Remembering Pope Francis
Abraham Foxman describes a Vatican leader solidly aligned with Jews but often antagonistic on Israel
As news of the death of Pope Francis spread on Monday — the day after Easter, perhaps the Catholic church’s equivalent of Yom Kippur in its sense of culmination and release — scores of Jewish organizations rushed to put out their formal regrets.
Abraham Foxman of Bergen County, the longtime, now-retired head of the Anti-Defamation League, is uniquely situated to talk about the pope, his legacy, and his effect on the Jewish community. Mr. Foxman, born in Poland in 1935, was brought up as a devout Catholic by his nanny — which kept him alive during the Holocaust — until he was 5 years old, and for 50 years, through the ADL, he met with each pope many times. That means that neither the papacy nor Catholicism are foreign to him.
As he talked about Pope Francis, Mr. Foxman looked further into the past. “The relationship between the Jewish people and the pope has been very painful throughout our history,” he said. “For many generations, most Jews couldn’t care less who the pope was, but every time one of them died, they hoped for a better one.
“The church has been the most significant element in the Western world’s antisemitism.
“But then things changed. Nostra Aetate” — the Second Vatican Council’s statement, released in 1965, that outlined a radically changed relationship between the church and Jews — “was the most dramatic change in our lifetime,” he said. “The church completely forgave the Jews for the killing of Christ. For deicide. That is the most significant turnaround by any institution on the issue of antisemitism.”
But that change in theology and sociology wasn’t enough to change psychology, at least in the Jewish community. “It changed the relationship, but the anxieties continued,” Mr. Foxman said. “We still worried every time a new pope came on the scene. Jews are always anxious at a moment of change.”
John Paul, born in Poland in 1920 as Karol Wojtyla, was the first pope Mr. Foxman met; the two met eight times.
“John Paul was the warmest, the most open, of the popes I met,” Mr. Foxman said. “And because he came out of the Holocaust experience, he understood us.” When he died, “we Jews were anxious, because we worried that this was the end of this new era. And then, ironically, there was Ratzinger, the German pope.” That was Benedict XVI, born Joseph Ratzinger in Germany, who became pope in 2005.
“There was a lot of anxiety at first about Ratzinger,” Mr. Foxman said. “And I wouldn’t say that he was warm, but when it came to his relationship with the Jewish community, he was fine. He was sensitive. He was available to us. He understood us. He wasn’t warm and fuzzy, like John Paul, but that’s just who he was.
“That wasn’t about us. It was about him.”
When Benedict retired, in 2013, “our anxiety began again,” Mr. Foxman continued. “Was this the end of an era? First there was the Polish experience, and then the German experience. At least there was something that moved both of those popes to some relationship with the Jewish world. Now what?
“Our anxieties were relieved very quickly, though, as interestingly, or ironically, or perhaps it was bashert, the first Latin pope in 1,600 years turns out to be an ohev Yisroel.” A lover of Israel.
“He had a very close relationship with the Argentinian Jewish community, and with its rabbi.” That’s Rabbi Abraham Skorka, who was the rector of the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano. The two worked closely together.
“So we overcame that anxiety, because the continuity in the Vatican was that the new pope was another friend of the Jewish people. He continued his friendship and his sensitivity on all issues — except Israel. He was available to the Jewish community. He was open to the Jewish community. I think that out of the last three popes, it was Francis who had the most audiences with Jewish groups.
“From the survivor perspective, he opened up the Vatican archives. That was a very, very important issue for survivors, for the Jewish community, and for historians. It helped us better understand the role of the church during the Shoah. And it is not a pretty picture. It is an ugly, painful picture.
“But Francis understood our pain, and our desire to know more, so he opened the archives.
“For 50 years the Jewish community banged on every door. Every meeting we had with every cardinal, with every bishop, every meeting in the Vatican, we asked them to open up those archives. And he did.
“And on the issue of antisemitism, which exploded during his term, he was there. He was there, whether it was meeting with Deborah Lipstadt, the antisemitism envoy, or meeting with other groups about antisemitism, or speaking out against antisemitism. You can look at the speech he gave to the ADL delegation in 2017, or the speech he gave to the American Jewish Committee delegation, or to the World Jewish Congress delegation. “His pronouncements on antisemitism were clear, tough, condemning it without any hesitation, and not excluding the history of the church.
So on all those levels, we have lost a friend, and now we’re back in anxiety mode, worrying about what’s next.”
But there also is the question of Israel, and the pope’s failure there.
“The only major disappointment with Francis is the issue of Israel and the Middle East,” Mr. Foxman said.
“The church has always been very political when it came to the Middle East,” he explained. “It always counted noses. It always had more adherents in the Arab world — there always have been some Arab Christians — and they saw an opportunity to proselytize there. They’d basically given up on that with us. But they played the numbers.
“And we have to understand — and Jews understand this better than most, because we have taken political positions in countries in the past because of our prioritization of the safety and security of the Jewish community — that the church would have a slight bias toward the Arab world, even though it’s Muslim, because it’s got Christian elements. So we understood that — but it went beyond that.
“That’s always been the issue with the Vatican, because the Vatican is not just a religious institution. It’s also a political institution. It plays politics the way other countries do. We may have greater expectation of it, and that can be a big disappointment.
That bit of realpolitik has played out in the way Francis talked about Israel in general, and in particular in his reaction to the barbarity of October 7.
“Our disappointment with Pope Francis was that despite his great friendship with the Jewish people, that friendship did not carry over to a sensitivity when it came to the Arab/Israel conflict,” Mr. Foxman said.
“He was almost hesitant in condemning October 7, Hamas, and terrorism. He talked about the human loss, about children and hospitals. But it was only in the last several months that he talked about hostages, or met with them. It took him a long time. There have been hostages for the last year and a half, and he mentioned them only in the last six months.
“He would condemn Israel frequently, harshly, way out of proportion. Probably the most balanced speech he gave on Israel was the last one, this last week. It was more empathetic, and softer.”
Personally, “Francis was open,” Mr. Foxman said. “He was warm. You didn’t feel any of the stodginess.
“I was part of the group at his investiture. The Jewish delegation, from many communities, sat separately from everyone else, and when we asked why, we were told that Pope Francis wanted us to be in his line of vision at all times.
“So we were in the front of the general audience, in box seats, so we stood out as a special group. That was his way to communicate to us, and to the rest of the world, his special relationship to the Jewish people.”
Pope Francis’s promises often went further than his actual accomplishments, as many commentators, including Mr. Foxman, have noted; he did less to help women in the church and the LGBT community and the victims of sexual abuse, among others, than he said he would. “He faced up to those issues better than anyone else did, but still the promise was greater than the delivery,” he said.
“But even the promise, and his empathy and sympathy and humanity, were very important. And that hurt us more, because if you have empathy for all victims, why was there a lack of empathy for the victims of October 7?
“Still, on the whole, we will miss him,” Mr. Foxman said. “And who knows who will be next?”
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