Pope Francis followed in the footsteps of his Polish and German predecessors, making friends and engaging positively with Jews many years before he became bishop of Rome. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he attended a Rosh Hashanah service and was praised by the Jewish community for his response to the 1994 bombing in Buenos Aires of the Argentine Jewish Association.
He became Pope in 2013 and in 2014, followed in the footsteps of his immediate papal predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, by visiting Israel, as well as Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. In 2016 he visited the Rome synagogue to mark 17th January annual ‘Day of Judaism’ in the Catholic Church in Italy and said, ‘we are one family’ and ‘Shabbat Shalom’ which was enough for the community to acclaim him as one of their own.
Later in the same year, he was the third consecutive pontiff to visit Auschwitz and as a pope from another continent, his visit underlined its universal importance. Since then, he regularly welcomed Jewish visitors to the Vatican, speaking out against antisemitism.
I met Pope Francis on three occasions and each time came away with the realisation that he intuitively knew among ordinary Jews and Christians there was less interest in the theological reflections and intellectual musings of his predecessor, than in a metaphorical hug and kiss.
Yad Vashem director Dani Dayan meets Pope Francis (Yad Vashem)
He continued the path of Christian reconciliation with Judaism, rejecting ancient Christian hostility and emphasising dialogue, even partnership. One of his best Argentinian friends was Rabbi Avraham Skorka “Ours is a spiritual journey”, he said. “Like him I don’t much like the protocol, and like him I too go for the essentials”. The pope and rabbi wrote a book together, based on their public dialogues on TV and Sobre el cielo y la tierra (‘On Heaven and Earth’) has been translated into several languages, including Hebrew.
Pope Francis desired a genuine encounter that involved a respect that takes the other as seriously as one demanded to be taken oneself. Personal engagement became a priority and he often took time to greet participants individually, sometimes hundreds of people, leaving his advisors to look at their watches with increasing concern, as the papal schedule was further delayed. I was fortunate to meet Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis and both were moving occasions but the difference was this: Benedict engaged intellectually; with Francis I was moved spiritually.
In the 60 years since Nostra Aetate, there has been a massive shift in the Christian reading of the New Testament, which now acknowledges Jesus was born, lived, and died a Jew and that the first Christians were Jews. Yet, few reflected on the harsh criticism of the Pharisees having as much to do with the closeness and rivalry between the communities at the time in which the texts were written, as with anything that happened during the lifetime of Jesus.
This development has not filtered into many pews, nor has been preached from many pulpits, including from the highest citadel in the Vatican. Pope Francis easily drew on Gospel accounts in which the Pharisees are depicted as hypocritical leaders of the Jewish people who oversaw a legalistic, exclusive religion lacking any sense of charity and compassion, without nuance or context. Unlike his predecessor, Francis easily fell back into old-fashioned tropes, unaware of the problems raised by stereotypes.
More serious than occasional clumsy theological reflections, were controversies about inappropriate language in light of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the subsequent war in Gaza and the dramatic increase in antisemitic incidents. Whilst Francis lamented the “terrible increase in attacks against Jews around the world” and that manifestations of hatred toward Jews and Judaism were “a sin against God”, his sensitivity to the real suffering of the Palestinian people sometimes led him to express himself in a manner that caused consternation.
Francis was not seeking to criticise the state of Israel nor the Jewish people as a whole, but to condemn the actions of the Israeli government. Nevertheless, when he told the faithful at St. Peter’s Square that in Gaza “we have gone beyond wars. This is not war. This is terrorism,” for many, these comments hinted at a moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas. Later, when speaking to the cardinals, he described Israeli raids on Gaza as “cruelty, not war”. In this case, it’s worth pointing out, that a good number of Jewish voices agreed with him.
During the six decades since Nostra Aetate, Jews and Christians have witnessed a transformation in relations. Pope Francis occasionally fell back into old tropes and was too casual in his comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but on most major issues, he helped consolidate the present position where Jews and Christians are now partners and find themselves on the same side of the fence, faced with the same challenges, and are in the unusual position of seeking to tackle them together.
- Dr Ed Kessler is the Founder President of Woolf Institute, Cambridge
