Pope talks of Palestine, Holocaust

Pope Benedict XVI today arrived in Israel for a much-anticipated visit after four days in Jordan. He immediately touched on the two major issues looming over the trip, addressing the Middle East conflict by expressing his support for an independent Palestinian state and addressing strain in Jewish-Catholic relations with a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

In today's Globe, columnist James Carroll reflects on the trip:

"Abstracting from the complications of Pope Benedict's own record of omni-directional religious insult, his role as a living emblem of what remains of Christendom, the generating core of Western Civilization, is enough to give his journey to Jerusalem special gravity. As the head of a church that has earnestly grappled with its legacy of anti-Semitism, yet understands how that legacy infects the air to this day, he can represent to Arabs the urgency of purging their own attitudes of its ongoing effect. Anti-Semitism no more. The popes who sent wave upon wave of crusaders to Jerusalem have been reversed only in recent years, and Benedict surely longs to continue that reversal. Crusades no more. As the Vicar of Christ in whose name so many colonial adventures were launched, he can stand repentantly with Palestinians who refuse to be treated as a colonized people. Colonialism no more. As the ultimate European, in the ultimate world city, he can acknowledge the new condition of human survival - that it belongs as a right not just to the "superior races," but to all.

However inhibited by strictures of institution or imagination, Benedict is a man of good will. Yet his role transcends his person. A symbolic figure on pilgrimage to a symbolic place, he has opportunities to heal ancient and modern wounds. So we wish him well."

The pope's trip to Jordan went quite smoothly, but over at the National Catholic Reporter, John L. Allen Jr. reports that there is already disappointment with the pope's remarks today in Israel:

"Pope Benedict XVI has long been a figure who draws mixed reactions, with many admiring his clarity and intellectual depth, and others turned off by his traditionalism and occasional lack of a popular touch.

The pontiff's keenly anticipated visit today to Yad Vashem, the main Israeli Holocaust memorial, is likely to become another chapter in Benedict's mixed reviews. Some are likely to see it as a stirring poetic meditation on memory and justice, while others will probably be more struck what the pope didn't say than what he did.

For one thing, there's no explicit expression of regret for Christian anti-Semitism, no allusion to the role that currents of thought within Christianity about Jews and Judaism may have played in preparing the soil for the Holocaust."

Of course, the trip is just getting underway. Tomorrow the pope is scheduled to visit the Western Wall and Temple Mount -- the holy sites of Judaism and Islam. Then he is to spend Wednesday in Bethlehem, Thursday in Nazareth and Friday at Christian sites in Jerusalem before returning to Rome. (One factoid I find amazing: Israel is deploying 80,000 people to provide security for the papal visit.)

The Vatican is posting the texts of the pope's remarks throughout his trip here.

(Photos, by Uriel Sinai/Getty, show the pope at Yad Vashem today, 5/11/09.)