Pope Benedict XVI visited a synagogue in Cologne on Friday in a clear sign that building better relations between the Catholic church and other faiths would play an important role in his papacy.
The German pontiff, who served briefly and unwillingly in the Hitler Youth and finished the second world war in a US prisoner of war camp, visited the city-centre synagogue which was destroyed by the Nazis and later rebuilt.
The relationship between Jews and Christians had been ”complex and often painful”, he said. Both religions had to join forces, he said, adding: ”We must come to know each other much more and better.”
The Pope’s conciliatory message, delivered to an unprecedented audience of cardinals and rabbis, suggested that he was keen to build on recently improved relations between the Vatican and the Jewish community. Pope Benedict is only the second Pope to step inside a synagogue. (His predecessor, John Paul II, was the first.)
Yesterday he listened intently as a rabbi, Netanel Teitelbaum, recited the kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the dead. Another rabbi then blew the schofar, a ram’s horn.
The Pope paid tribute to the 11,000 Jews from Cologne who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, describing the Holocaust as an ”unspeakable and previously unimaginable crime”.
He said: ”In the 20th century, in the darkest period of German and European history, an insane racist ideology … gave rise to the attempt, planned and carried out systematically by the state, to exterminate European Jewry.”
Anti-semitism had not gone away, he said: ”Sadly we are witnessing the rise of anti-semitism and various forms of a general hostility towards foreigners.”
But he appeared to shrug off a demand by Abraham Lehrer, a member of the synagogue’s board, who said that if the Vatican were serious about improving relations it should be open about the most embarrassing episode in its recent history, the second world war. ”The Vatican should now open its archives,” Mr Lehrer told the Pope.
Many Jews believe that Benedict’s predecessor, Pius XII, who was Pope from 1939 to 1958, did little or nothing to condemn the Holocaust.
Yesterday Pope Benedict said Jews and Christians should not ”look back at history”. They should instead concentrate on their ”common inheritance”.
Hundreds of young Catholics greeted the Pope on the second day of his first trip abroad, for World Youth Day. But he appeared more comfortable giving speeches than waving to the crowds, who hung from balconies chanting ”Be-ne-detto”. He still seems to find all the attention faintly embarrassing.
Yesterday members of Germany’s Jewish community, which has grown dramatically since 1989 with an influx of Russian Jews, gave mixed reactions to the Pope’s speech.
”It will help to enable a dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims,” Golda Nasta said.
But Levit Chaim, an orthodox rabbi from Bremen, said the Pope had to do more to condemn terrorism. ”The previous Pope did a lot for the Jews. Will this Pope do a lot for the Jews? I don’t know. We will have to see,” Mr Chaim said.
Relations between the Vatican and Israel were strained recently when Israel criticised Pope Benedict for not mentioning attacks on Israelis in a condemnation of terrorism. The Vatican responded with a terse statement asking Israel not to tell the Pope what to say.
Pope Benedict continues his four-day visit to Cologne with a meeting today with the chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, followed by an open-air mass tomorrow for some 500,000 young pilgrims. – Guardian Unlimited Â