Man of the theatre and seismographer of symbols that he was, John Paul II created a religious drama in which Catholics were performing against a backdrop of overwhelming evil. But the Pope?s pleas for forgiveness scripted Catholics into a liturgical performance before they were completely clear about what it was exactly for which they should feel a collective responsibility and embrace a penitential spirit. We are still early into the performance, but many already ache for catharsis. But why did it take so long to seek forgiveness, especially with respect to the Jews? The Catholic Church did not sleepwalk through the past century. It knew a great deal about what was happening to the Jews of Europe during the actual genocide, and, in the decades since, the historical record has cast light into many of the darkest recesses. Hannah Arendt is surely correct in claiming that forgiveness is intimately connected to the desire for a new beginning. But it was precisely that aspiration that was absent in the Catholic world for so long?the desire to begin a new relationship with the Jewish people after the Holocaust. Without such a desire, why perform penance, why plead for forgiveness? The relationship between Christians and Jews seemed theologically frozen, out of time, a stranger to those domains in which tragedy and sorrow could transform hearts and minds.

As we shall see, there were a few who did prepare for the charismatic role seized by John Paul II: the elderly Jewish scholar Jules Isaac, who pressed to meet with Pope John XXIII to talk about the Church?s historical contempt for the Jews and who actually wrote of the Vatican Council II as a vast ?examination of conscience?; Pope John, who was determined to end that disdain; and the bishops, who in 1965 adopted the ?Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions? at the Second Vatican Council. Still, it was John Paul II who dramatically advanced a new relationship with the Jewish people. How it will develop is for the future to disclose, but, if we have any appreciation for how the earlier relationship shaped and malformed Christianity, we are able to sense the radical reinvention that a loving relationship might entail. Catholicism?s desire for a new beginning with Judaism is, in effect, the desire for a new relationship with itself, a desire to get beyond Christendom. Christendom is not a historical epoch but rather a set of attitudes that generated a fortress Christianity. I shall mention but two of these attitudes. The first is that Christianity best interpreted itself through a particular form of European culture that asserted its spiritual surpassing and discarding of Judaism. The second maintains that the modern world is a definitive repudiation of Christianity and that the Church is responsible for neither its achievements nor its crimes.

These distinctions stand behind the continual argument of Church authorities that there is an absolute border between medieval anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. Taking a cue from the philosopher Charles Taylor, perhaps it could be claimed that modernity is frequently an embrace rather than an abandonment of Christianity. Taylor gives the example of modern liberal political culture?s proclamation of universal human rights as a ?great advance in the practical penetration of the gospel in human life.? It was a progress that rested upon exit from an earlier version of Christian practice and rhetoric, as the historian James Chappel has argued. In Chappel?s analysis, twentieth-century totalitarianism drove Catholic thought to a language of human rights, human dignity, and religious freedom. While Taylor has stressed the positive side of Christianity?s survival in modern culture, the murder of European Jews may force us to regard the often toxic effects of that endurance as well. Do anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism interpenetrate in ways that have not yet been adequately mapped? Certainly Christendom?s historical contempt for the Jews is not a place from which some mere new set of ideas allows us egress. Like the Holy Roman Empire, Christendom formed an intoxicating, imaginative piece of theological and spiritual theatre.

Only another drama of more than equal appeal will displace it. The new century witnessed the opening scenes of that new play. (Excerpted from Chapter 1).