Word: vaticans
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...Israeli leaders are expecting the pope to elaborate, during a visit to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, on his recent apology for the Vatican's failure to speak out during World War II against the Nazi genocide. And the bar of their expectations may have been set beyond the Vatican's limit. Israel is also miffed that John Paul II will visit a Palestinian refugee camp outside Bethlehem, where they fear he may make remarks affirming the right of refugees to return to their homes - which, in the case of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, are in Israel...
...most prominent and exposed of these is the city of Jerusalem. In January, Israel's Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau asserted that John Paul's visit to the Western Wall would constitute "de facto recognition...of a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty." The Vatican supports no such thing. Weeks later, it signed an agreement with the P.L.O., whose preamble stated that unilateral actions by any party in Jerusalem are "morally and legally unacceptable." The Israelis were furious, but the trip was kept on track...
...Pope will also face pressure from Jews who, like Lau, regard Vatican statements about the Holocaust as "too little, too late." They will probably feel similarly about the homily, scheduled for last Sunday, in which John Paul was expected to reiterate regret for Christians' past anti-Semitic acts without admitting church culpability. Lau tells TIME he expects private pledges from John Paul to halt the canonization process for Pope Pius XII, who has been accused of "silence" during the Holocaust, but such promises are unlikely...
...Vatican's 1997 document "We Remember," concerning the church's role during the Holocaust, was widely criticized by Jewish organizations for failing to go far enough in confronting the church's failures both during the Holocaust itself and in creating the cultural climate in Europe in which it occurred. Although the current document goes a little further than "We Remember," that's unlikely to be enough to satisfy Jewish critics...
...treatment of the Holocaust in "Memory and Reconciliation" is sure to attract the most attention, there is plenty more for observers to ponder. It questions some of the more important episodes of church history in the Middle Ages, such as the Crusades, in which military campaigns ordered by the Vatican resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians, and the Inquisition, in which the Vatican authorized torture as a means of extracting confessions from "heretics." The document challenges many of the practices of the church in the New World, by criticizing forced conversions...