A senior Israeli government minister has said Pope John Paul's speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Hall in Jerusalem yesterday was "a very important statement".
Mr Haim Ramon, Minister for Jerusalem Affairs, dismissed expectations that the Pope should have gone further and said "we are aware how difficult it is from their [Catholic Church's] point of view". He could not "complain about that from this special Pope" who, he said, had made "a tremendous contribution to reconciliation between the Christian and Jewish peoples."
The speech had been "a step in the process of reconciliation" he said, and he felt that the greater part of that journey had already been made, due to the Pope, with "very little left" before full reconciliation could be accomplished.
And he quoted, a number of times, Pope John Paul's statement that "as Bishop of Rome and successor of the Apostle Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."
In his speech Pope John Paul continued that "the church rejects racism in any form. . .". He said no words were strong enough "to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah" and remembered personal friends who had died in it and some who survived it. He had come to Yad Vashem "to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially of their human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust," he said.
He prayed for a new future where "there will be no more anti-Jewish feeling among Christians or anti-Christian feeling among Jews, but rather the mutual respect required of those who adore the one Creator and Lord. . ."
The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, in his speech at Yad Vashem, noted that when his people (including his maternal grandparents) "were led from all over Christian Europe to the crematoria and the gas chambers. . . the silence was not only from the heavens."
He spoke of those who had secretly helped, "mostly children of your faith", whose names were inscribed on the walls at Yad Vashem, and he praised the Pope personally. "You have done more than anyone else to bring about the historic change in the attitude of the church towards the Jewish people, initiated by the good Pope John XXIII."
