Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural Mass takes place on Sunday and the world’s attention will hone in, once again, on the Vatican. Born on the South Side of Chicago, the new pontiff grew up and studied in a city with a strong Jewish population and will likely have encountered Jews in his everyday life. Today there are roughly 120,000 Jewish residents there, with another 200,000 based in the surrounding suburbs.
Notwithstanding his theological training, there can be little to have prepared Robert Prevost from the step up from Cardinal to Pope, a role with unique global reach and which traces its history back to St. Peter in the first century. In becoming the 267th in that lineage, he is now the nominal head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.
By contrast, the global Jewish population numbers approximately 15.8 million, meaning there are almost 90 Catholics in the world for every Jew. Despite the imbalance in demography, the relationship has an important past, present and future.
The Catholic Church’s historic relationship with Judaism is a painful one, and Popes in a bygone era were often the source of hostility and hatred. A succession of popes contributed to a legacy of anti-Jewish laws, forced conversions and expulsions, which had devastating effects on Jewish communities throughout Europe during and following the Middle Ages.
As an example, Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) played a key role in codifying anti-Jewish doctrine, declaring Jews to be enemies of Christ who must be kept socially inferior. In 1215, during the Fourth Lateran Council, he issued a decree requiring Jews to wear distinctive clothing to distinguish them from Christians (this was the
precursor to the Nazis’ yellow star).
There are a shocking number of other Popes who continued the antisemitic invective and measures. To take one example, Pope Sixtus IV (1471–1484) authorized the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, which led to the persecution, forced conversion and torture of Jews in Spain, culminating in the expulsion of over 160,000 Jews in 1492.
Zaki Cooper
Some years later, the anti-Jewish prejudice still pervaded the Vatican. When Theodore Herzl went to visit Pius X in 1904, in the hope of winning support to establish a modern Jewish state, he was rebuffed. The Pontiff told him: “The Jewish people has not recognised our Lord, therefore we cannot recognise the Jewish people.”
Pope Leo will have plenty to keep him busy, and Christian-Jewish relations will be a part of that. He assumes the office at an auspicious time, with the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate looming. This was the famous declaration adopted by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, which introduced sweeping and transformational changes to Roman Catholic teaching, with reverberations felt across the Christian world and across relations between faiths.
It came about after the French-Jewish historian Jules Isaac, who survived the Holocaust, went to meet Pope John XXIII. This encounter led to a transformational
moment in Catholic-Jewish relations. The ensuing Nostra Aetate document made clear that Jews were not responsible for the death of Jesus, and denounced replacement theology, which claimed that Christianity was a direct replacement for Judaism.
Second, the Pope will be expected to continue the trend of his predecessors in condemning antisemitism, both where it manifests in the Catholic Church but also well beyond. Third, it is hoped that the Pope will continue moves against evangelism. Pope Francis restricted the use of the Latin Mass recited on Good Friday, which calls for the conversion of the Jews and until 2008 included a reference to Jewish “blindness.” Furthermore, in 2015 the Vatican issued a document declaring that the Catholic Church would “neither conduct nor support
any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”
Fourth, we can’t expect the Pope to solve the Middle East conflict but he will have to decide his position on this diplomatic tightrope. Whilst motivated by a humanitarian concern for the plights of the people of Gaza, Pope Francis was perceived as overly aligned with the Palestinian cause, and Israel will hope that Pope Leo is more sympathetic to its plight.
Finally, as an exponent of religious values and ethnical monotheism, it is hoped that Pope Leo will find common cause with Jewish organisations. This could cover a range of moral issues such as the environment, the family, technology or anti-slavery. One of Pope Francis’ memorable interventions, in 2018, was to praise the value of Shabbat, saying “what the Jews followed, and still observe, was to
consider the Sabbath as holy.”
Pope Leo will have a busy time on Christian-Jewish relations, and much besides. As the holder of a role symbolizing the world’s moral conscience, his every word will be scrutinised. Many people are pinning high hopes on him, at a time where there is a worrying rise of populist and authoritarian political leaders around the world. He has already said he would like to be a bridge-builder. At CCJ, that is what we have been doing since 1942 and we even started the Bridge Award in 2017; recipients have included Lord Rothschild and King Charles.
As he embarks on this awesome responsibility, the Pope can take inspiration from Rebbe Nachman’s famous dictum: “The whole world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid.”
- Zaki Cooper is a vice-president of the Council of Christians and Jews.
