“‘Daniel, when you were serving your rural parish in Poland, did they bring you the food like this?’ he asked and laughed.
“Actually, they did, Hilda. After the war, times were very hard in Poland and old ladies really did bring me cakes and pies, and sour cream. Oh, my Poland, my Poland!
“I had been saving up what I had to tell him for so many years, and then between the soup and the bigos I could not find how to begin. He himself made it clear that he was prepared to listen to me. He said, ‘You know, Daniel, it is very difficult to turn this great ship. There is a habit of thinking in a particular manner, both about Jews and about many other things. You have to change the direction without capsizing the ship.’
“‘Your ship threw the Jews overboard, that’s the problem,’ I said. He was sitting almost opposite me, slightly to one side. He has large hands and the papal signet ring is large and on his head was the white papal skullcap, like a yarmulke, and he was listening attentively. Then I told him everything I had been thinking these last years, the things which keep me awake at night.
“‘The Church expelled the Jews. That’s what I think. But what I think is not important. What does matter is what St. Paul thought. For him the “one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church” was a Church of Jews and non-Jews. He never imagined a Church without Jews. It, the Church of circumcision, had the right to decide who belonged to that catholicity. Paul came to Jerusalem not just to pay his respects to the Apostles Peter, James, and John. He was sent by an affiliated Church, the Church of the Gentiles. He came to the mother Church, to that early Christianity, to Judeo-Christianity, because he saw it as the source of all being. Later, in the fourth century, after Constantine, the daughter Church usurped the place of the mother Church. It was no longer Jerusalem which was the ancestral mother of the Churches, and catholicity no longer meant unity, all-inclusiveness, global reach, but merely loyalty to Rome. The Greco-Roman world turned away from its source, from the primal Christianity which had inherited Judaism’s attitude toward orthopraxis, that is, to the observance of the commandments, to dignified behavior. To be a Christian now meant principally to acknowledge doctrine emanating from the Center. From that moment, the Church was no longer an eternal union with the God of the Jews, renewed in Jesus Christ as a union with the God of all peoples, following Christ, and thereby confirmation of loyalty to the first covenant of Moses. The Christian peoples were by no means the New Israel, they were the Extended Israel. Altogether we, the circumcised and the uncircumcised, became the New Israel not by rejecting the old one but by extending it to include the whole world. What was at issue was not doctrine but purely a way of life.
“‘In the Gospels we find a very Jewish question: ‘Rabbi, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ The Master does not tell the questioner to believe this or that. He tells him to go and do this and that. Act in accordance with the commandments of Moses. But, he says, he is already doing that. He has no intention of breaking the commandments. Then the Master says, in that case everything is fine, but if you want to be perfect, give away all your property and follow me. That is Christianity—giving everything to the Lord, not a tithe, not a half, but everything! But first learn to give away, like a Jew, a tenth. Moses taught how a man should do his duty to the Lord, and Jesus how to do it not from a sense of duty but of love.
“‘Why is Rome the mother Church? Rome is a sister! I am not against Rome, but I am not under Rome! What does “the New Israel” mean? Is it supposed to abolish the old one?
“‘Paul understood that the Gentiles were a wild branch which had been grafted on to the natural olive tree. Israel opened up to receive new peoples. This was not a New Israel separate from the old one but an Extended Israel. Paul could never have imagined that there would be a Church without the Jews.’
“At this point he stopped me and said, ‘Forgive me, I was wrong. I am happy to say that.’
“Hilda, he said that because he is a very great man, greater than one can imagine!
“He said, ‘Yes, I was wrong and I want to put this mistake right. You are correct in talking of an Extended Israel!’
“But by now I could not stop. After all, I did not know whether I would ever see him again and I had to tell him everything.
“‘For the Jews, as for the Christians, it is man, not God, who stands at the center. Nobody has ever seen God. You have to see God in man. In Christ the man, you need to see God. The Greeks put Truth at the center, the principle of Truth, and for the sake of that principle you can destroy a man. I have no need of a truth which destroys a man. More than that, anyone who destroys a man destroys God also. The Church bears a guilt toward the Jews!
In the city of Emsk we were shot down in a square between two churches, one Catholic, and one Orthodox! The Church drove out and cursed the Jews and has paid for that by all its subsequent divisions and schisms. These divisions cover the Church in shame right up to this day. Where is the catholicity? Where is its all-embracing nature?’
“‘I know, Daniel. I know this,’ he said.
“‘It’s not enough for me that you know it,’ I said.
“‘Don’t be too hasty, don’t be too hasty. It is an enormous ship!’ That is what he said.
“The server came in and brought kissel.”
“What did he bring?” Hilda asked.
“Kissel. It’s a dessert, made from cherries. Like German Grütze. Yes, Hilda, I have remembered—the boy’s name is Jonathan.”
“What boy?” Hilda asked in surprise.
“That couple of hippies in the telephone box. The girl was Patricia, and the boy was Jonathan. He had a harelip which had been sewn up fairly neatly. You will recognize them.”
48.
F
ROM THE BIOGRAPHY OF
P
OPE
J
OHN
P
AUL
II
1981, 13 May: in St. Peter’s Square a Turkish terrorist, Ali A
1986, 13 Apriclass="underline" for the first time since the era of the apostles a Roman pope visits a synagogue (in Rome) and greets Jews, calling them “our beloved brothers and, we may say, our elder brothers.”
1986, 27 October: on the initiative of John Paul II a meeting takes place in the city of Assisi of representatives of 47 different Christian churches and 13 representatives of non-Christian religions and they pray together.
1992, 12 July: Pope John Paul II announces to believers his imminent hospitalization in connection with an operation to remove a tumor in his intestine.
1993, 30 December: Diplomatic relations are established between the Vatican State and the State of Israel.
1994, 29 Apriclass="underline" John Paul II slips getting out of the shower and breaks his hip. Independent specialists consider that it is from this time that he begins to suffer from Parkinson’s disease.
2000, 12 March: in the course of a Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Cathedral the Pope asks forgiveness and acknowledges the Church’s guilt for its sins: persecution of the Jews, church schisms, and religious wars, crusades and justification of wars on the basis of theological dogmas, contempt for minorities and the poor, justification of slavery. He performs a ritual of repentance (mea culpa) for the sins of the sons of the Church.
2000, 20 March: beginning of the Pope’s visit to Israel, in the course of which he prays at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
2001, 4 May: in Athens the Pope asks forgiveness on behalf of the Church for the destruction of Constantinople.
2001, 6 May: in Damascus the Pontiff, for the first time in the existence of the Church, visits a mosque.
2004, 29 June: Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, pays an official visit to the Vatican.