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The Preacher of the Papal Household explains why, in a Good Friday homily at St Peter’s, he thought it an appropriate analogy to compare recent criticism of the Pope and the hierarchy over the handling of the sex-abuse crisis to anti-Semitism Good Friday homily furore.
My sermon, when correctly understood, does not constitute a step backward in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, but rather a step forward Now that the initial uproar has passed, I would like to clarify what my intentions were in the sentences that caused offence during my Good Friday homily in St Peter’s Basilica in the presence of the Pope. My main goal in doing so is to ensure that the dialogue between Jews and Christians is not harmed but rather encouraged. It is also to indicate that the reactions from the Jewish world were not always the same. The Jewish Passover this year occurred during the same week as the Christian Passover, Easter, and I decided to take advantage of that to offer a greeting to the Jews on behalf of Christians, precisely in the context of Good Friday which has always been an occasion of understandable suffering for them. I wanted to do that even more so because the central theme of my sermon was against violence, something that the Jewish people have experienced so much through the centuries. In 1998, when there was a similar timing between the Jewish Passover and the Christian Passover, I dedicated my entire sermon on that particular Good Friday to highlighting the roots of Christian anti-Semitism, including a request for forgiveness, which was extended to the Jewish world by Pope John Paul II at that time. The press, including the Jewish press, gave widespread attention to the sermon. This year, a few days before Good Friday, I received a letter from an Italian Jewish friend (the letter truly exists and is not a literary fiction on my part!). He compared certain aspects of anti-Semitism to the ongoing attacks against the Church and the Pope, in particular the use of stereotyping and the shift from the guilt of an individual to collective guilt in the case of paedophilia by some clergy. I decided, therefore, with my friend’s consent, to quote that letter because it seemed to me to be a very noble gesture on the part of a Jewish person to express his solidarity with the leader of the Catholic Church at a time like this. It was a gesture, I believed, that would encourage Christians to do the same in similar circumstances for the Jewish people. Neither I nor my Jewish friend remotely had in mind the anti-Semitism expressed in the Holocaust; we had in mind anti-Semitism as a cultural orientation, which is far more ancient and widespread than that of the Holocaust – the anti-Semitism, for example, of the Dreyfus Affair. Considering anti- Semitism in its more recent, nineteenth century, version, some Jews have objected to me that anti-Semitism has always been about the impersonal and the collective, providing therefore no analogy with the present passing from personal to collective guilt in the case of clerical paedophilia. In his letter, my Jewish friend considered it in a much wider way. The passing from individual to collective responsibility, in the case of the Jews, consists in placing upon the whole of the Jewish people, past and present, the responsibility of some Jewish leaders who collaborated in the condemnation of Jesus, which has been the root of anti-Semitism among Christians. Understood in that way, the comparison did not seem as absurd to me as some people believe it was. Just a few weeks before, on the front page of the leading Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, Ernesto Galli della Loggia, a secular journalist, had denounced the rise of a real and distinct “anti-Christian attitude” in modern culture. There are many, in fact, who think that the media campaign is motivated less by love and compassion for the victims of paedophilia than by a desire to bring the Church to its knees – something reminiscent of Voltaire’s famous saying, “Ecrasez l’infâme” (“Crush the infamous [Church]”). The former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, in an article in The Jerusalem Post on 8 April, wrote: “I believe the continuing attacks by the media on the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI have become manifestations of anti-Catholicism. The procession of articles on the same events are, in my opinion, no longer intended to inform, but simply to castigate.” This does not in the least mean one should be silent or underestimate the gravity of the cases of paedophilia by the clergy. In that very same sermon – even though it was not the main point of the sermon – I spoke about “violence against children that unfortunately was perpetrated by not a few members of the clergy”. In a sermon to the Papal Household in Advent 2006, I had even proposed a day of fasting and repentance to express solidarity with the victims of paedophilia, and the proposal had wide circulation in the press and some concrete response. Given these intentions on my part, then, how could a media tempest of such proportions develop? A Jewish rabbi, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, explained it one week after the event, on 11 April 2010, in The Jerusalem Post, in an article entitled “We Are Bad Listeners”. It is worth looking at some quotes from it because they demonstrate how my sermon, when correctly understood, does not constitute a step backward in the Jewish- Christian dialogue but rather a step forward. “I assume”, Gottstein wrote, “none of the Jewish speakers who reacted to the preacher’s statement even read his homily. They were probably reacting to a journalist who asked for a comment on some statement, and offered an appropriate response. Journalists, lifting a quote from a longer piece, set the agenda, Jewish spokespersons respond, a story is told, a scandal is created … “A look at what the Franciscan preacher actually said tells another story, that at the very least offsets the negative impressions generated by the statements that have made headlines … The homily for Good Friday was the moment most dreaded by Jews for centuries. Following this homily, mobs would set to the streets, and Jews feared for their lives. Passion plays enacted on Good Friday were a constant source of violence towards Jews… With this background, it is striking to note what Fr Cantalamessa makes of the opportunity. He uses the moment at St Peter’s Basilica, in the presence of the Pope, to wish Jews a “Good Passover”… “To think of the Jews as brothers in faith during a Papal Good Friday service is the fruit of decades of labour in the field of Jewish- Christian relations. That this could be said so casually and naturally is the real news. But he does not stop here. He greets us, Jews, with words from the Mishnah, quoted in the Hagaddah, the most popular of Jewish texts… To all this, there is only one appropriate response, recognition and acknowledgement of the quiet yet profound significance of the moment, and so – thank you, Fr Cantalamessa. “He has been legitimately called to task and has appropriately apologised. But we too need to express our regret at failing to hear the message as it was delivered and for allowing the media to create the wrong story, while missing the true story. The theme of the preacher’s homily was going beyond violence. The last couple of days show us yet again that bad listening is itself a source of violence.” Guido Guastalla, of the Jewish community in Livorno, added his voice to that of the rabbi in Jerusalem in an article reprinted in L’Osservatore Romano on 19 April 2010. Because of my sermon, after Easter a segment of the public and of the Italian press promoted a campaign to cancel the honorary degree in Multimedia Communication that an Italian university had decided to award me. Once again it was a Jewish person who took up my defence, Marisa Levi, a professor of biology whose father had lost his teaching post during the fascist era. In a letter of support to the chancellor, she said: “The fact that the words of solidarity with the Pope quoted by Fr Cantalamessa were written by a Jew made them even more significant. I am very concerned, beyond this specific case, about a system of information that takes key words, expressly chosen and out of context, and spreads them with extreme rapidity without knowing what the person really said.” I hope that this explanation will serve to reassure my many readers and listeners throughout the world who have been disturbed by what they have read or heard in the media. Above all, I hope that it will convince my Jewish friends that my sentiments toward them have not changed and that they have, in the Preacher of the Papal Household, a promoter – and not an enemy – of dialogue with them.
Fr Raniero Cantalamessa OFMCap has been the Preacher of the Papal Household for 30 years. The English translation of this article is by Marsha Daigle Williamson. 14 | THE TABLET | 15 May 2010 |
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