I have spoken about. Once he became Pope, however, John Paul moved rapidly to change the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community. These relations were in an unhappy state, not least in Rome, where the inaction of Pope Pius XII when the Nazis deported the majority of Roman Jews to their deaths in 1943 was remembered with great bitterness. At an international level, the refusal of the Vatican to recognise Israel was also an unresolved problem. John Paul II took immediate steps to confront this situation, although it took a while to overcome the resistance of some in the institution he represented and, frankly, some of the suspicion in the Jewish community.

John Paul II was the master of dramatic gesture. The first of these occurred during his 1979 tour of Poland, which did so much to undermine the communist regime in his homeland. John Paul went to Auschwitz and knelt in prayer there, making it clear that he was praying for millions of Jews who had died there. His next great gesture was to visit the Great Synagogue in Rome, where he embraced the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff, and spoke of the ‘irrevocable covenant’ between God and the Jews. He explicitly renounced and apologised for the church’s history of anti-Semitism. He said: ‘With Judaism we have a relationship that we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way it may be said that you are our elder brothers.’ I will return to that in a minute.

In 1985 the Church, on John Paul’s instructions, published, Notes on the correct way to present the Jews and Judaism in preaching and catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church, an effort to correct generations of myths and stereotypes which continued to be propagated in some places in Catholic education. In 1998 he went further when the Church’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, headed by Australia’s Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, who is owed great credit for this great reconciliation between the two faiths over the last decades, produced a publication We remember: a reflection on the Shoah.. This document said of the behaviour of Catholics during the Holocaust years:

The spiritual resistance and concrete action of Christians was not that which might have been expected from Christ’s followers. We cannot know how many Christians in countries occupied or ruled by the Nazi powers or their allies were horrified at the disappearance of their Jewish neighbours and yet were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest. For Christians, this heavy burden of conscience of their brothers and sisters during the Second World War must be a call to penitence. We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church.

Finally, in 1993, John Paul agreed to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican City state and the state of Israel. The Vatican’s longstanding position was that the city should be placed under a form of international sovereignty. Israel’s position was that it would never give up Jerusalem, its capital and location of its holiest sites, reunited under Israeli rule in 1967. Eventually the Vatican redefined its position, to one of asking for ‘international guarantees’ for the security of Christian sites and Christian communities in Jerusalem.

In 2000 the Pope visited Israel. He went to the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem and saw for himself what had happened to the Jews of his Polish homeland as well as the rest of Europe. He visited the Western Wall of the Jewish Temple, where he submitted a written prayer, called kvitel, which he placed in the wall, as Jews have done for many centuries. Karol Wojtyla said in that note:

We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with People of the Covenant.

All of these actions and words had the effect of vastly improving relations between the Catholic Church and Jewish communities around the world, including in Australia, but they have been paralleled by other actions, which sometimes have not always led to an easy relationship, such as the canonisation of Archbishop Cardinal Stepinac, the canonisation of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, who died in Auschwitz because she was born a Jew, and a few other issues that have caused upset. The canonisation of the prejudiced Pius IX, in particular, was one that caused difficulty.

But today is not a time for reflection on these difficult issues. In the view of most Jewish leaders, in my view, the positive contributions of John Paul II to reconciliation between Catholics and Jews far outweighs any negative factors which still operate. Israel’s official reaction to John Paul’s death was that ‘Israel, the Jewish people and the entire world lost today a great champion of reconciliation and brotherhood between the faiths’. A leading US Jewish civil rights organisation said:

It is safe to say that more change for the better took place in his Papacy than in the nearly 2,000 years before.

When Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope in 1978, many Polish Catholics believed that it was literally a miracle—that John Paul was God’s chosen instrument for delivering Poland from oppression and restoring its freedom and independence. I am not qualified to read the mind of the Almighty, but there is no doubt that John Paul’s election was a decisive turning point in the overthrow of the communist regime in Poland, which in turn was the first vital step in bringing down the whole Soviet empire, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991—I would say ‘the welcome dissolution’ from the point of view of probably all people in this parliament.

For that reason, if no other, John Paul II deserves to be ranked with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as among the greatest political and moral leaders of the 20th century. One consequence of the fall of the Soviet Union and the ending of restrictions on Jewish emigration has been that millions of Jews have left the Soviet Union over the past 15 years. Many have gone to Israel and the United States. Many have settled in my electorate and enriched the local culture, as have tens of thousands of Poles who have come to Australia as a result of the persecution under the communist regime in Poland. I count many of them, including Adam Warzel and his wife, Margaret—the former leaders of Solidarity in Australia—as close personal friends.

My praise of the historic role of John Paul II does not mean that I agree with everything that he said and the people the Church has canonised since. Many people in my electorate object pretty strongly to some of his positions on issues such as abortion and homosexuality and I respect their views. The opposition of the Catholic Church to the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV is a difficult issue for many people, particularly in view of the terrible situation in Africa, and it is a position which I respectfully suggest the church should reconsider.

Even allowing for these matters of dissent, I think most Australians, whatever their religious views, will acknowledge that John Paul II was a man who changed the course of history, both in his native land and on the world stage. His contribution to opposing anti-Semitism and bringing about reconciliation between Catholics and Jews was but one manifestation of his wisdom, courage and vision, albeit one close to my heart. I sincerely mourn his passing and hope that his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, will continue along the path he pioneered. I am pleased that two friends from Sydney, the members for Lowe and Kingsford Smith, are present today for this reflection on the spiritual and temporal greatness of John Paul II.