Impressive act of reparation

The new pope, Benedict XVI, visited the oldest synagogue in northern Europe during his trip to Germany last Friday.

The synagogue had been destroyed in the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht riots of November 1938 and was rebuilt in 1959.

The visit was loaded with significance. A German pope identifying so vividly with the victims of the pogroms and Holocaust. It was impressive. A silent act, perhaps, of reparation for the crime against the Jewish people perpetrated by Germans, Catholics, the Catholic church and two predecessors of Pope Benedict, Pius XI and Pius XII?

Welcoming him to the synagogue Abraham Lehrer, a German Jewish leader, said: "You grew up in Germany during a terrible time. We not only see in you the head of the Catholic church, but also a German who is aware of his historical responsibility."

The Catholic church has been attempting to repair its relations with the world's Jewish community since 1959, when Pope John XXIII abolished from the Catholic liturgy reference to the "perfidious Jews".

In 1965 Pope Paul VI published a declaration on "The Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate". This acknowledged the unique relationship between Judaism and Christianity, deriving from their common heritage, but went on to repeat the charge that was at the root of anti-Semitism: "True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ, still what happened in his passion can not be charged against all the Jews without distinction then alive, nor against the Jews of today."

Pope John Paul II visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem and prayed for forgiveness for all the sins Christians had committed against Jews.

In 1998 the Catholic Church published We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, which spoke of "certain interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people as a whole" that had incited "Christian mobs to attack the religious centres of others, including synagogues".

The problem with the gospels is not the misinterpretations; it is the gospels. Take the following passage from the gospel of St Matthew, chapter 27. Pilate asked the crowd of Jews, whether they wanted him to release Jesus or Barabbas, a notorious prisoner. The chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for the release of Barabbas. So, in answer to Pilate's question, the crowd said Barabbas. Then the crowd shouted in relation to Jesus "crucify him". And, according to Matthew, they followed this up with the infamous remark: "Let his blood be on us and on our children."

All this dialogue was of course a complete invention but there it is, right in the heart of the gospel, at the moment of climax. How do you interpret away this other than by way of saying: by the way, folks, this is all made up? And since so much reliance is and has been paid to the literal word of the gospel, the problem is what is stated there, not how it is interpreted.

There is also the problem that it wasn't just what certain Christians did to the Jews, but what the Catholic church did to them. True, some Catholic prelates protested over what was being done by the Nazis to the Jews but others, including the most senior churchman in Germany at the time, Cardinal Bertram, while tut-tutting a bit, still remained on folksy terms with Hitler - for instance every year he sent him birthday greetings.

Pius XI was openly anti-Semitic, approving, for example, of the abduction of a Jewish child to rear her as a Catholic. Pius XII's record remains problematic, not just for him but for the Catholic church.

As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the present pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, opened up the church archives on the Inquisition. He also opened the archives on the dealings between the Vatican and the German authorities, up to 1939. The files in general were not opened.

On Friday in the synagogue in Cologne , Abraham Lehrer said to the Pope: "For us a complete opening of the Vatican archives covering the period of the second World War, 60 years after the end of the Shoah [ Holocaust], would be a further sign of historical conscience."

Benedict did not reply directly but mentioned the desirability of "a mutually accepted interpretation of still disputed historical issues".

In the late 1990s an official commission of Catholic and Jewish historians was established to examine the church's role in the Holocaust. The commission collapsed, amid some acrimony, when the Vatican refused to make records available from the archives. The Vatican is talking of opening the files in 2009 at the earliest, fuelling the suspicion that there is something awful to hide.

A terrible crime was perpetrated against the Jewish people. The Catholic church bears a responsibility for its part in generating anti-Semitism. There should be an open acknowledgment of that and how, in essence, Christianity came to be anti-Semitic (not just because of "misinterpretations") - also an openness of what the Vatican did and did not do in the course of the Holocaust.