Indeed, no other Pope has had so direct an experience of Jewish life and suffering. As a youth growing up in the small Polish town of Wadowice, Karol Wojtyla (as John Paul II was then named) counted Jews among his closest friends and came to know the rhythms of Jewish observance and family life. He would later witness firsthand the Nazi murder of Poland's Jews. Speaking of his hometown in 1994, John Paul II remarked that it was "from there that I have thi

MAKING ITS sympathies clear from the start, We Remember refers to the murder of European Jewry as the Shoah--the Hebrew word meaning "catastrophe." The event, declares the Vatican statement, was an "unspeakable tragedy," one that "can never be forgotten." Moreover, the document continues, although the obligation to recall and understand the Shoah falls upon everyone, it is felt with particular urgency by the Church, not only because of its "very close bonds of spiritual kinship with the Jewish people" but also because of its "remembrance of the injustices of the past."

Finally, looking to the future of Jewish-Christian relations, We Remember concludes by urging Catholics to attend both to the "Hebrew roots of their faith" and to the "salutary warning" of the Shoah: that "the spoiled seeds of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism must never again be allowed to take root in any human heart."

WHATEVER ONE'S final judgment of this mea culpa, one cannot but commend both its tone and its basic aims. Throughout, the long history of Christian persecution of the Jews is discussed with candor and in a spirit of contrition. As for the Shoah itself, it is evoked in terms that leave no doubt as to the Church's recognition of its horror, as well as its repudiation of any effort to deny or trivialize the event. (In the United States, Patrick J. Buchanan may be the best-known Catholic guilty of this relativizing tendency.) Nor is there any mistaking the sincerity of John Paul II when in a letter accompanying We Remember he declares his hope that the statement will help to avert any future recurrence of "the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah."

Against this record of institutional progress and personal sympathy, however, must be set the Church's less than felicitous handling of a range of issues related to the Holocaust. The death camp at Auschwitz has been a particular source of contentiousness, first with the establishment there of a Carmelite convent in the 1980's and more recently with the proliferation on its grounds of memorial crosses erected by militant local Catholics. Both episodes have been seen as efforts to reorder historical truth--comparatively few Catholics were killed at the camp--and, perhaps worse, to appropriate the millions of Jewish dead into the sacred drama of Christian martyrdom. Similarly controversial was John Paul II's canonization of Father Maximillian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest who had opposed the Nazis but was also the founder of a viciously anti-Semitic newspaper in prewar Poland. Nor were matters helped by the Pope's canonization last October of Edith Stein, a German Jewish intellectual who converted to Catholicism and became a nun but was nonetheless consigned by the Nazis as a Jew

Some common words found in the essay are:
Paul II, Christianity Vatican, Nazi-occupied Europe, Europe's Jews, Reflection Shoah, Shoah--the Hebrew, WHATEVER ONE'S, Jews Rome, Der Sturmer, Vatican Council, john paul, paul ii, john paul ii, jewish people, vatican statement, pius xii, 19th century, third reich,
Approximate Word count = 1834
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)