In Boston, Israeli diplomat speaks of Rome

The past year has been an eventful one for Jewish-Catholic relations – there were controversies over the revival of an allegedly anti-Semitic Good Friday prayer and the lifting of the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, and then there was the visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Israel. In the middle of it all was Mordechay Lewy, a longtime Israeli diplomat who serves as Israel's ambassador to the Holy See.

Lewy, who previously represented Israel in Germany, Sweden and Thailand, visited Boston this week, primarily to speak at a conference at Boston College, and I spoke with him Friday morning at his hotel in Newton.

Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:

Q: Why do relations with the Vatican matter?
A: We can not afford, as a Jewish state, and we can not afford as a Jewish people, to continue on after 1,900 years of bad experience, traumatic experience with the Christian world. Now, if we take the Christian world as a whole, it's quite an amorphic body. But at least if we have a well known structure, as the Catholic Church, with a top echelon of it in Vatican, I think that would be a missed opportunity not to get along with them as much as we can, knowing that we will not ever be able to come to terms on all aspects the questions which lie between us.

Q: You've been at the Vatican for a year. What have you learned?
A: From the books you can see that it is an absolute monarchy, but it is not. Far, far from that. Structural absolute monarchy doesn't mean that the monarch is trying to exercise, on every day basis, his authority. You are reducing your authority if you are using it too often. In military terms, if you have a power of deterrence, keep the power, don't use it, because after using it, everybody will know what you are worth. You can also (apply that) with authority. If you are really applying it all the time, you are likely to get a lot of frictions, and by that you are losing at least a degree of the authority you had at the beginning. And I think the pope is very well aware of that.

Q: What do you actually do on a day to day basis?
A: (laughs) Try to convince Jews that the menorah is not any more in the cellar of the Vatican Museum. I'm not joking. I've had very many requests of that kind. To intervene, to find it, and to bring it back in a diplomatic pouch. There is a legend that says the menorah from the Second Temple, after the destruction, was the war booty of Titus, brought to Rome, was shown where war victories were shown, in a temple of peace. It's shown in the Arch of Titus.

Q: What else?
A: There are a lot of issues between the Vatican and Israel where the Vatican is coming to us. Often I am a go between, as many ambassadors are. Most of the requests are in the realm of the broad concept of religious freedom, which Israelis subscribe to, but theory is one thing, and another thing is how to implement it.

Visa issues are a very serious problem, and I can not say we are solving the problem, but we are alleviating it. It is one thing to come to Israel as a tourist, it's not a problem at all, but another thing is if a clergyman would like to stay more than three months. And if a Syrian Catholic would like to come, or is invited by his church, to assume a priestly post in Jerusalem, he has Syrian documents, he will be not admitted, as long as Syria is defined as enemy country, he will not be able, in spite of the fact that there is religious freedom. So this is a problem which we have to see how we can alleviate it.

Q: Does Israel have an interest in preserving a Christian population?
A: It's not a question. We are obliged to. To be a holy land is not only a blessing, it's a burden. And if you are saying 'holy to three monotheistic religions,' it's an obligation to make it happen, or to preserve it as it is, but not to work against it.

Q: What is your assessment of the pope's visit?
A. The visit was a success. No doubt.

Q: There was some criticism of the way he characterized the Holocaust.
A: People who were expressing those disappointments, which to my mind were unjustified, were on second or third thought retracting them. It didn't cast a real shadow on the visit. It was filling the columns in the press for one or two days. The speeches of the pope were of enormous importance to everybody, not only to us, but to everybody. What he contributed at Yad Vashem was a completely different approach which was an enrichment to the culture of memory, and it was almost a wake-up from an unexpected corner for people to think a little bit differently, and not to expect a ritual. This pope is not one who is getting into existing patterns of rituals – it's not a challenge for him intellectually – so he would like really to set his mind and contribute his own thoughts, which are rather deep thoughts about what Yad Vashem means.

This pope…didn’t come as a German pope, and this was a second misreading of him – I never saw him as a German pope, although we communicate in German with each other – he wasn't elected as a German pope, and he doesn't see himself as a German pope, no matter what the Germans say. So it's more through the head, the theological mind…He's not a newcomer to sort out what kind of approach Catholics should have toward Judaism as a result of the Second Vatican Council. He has contributed a lot, and we have a friend in him. This is often misunderstood, because he's a conservative. He is an example that you can be a conservative in terms of theological approaches, (and) also in terms of what he calls the hermeneutic of continuity after the Second Vatican Council, and then, all of a sudden, still be very friendly to Jews. This is a little bit surprising for many liberals within the Catholic Church who feel very much frustrated and think that the main prerequisite of this liberal spirit is their approach to Judaism. We need to work a lot to make them understand that continuity doesn’t mean necessarily to have anti-Jewish approach.

Q: What about the controversy over the Catholic Church's relationship with the Society of Saint Pius X?
A: This is a very, very severe problem. Matters of excommunication are not our problem – we should not interfere. But if these internal matters are affecting the public sphere, to the extent that they affect our own attitudes and emotions…Williamson's reconciliation, without the Holocaust denial, would not have made this affair sexy to everyone. The Holocaust denying was the point which brought the whole Jewish interference, which was not into the internal matters of the church but to the Holocaust denying…This was a rare case where he (the pope) admits mishaps in the church.

Q: Is this issue over?
A: No. It's not over when it comes to the effort of bringing them (the Lefebvrites) back to the church. I don’t think that many of them would like to go back. They are likely to become a daily provocation, or an embarrassment at least. They are going to consecrate new priests. They are conducting negotiations, but they seem not to want any results.

But this affair was for us, at least in one sense, productive. It was clearly said by the church that no Holocaust denier can assume any function as bishop…Now the parameters are clear. We got the clarification which we needed, because they are going to embarrass the church indefinitely, to my mind, because they don’t want to go back, some of them. This is my read.

Q: Does Israel have a role to play in the canonization of Pius XII?
A: Canonization is not our concern. We don’t believe in beatification. What concerns us is the historical role of Pius XII. This is a real issue which has been, to my mind, deliberately, but still mistakenly, combined with the matter.

Q: Do you have a position on Pius XII's historic role?
A: Historically speaking, I think he was neither a hero nor a villain. It is probably the right thing to think of a more balanced view of him. The problem is that we are looking at him through the filter of a post-conciliar church. He is definitely a protagonist of the pre-conciliar church, and the pre-conciliar church has, as its main assignment, to seek all possible means to salvation for its own flock. He is not a pope for the Jews; he is not a pope for the Mohammedans; he is not a pope for everyone who was not Catholic. 'My main task is to save the souls of the Catholic Church.' This is why he did a concordat with the Germans. He didn't make a concordat because he was Hitler's pope. This is a mistaken concept. He did it in order to survive, to make it happen that the church can survive a godless regime. This was the term that they used. He tried also to make a concordat with the Soviet Union, but the Russian Orthodox Church didn't like this idea. It is wrong to look for any affinity between him and the Nazis.

It is also wrong to say that he didn’t save Jews. Everybody who knows the history of those who were saved among Roman Jewry knows that they hid in the church, they hid in Roman monasteries, in the Vatican itself people were hidden. To look for written evidence, an order of the pope, well…this is odd. This is not how it works.

Q: So I hear you explaining why he was not a villain. Why was he not a hero?
A: He was very, very timid. He was a diplomat. This is why the curia is very much advocating for him as a saint. He was brought up politically by Benedict XV, who was the protagonist of neutrality during the First World War, wanting to keep up relations with everyone in order to get involved in mediation, humanitarian aid, good things. This is the concept with which Pius XII, as a pupil of Benedict XV, approached the Second World War. He misread, completely, the situation. He can not be blamed for it. He was who he was, with shortcomings. To be neutral meant for him to be quiet, to rely on quiet diplomacy. The main argument is why he was silent, not why he didn't help. And by the way, after the war, he was silent as well. If we take the whole tenure, before the war and after the war, he was silent all the time. He never spoke up. He was saying…the church was victim of those regimes. With that mindset, there's not much space to have a place to have another victim, if you feel yourself a victim. And, by the way, that's our problem in the Middle East.

(Photo, by Gary Gilbert/Boston College, shows Mordechay Lewy, the Israeli ambassador to the Holy See, speaking at Boston College on Wednesday, June 17, 2009.)