B16 at the Great Synagogue of Rome

- Great Synagogue of Rome

Tomorrow the pope is scheduled to visit the Great Synagogue of Rome. David Gibson has a good article on this and the issues surrounding it - The Jewish-Catholic Crisis: How Bad is it -- and Why? TIME also has a briefer article on this. Here's the beginning of it ......

Amid Tension, Pope Will Pay Visit to Synagogue

When Pope John Paul II stepped into Rome's central synagogue on April 13, 1986, the man in white was met by a thunderclap of applause. After centuries of Jews suffering through pogroms, ghettos, Nazi death camps and arm's-length-at-best cohabitation with Christians, the first-ever papal visit to a Jewish house of worship — entering the synagogue side by side with Rome's avuncular chief Rabbi Elio Toaff — was much more than a photo op. It was a shared embrace to begin to heal the wounds of history.

Still, the momentous visit 24 years ago, during which John Paul referred to Jews as Christians' "older brothers," could never fully erase that history. And indeed, when John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, crosses the Tiber River on Sunday to visit that same synagogue, he will be dogged by a new dispute about the past: the controversy over the Vatican's decision last month to push for possible sainthood for World War II-era Pope Pius XII, whom some Jewish groups and scholars blame for not doing enough to try to halt the Holocaust. Because of this and other tensions in the five years of his papacy, Benedict may be met by slightly more tepid applause from his Jewish hosts. One of Italy's leading rabbis, Giuseppe Laras, said he would boycott the service, citing a number of sore points with the Pope, most notably his decision to reactivate Pius XII's sainthood dossier .......

Here's a bit about the Rome Synagogue from Wikipedia ....

The Great Synagogue of Rome (Italian: Tempio Maggiore di Roma) is the largest synagogue in Rome. The Jewish community of Rome goes back to the second century BC when Judea had an alliance with the Roman Empire under the leadership of Judah Maccabeus. ..... The building was constructed shortly after the unification of Italy in 1870, when the Kingdom of Italy captured Rome and the Papal States ceased to exist. The Roman Ghetto [Papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1555 segregated the Jews, who had lived freely in Rome since Antiquity, in a walled quarter with three gates that were locked at night] was demolished and the Jews were granted citizenship ..... Designed by Vincenzo Costa and Osvaldo Armanni, the synagogue was built from 1901 to 1904 on the banks of the Tiber, overlooking the former ghetto ..... The aluminium dome is the only squared dome in the city and makes the building easily identifiable even from a distance. Commemorative plates honour the local Jewish victims of Nazi Germany and of a Palestine Liberation Organization attack in 1982. On 13 April 1986, Pope John Paul II made an unexpected visit to the Great Synagogue. This event marked the first known visit by a pope to a synagogue since the early history of the Roman Catholic Church .....


- interior of the Synagogue

As you guys know, I've written oh so many posts on why Pius XII should not be made a saint, so I won't go into the arguments here but simply say (again) that I think his refusal to speak out publicly against the Holocaust disqualifies him. Unfortunately, Benedict has deteriorated Catholic-Jewish relations not only with the press for Pius' sainthood, but with the restoration of the Latin Mass and the de-excommunication of the SSPX bishops as well.

This visit by Benedict to the Rome Synagogue reminds me of one of Daniel Silva's novels, The Confessor, in which the pope chosen after JPII's death is not Joseph Ratzinger but the Patriarch of Venice who takes the name Paul VII and who plans to visit the Rome Synagogue where he will both announce the opening of the secret Vatican archives on Pius XII, and will publicly apologize for the Catholic Church's history of anti-Semitism ..... needless to say, Vatican officials try to assassinate him first :)

I guess it's too much to hope that tomorrow life will imitate art and Benedict will follow in the footsteps of the fictional Pope Paul VII of The Confessor, but I do wish he would.