Pope Benedict’s speech at the Yad Vashem today took a different approach from the speech his predecessor Pope John Paul delivered at the Holocaust memorial on 23 March 2000. Polish-born John Paul mentioned the Nazis twice while Benedict, a German, did not. John Paul recalled the fate of his Jewish neighbours; Benedict offered no personal wartime memories. John Paul spoke in a broader perspective, mentioning godless ideology, anti-Semitism, the “just” Gentiles who saved Jews and the shared spiritual heritage of Christians and Jews. Benedict took a narrower approach, meditating on the significance of names and speaking only of the Catholic Church rather than Christians in general.

Here are a few quotations comparing and contrasting the two speeches:

INTRODUCTION:

POPE JOHN PAUL: “In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence in which to try to make some sense of the memories which come flooding back. Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah. My own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the War. I remember my Jewish friends and neighbours, some of whom perished, while others survived. I have 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. More than half a century has passed, but the memories remain. Here, as at Auschwitz and many other places in Europe, we are overcome by the echo of the heart-rending laments of so many. Men, women and children cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish its scale. We wish to remember. But we wish to remember for a purpose, namely to ensure that never again will evil prevail, as it did for the millions of innocent victims of Nazism.”

POPE BENEDICT:“I will give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name … I will give them an  everlasting name which shall not be cut off” (Is 56:5). This passage from the Book of the prophet Isaiah furnishes the two simple words which solemnly express the profound significance of this revered place: yad – “memorial”; shem – “name”. I have come to stand in silence before this monument, erected to honor the memory of the millions of Jews killed in the horrific tragedy of the Shoah. They lost their lives, but they will never lose their names: these are indelibly etched in the hearts of their loved ones, their surviving fellow prisoners, and all those determined never to allow such an atrocity to disgrace mankind again. Most of all, their names are forever fixed in the memory of Almighty God. One can rob a neighbor of possessions, opportunity or freedom. One can weave an insidious web of lies to convince others that certain groups are undeserving of respect. Yet, try as one might, one can never take away the name of a fellow human being.”

INTERFAITH RELATIONS:

POPE JOHN PAUL: “Jews and Christians share an immense spiritual patrimony, flowing from God’s self-revelation. Our religious teachings and our spiritual experience demand that we overcome evil with good. We remember, but not with any desire for vengeance or as an incentive to hatred. For us, to remember is to pray for peace and justice, and to commit ourselves to their cause. Only a world at peace, with justice for all, can avoid repeating the mistakes and terrible crimes of the past. 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. The Church rejects racism in any form as a denial of the image of the Creator inherent in every human being.”

POPE BENEDICT: “The Catholic Church, committed to the teachings of Jesus and intent on imitating his love for all people, feels deep compassion for the victims remembered here. Similarly, she draws close to all those who today are subjected to persecution on account of race, color, condition of life or religion – their sufferings are hers, and hers is their hope for justice. As Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, I reaffirm – like my predecessors – that the Church is committed to praying and working tirelessly to ensure that hatred will never reign in the hearts of men again. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God of peace.”

CONCLUSION:

POPE JOHN PAUL:“I fervently pray that our sorrow for the tragedy which the Jewish people suffered in the twentieth century will lead to a new relationship between Christians and Jews. Let us build a new future in which 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, and look to Abraham as our common father in faith. The world must heed the warning that comes to us from the victims of the Holocaust and from the testimony of the survivors.”

POPE BENEDICT: “As we stand here in silence, their cry still echoes in our hearts. It is a cry raised against every act of injustice and violence. It is a perpetual reproach against the spilling of innocent blood. It is the cry of Abel rising from the earth to the Almighty… My dear friends, I am deeply grateful to God and to you for the opportunity to stand here in silence: a silence to remember, a silence to pray, a silence to hope.”

(Photo credits Jim Hollander, Ronen Zvulun

“The opening of our yeshiva (in 2005) and the ordination of the new rabbis is the best answer we can give to Hitler and the Nazis, it shows they did not win,” said Rabbi Shalom Stambler. The ordination of nine new rabbis on Sunday evening in Warsaw, the first in Poland since the Nazis murdered most of what was one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, was a proud moment for the Warsaw-based head representative of Chabad Lubavitch of Poland. “Poland was always a centre of Jewish study in the world,” he said. “People used to come from all over the world to study the Torah here. This was stopped by the Nazis … We hope the yeshiva will grow and grow.”

Read our feature “Pride, hope as Poland ordains first postwar rabbis” here. Apart from his comments in the feature, Rabbi Stambler told me a recent controversy in Poland over a book accusing Poles of persecuting Jews in the years after the Holocaust had told him something about today’s Poles. “I saw how many people entered into the dialogue, students, intellectuals, people who wanted to know how their grandparents had acted,” he said.

Jan Gross’s book Fear argues that anti-Semitism remained prevalent in Poland under the communist regime after 1945. In a sign of the continued sensitivity of the subject in Poland, state prosecutors investigated whether the book had slandered the Polish nation but finally decided not to press charges.

Stambler said he did not believe there was anti-Semitism in the higher echelons of Polish society, but noted the continued attraction of the ultra-Catholic, often anti-Semitic Radio Maryja among some sections of the population.

Commenting on anti-Semitism, Stambler’s brother Meir, a businessman, said: “Some old people, or young drunks, sometimes shout abuse. There is not plenty (of anti-Semitism) but it exists… But once an old man was screaming at us on a tram and some young people walked up and told him to stop, they were ashamed, they told him to join the 21st century,” he said.

“Do Catholic countries have better football players?”

I was surprised to see this headline on the Austrian Catholic website kath.net today… and even more surprised to see they seemed to mean it seriously.

“A look at the participants in the final round of the European football championship in Switzerland and Austria suggests this,” kath.net writes in a report from Vienna. “In seven of the 16 participating countries, Catholics are clearly in the majority: Poland (95 percent of the population), Spain (92 percent), Italy (90 percent), Portugal (90 percent), Croatia (77 percent), Austria (69 percent ) and France (51 percent). Only one Protestant stronghold confronts them, Sweden. Of the 8.8 million inhabitants of the northern European country, 80 percent are Lutherans.”

There’s no hint of analysis of why this should be relevant, or mention of the personal faith — or lack thereof — of the players on these national teams. This purely statistical view (sports fans love stats, don’t they?) goes on to point out which participating countries have large numbers of both Catholics and Protestants (Germany, Switzerland and Netherlands).

The article notes that only 32 percent of all Czechs call themselves Christians, making the Czech Republic the most “de-churched” participating country, i.e. the country where religion has retreated the most. Even there, though, the Catholics make up the largest group among the believers (26.5 percent of the population). So maybe they still have a chance after all.

No religion story in Europe is complete without a mention of Islam, so the Vienna-datelined article ended up with a comment about Turkey. The Turkish team, by the way, beat Austria’s co-hosts Switzerland 2-1 on Wednesday in Basel and face the “de-churched” Czechs on Sunday in Geneva, aka “the Protestant Rome”.

“The only Muslim-dominated country in the European Championship is Turkey, where 98 percent of the 72 million inhabitants are Muslims. The 120,000 Christians there have a hard time because of much discrimination,” it wrote. “In Europe there are 224.5 million Catholics, 57.8 million Protestants, 39 million Orthodox, 15.7 million Muslims and 1.6 million Jews.”

These statistics appear to be completely irrelevant to Euro 2008. In fact, with the large Catholic majority in Europe that kath.net mentions at the end, it’s almost inevitable that many countries with a Catholic majority will end up in the final rounds every time the championships are held. Can any football fan tell me if there’s something this religion editor is missing?

Two general elections on Sunday made it an interesting weekend on the religion&politics beat in Europe. Put simply, a pro-Catholic party lost in Poland and an anti-minaret party won in Switzerland. There was no link between the two votes and religion was not the main issue in either. But the faith factor was in the air and it highlighted two trends at the crossroads of church and state in Europe.

Poland’s Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski lost his election despite strong support from the powerful media empire of right-wing Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, whose outlets include the controversial Radio Maryja that critics call xenophobic and anti-Semitic. Kaczynski and his twin brother Lech , Poland’s president, have enjoyed support from older Poles and many clerics because of their fervent Catholicism. But Jaroslaw’s government got mired down in infighting and picked fights with the European Union, Germany and Russia. The Polish bishops, sensing the Church was being used for political purposes, told priests not to use the pulpit to endorse any candidates.

The Polish Catholic Church played a major political role before 1989, standing as an alternative to the Soviet-backed communist government in Warsaw. Since then, however, democracy, economic growth and European Union membership have changed the country profoundly. The close ties between some conservative political parties and the Catholic Church faded in most of Europe years ago and are fading now in Poland, even while a majority of Poles still attends church regularly.

A different trend was at play in Switzerland, where a party that campaigned against minarets on mosques and pledged to kick out “black sheep” (immigrants who commit serious crimes) became the biggest group in the Swiss parliament. The Swiss People’s Party (SVP) will not take over the government because the Alpine republic has a consensus- based system that ensures no one party exerts too much influence. But its populist leader Christoph Blocher can be expected to continue the campaigns against minarets (and mosque building in general) and against immigrants. This time, the religion concerned — Islam — is perceived to be on the rise.

The tougher line on building mosques has emerged recently in several countries, especially — but by no means exclusively — in the German-speaking ones. A dispute over a planned mosque in Cologne goes on (here local media reports in German) and the head of the Evangelical Church in Germany, the main Protestant body there, recently asked whether a series of mosques planned around Germany amounted to a concealed “claim to power” (Machtanspruch) by Muslim communities.

If a novelist twists historical facts to fit a plot, we can accept it as poetic license. When Dan Brown has the dashing “symbologist” Robert Langdon race to the American Embassy in the wrong part of Paris, we might shrug and say it’s a mistake but The Da Vinci Code is a thriller anyway. But what should we say when a major theatre production mixes fact and fiction in the life of the late Pope John Paul II so much that it misrepresents history? Is that just a little white lie? Or maybe something more?

This has been on my mind since seeing “N’Ayez Pas Peur” (Be Not Afraid) a few days ago. This latest spectacular by the French impresario Robert Hossein is a theater version of the life of the Polish pope. It opened in late September in Paris and will run until early November. Spread out across the wide stage of the Palais des Sports, the play sweeps through the eventful life of Karol Wojtyla at a quick and entertaining pace. We see him as a forced labourer in Nazi-occupied Poland, a young priest out hiking with students, at his election as pope and then on his many journeys around the world.

Hossein is a veteran showman, with two shows on the life of Jesus and one each on Ben Hur and Charles de Gaulle to his credit. Some of the scenes are wonderful. There’s a re-enactment of the 1978 conclave where Hossein takes some liberties with the rituals. On the stage, some cardinals stand up and give speeches for Wojtyla, something that is strictly banned under Vatican rules. But Hossein makes up for it by using a huge reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel as the stage backdrop.

When in the next scene a cardinal announces from the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica “Habemus papam!” (we have a pope!) and Wojtyla appears, the audience clapped and cheered as if they were actually there on Piazza San Pietro that day. The 1986 Assisi ecumenical summit, a real inter-faith spectacle presided over by the former actor John Paul himself, was re-enacted on a nearly empty and dark stage with about a dozen actors dressed as leaders of different faiths. The spotlight moved from one actor to the next as each one chanted a hymn or prayer from his faith.

It was when the story turned to the end of communism that it didn’t feel like poetic license anymore. In one short episode, a tense session in Warsaw between John Paul and Polish President General Wojciech Jaruzelski — this seemed to be a reference to his 1983 visit to Poland — slides seamlessly into a talk between Jaruzelski and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorby praises John Paul and says he’s going to visit him soon — but that visit only took place at the Vatican in 1989.

That was quite a stretch, but still OK — come on, I told myself, this is not a documentary. Then came a scene where the Berlin Wall opens up and who comes out marching through the breached border with the cheering East Germans but … JP2! And there to meet him is … Gorby! There were lots of teens in the audience — this play must be well advertised in the Catholic high schools — and they loved it. They’ve heard that John Paul helped tear down the Wall and that Gorby reformed the Soviet Union out of existence, but have no memory of watching it on CNN. Now they could see what it was like. Sort of…

This is where journalists can feel like real spoilsports. Those of us who covered these events remember that nothing of the sort happened at the Wall. John Paul and Gorbachev first met in December 1989 at the Vatican, not in Berlin. The pope didn’t even make it to the reunited city until 1996. Even if they had met in Berlin years after the Wall opened, it still would have been a hugly symbolic event. Just imagine it — the anti-communist pope and the last Soviet communist leader, meeting at the symbolic epicentre of the collapse of communism. It would have been fabulous … but it never happened. Will everybody in the audience know that? What if they leave thinking history happened like that? Should a showman make it up to that extent just to create a memorable but false scene?

Actually, I should have known from the start that this was coming. The story started out on an unbelievable note. The opening scene is a re-enactment of the 1981 assassination attempt on John Paul, staged with all the appropriate shock and noise and confusion. It is narrated from the side of the stage by an actor playing Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot, the former Secretary of State or number two in the Vatican hierarchy. He was French, so he was probably picked because he would be familiar at least to older Catholics in the audience. The only problem was that Villot was himself already dead for two years by the time of the event he was narrating. He continued to narrate the story throughout the evening.

Is this getting too close to the story? That’s what we ask when a journalist gets so wrapped up in a story that he or she can’t see it from the outside anymore. I know this wasn’t a documentary, but I still think Hossein went too far in bending history to fit his show.