John XXIII and the Jews | Thomas L. McDonald | CWR
How the personal experience of Angelo Roncalli during World War II changed the course of Catholic-Jewish relations
The press called him a caretaker pope. Elected on October 28, 1958, at the age of 77, he was expected to warm the Chair of Peter for a few years without making any great waves. They could hardly have been more wrong.
The people called him Good Pope John because of his genial nature, and few popes have been more loved.
His successor, Paul VI, hailed him as “an incomparable pope.”
But the Jews had a special relationship with John XXIII, and it is their love for him that brought Rabbi David G. Dalin to Seton Hall University, in South Orange New Jersey. On March 30, he delivered a guest lecture for the Institute of Judeo-Christian Studies to reveal the fruits of his research into the life and actions of Pope John and his impact on the Jews of the 20th century.
“In the Jewish community,” says Rabbi Dalin, “he has been recognized and revered, together with Pope John Paul II, as one of the 20th century’s greatest papal friends and supporters of the Jewish people. Catholics are anticipating the day of their shared canonization. I think that’s being anticipated with a great deal of reverence, happiness, and gratitude by the Jewish community as well.”
Rabbi Dalin, professor at Ave Maria University and an expert on American Jewish history and Catholic-Jewish relations, has sailed into controversial waters before to tell the true stories of popes and Jews. His book The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis (Regnery: 2005) soundly debunked defamatory and grossly inaccurate books by Garry Wills and John Cornwell, who both claimed that Pius did nothing to help the Jews. In fact, Dalin’s research showed that Pius had been instrumental in saving perhaps hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives.
Rabbi Dalin didn’t let the issue rest there, but went on to identify the real man who was “Hitler’s cleric,” the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in Icon of Evil Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (with John Rothmann, Random House: 2008) and the impact of John Paul II on Jews in John Paul II and the Jewish People: A Jewish-Christian Dialogue (editor, with Matthew Levering, Rowman & Littlefield: 2008).
Now he’s gone back to the archives to fill in more of the story of 20th-century Jewish-Catholic relations by exploring the life and actions of Angelo Roncalli, first in his career as a diplomat and cardinal, and then as pope.
Scholar, diplomat, friend of the Jews
Born into a family of poor tenant farmers on November 25, 1881, Roncalli was ordained in 1904.
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