ROME – In geopolitics, the concept of a “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom has been a cornerstone of strategic thinking since Winston Churchill coined the phrase in 1946. While it can mean vastly different things depending on who’s employing it, the basic idea is that the two partners will stand by one another even when one may privately believe the other is wrong.
For example, the US belatedly backed the UK in the Falklands conflict in 1982, and the UK reluctantly followed the US under George W Bush into war in Iraq in 2003. Both paid a price for their loyalty: the US watched Argentina, a reliable Cold War ally, drift into an ever-closer relationship with Cuba and Latin America’s anti-colonial movements, while the Iraq debacle was the beginning of the end for the Blair regime in the UK. That, perhaps, is the real definition of a special relationship – putting your own skin in the game, in order to back your partner.
In the sphere of religion, the Catholic equivalent of this special relationship, at least since the Second Vatican Council, is supposed to be the bond between the Church and Judaism. Jews, as the late Pope John Paul II memorably put it, are our “elder brothers in the faith”; moreover, the legacy of the Holocaust creates a special obligation for the Church to manifest perennial friendship and support for the Chosen People.
Here’s how Cardinal Kurt Koch, head of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, put the point in 2022: “For us Christians, Judaism is not simply one of the many non-Christian religions, and the relation of the Catholic Church to Judaism is not simply a special variant of inter-faith dialogue. Rather, the Church has a one-time and unique relationship with Judaism as to no other religion. This is because the relationship with the covenant people of Israel is so very much part of the Church’s intrinsic self-understanding that the Church cannot understand itself without reference to Judaism.”
That, at least, is the theory. Of late, however, a growing chorus of critics are charging out loud that, under Pope Francis, the special relationship is eroding, revealed as little more than hollow rhetoric which the Pope and other Catholic leaders are perfectly prepared to disregard when it becomes politically convenient.
The source of this angst, naturally, is the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. On the Catholic side, a German theologian named Gregor Maria Hoff, who teaches at the University of Salzburg, recently published an essay in the prestigious journal Communio in response to a 3 February letter from Pope Francis to the Jews of Israel. In effect, it was a response to an open letter that more than 400 Jewish leaders had addressed to the pontiff in November requesting “moral and conceptual clarity” on the Gaza conflict.
Aside from wondering why it took the Pope three full months to get around to replying, Hoff charged that Francis’s letter left much to be desired. While it said the right things about combatting anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, Hoff wrote, it failed to “call a spade a spade” by clearing distinguishing between Hamas as the aggressor and Israel as engaged in legitimate self-defence.
Hoff asserted that if the idea of a special relationship with Judaism doesn’t imply “trustworthy loyalty in an emergency”, then it’s pointless. Instead of an almost 1,000-word letter, Hoff suggested, what Jews wanted to hear could be expressed in one brief sentence: “Whoever attacks Jews, also attacks us!”
Hoff, by the way, is a Catholic liberal who supports both the German synodal path and the Pope’s own Synod of Bishops on Synodality. Yet he’s also a veteran of Jewish-Catholic dialogue, who believes the legacy of the last 60 years of friendship is now at risk.
Such voices are even more prominent on the Jewish side, especially after a November encounter with a delegation of Palestinians with relatives on the Gaza Strip in which Francis allegedly used the term “genocide” to characterise the Israeli military operation.
In December, South Africa’s Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein posted a video to social media accusing Francis of repeating “the sins of Pius XII”, referring to the wartime pope and his alleged silence on the Holocaust, charging that once again a pope is “surreptitiously colluding with the forces of evil who seek to annihilate the Jewish people”.
In more measured fashion, Chief Rabbi Riccardo di Segni of Rome expressed “great disappointment” in Francis and the Vatican in late January, warning that there have been “many steps backward” in Jewish-Catholic relations since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict. Di Segni, 74, who’s led the Jewish community in Rome since 2001, pointedly told his Catholic counterparts that “you don’t have a monopoly on peace.”
“Everyone wants peace, but it depends on what kind,” he said. “Whoever does evil must be defeated, as happened with the Nazis in 1945. You can’t just accept the idea that war, in itself, is a defeat for everyone,” he said, quoting a frequent line from Pope Francis.
Di Segni expressed the hope that his cri du coeur will produce an examination of conscience, since the reservoir of good will built up in Jewish-Catholic ties is now at risk.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Pope Francis came into office amid enthusiasm among Jews, based in large part on his longtime friendship with Rabbi Abraham Skorka in Buenos Aires, including the fact that the two men published a book together based on their conversations, titled Sobre el Cielo y la Tierra (“About Heaven and Earth”).
Yet there were early signs of coming storms. When Francis visited the Holy Land in 2014, he made an impromptu stop at the West Bank separation wall – what Palestinians call the “apartheid wall” – and paused to pray in front of graffiti reading: “Free Palestine”. The propagandistic nature of the moment was quickly immortalised in the form of a new postage stamp from the Palestinian Authority.
In truth, the election of the first pope from the developing world likely made a redefinition of Jewish-Catholic relations inevitable. For one thing, Catholic prelates from outside Europe and North America don’t feel the same sense of historical responsibility for anti-Semitism and hatred of the Jews. To many Catholic prelates from Latin America, Africa and Asia, the Holocaust is a chapter of European, not Christian, history for which they don’t feel compelled to carry the weight.
Across much of the developing world, especially Africa and Asia, the far more consequential religious “other” is Islam, not Judaism. Certainly in terms of where he invests his own time and treasure, Francis has made clear that Islam is his top inter-faith priority.
In addition, Catholics from the developing world typically see the Israeli/Palestinian conflict through the same lens as others in their societies, meaning there’s a widespread natural sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
Broadly speaking, the Vatican under a Latin American is going to be closer to the Brics line on Gaza than that of the United States.Though the Vatican hasn’t endorsed South Africa’s effort to charge Israel with war crimes before the International Criminal Court, it also hasn’t followed the White House line of calling the case “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis”.
All that comes on top of the structural reasons why the Vatican has always walked a tightrope on the Middle East – to wit, that whatever its theological commitment to Israel and Judaism may be, the Christians of the Holy Land are overwhelmingly Arab and pro-Palestinian, as are their clergy and bishops, and the Vatican can’t help but be influenced by its people on the ground.
Arguably we’re living through an historic shifting of the plates, in which Judaism is losing its pride of place as Catholicism’s paradigmatic inter-faith relationship. Instead, Judaism is becoming one more dialogue among many others, without the deference to Jewish and Israeli sensitivities Catholic leaders of previous generations would have regarded as both natural and obligatory.
Where will this lead? One indication came on 14 February, when Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, publicly said that Israel’s response to the 7 October Hamas attack has not been “proportionate”, citing the debated claim of 30,000 dead from the Gaza Health Ministry. That brought a swift rebuke from the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See, calling Parolin’s comments “regrettable” and insisting that Hamas alone is responsible for the bloodshed in Gaza.
To add insult to injury, the Italian version of the communique issued by the Israeli embassy used the pejorative word deplorevole, (“deplorable”) to translate “regrettable”, rather than the closer sfortunata (“unfortunate”). The ambassador later apologised, but by that point the damage was done, with the Italian paper Il Giornale referring to an “all-time low” in Israeli-Vatican relations.
Such back-and-forth is not unusual in international affairs. Parties with differing geopolitical visions and agenda often engage in such verbal sabre-rattling, only to walk things back later when tempers calm.
What the Parolin/Israeli exchange clearly isn’t is the language of a special relationship. Whatever the real number of casualties from the Gaza war turns out to be, it’s possible that the privileged nature of Jewish-Catholic ties, at least as they’ve evolved since Nostra Aetate, might be among them.
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