Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Israel’s War of Independence in 1948–1949 left the Catholic Church in the Holy Land in a diminished and difficult situation. Jerusalem was divided by the armistice line, with the Old City, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, most of the major shrines, the seat of the Latin-rite Patriarch, the Franciscan Custos (responsible for the maintenance of the shrines), the seat of the apostolic delegate, and Bethlehem in Jordanian hands. Many Arab Christians had fled or had been expelled during the war, including much of the Arab Christian elite; parishes had been decimated; the local Church in Israel was cut off from the Holy See’s representative on the other side of the green line. The Church’s time, energy, and meager resources were absorbed in assisting refugees and displaced persons, rebuilding a modicum of infrastructure, and trying to maintain contact with Rome. Catholicism in the new State of Israel, a religious minority within an ethnic minority suspected of being a potential enemy of the state, was frightened and cowering—a Church incapable of engaging the new Israeli society or of thinking through the relationship between the new political situation and the old questions of the Holy Land. The majority of Israel’s citizens had bad memories of European Catholicism. The remnant Catholic Church felt alienated and suspect. The situation was thoroughly confused and very difficult.

  The 1967 Six-Day War, the Israeli reconquest of Jerusalem, and the subsequent redivision of the region along new armistice lines changed the Church’s situation in one crucial respect. To the Holy See, it now seemed as if the 1,300-year-old question of the Holy Land was about to be settled bilaterally between two belligerent powers, Israel and Jordan, rather than as a matter of international concern in which international legal issues were engaged. The idea, for example, of creating Jerusalem as an internationally administered special zone (a corpus separatum, or “separate body,” in international legal terms) had not been the Holy See’s initiative. It was an international proposal with which the Holy See was comfortable in 1947, as it seemed a solution that met the legitimate concerns of all parties at the time. Now, amid the changed politics of the situation, the Holy See continued to insist that the status of Jerusalem and the other holy places involved rights and interests that touched so much of humanity that they could not be resolved unilaterally or as part of a territorial settlement between two belligerents. That international interest, the Holy See insisted, was what remained valid about UN Resolution 181. The corpus separatum was a dead letter; no one in the 1960s thought that internationalizing a zone respected the rights of those who lived there. But the Holy See continued to insist that a response to the situation that took account of the legitimate concerns of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and all who valued the great cultural patrimony of the holy places had to be devised at the international level. The principle of international guarantees was what the Holy See wanted to defend. How those guarantees were concretely expressed was the business of diplomats and their political masters.

  At the same time, the Secretariat of State of the Holy See was beginning to understand that Israel, unlike any other state in the Middle East, was a democratic society that aspired to live by the rule of law and the standards of justice. So it was possible to engage Israel as the Holy See engaged other modern, democratic societies. Moreover, the holy places under Israeli control since 1967 were more open to pilgrims of all faiths than they had been in centuries.

  Still, the Church’s situation in the place of its origin remained unsettled and precarious. A broadly written Israeli law against Christian missionary activity, adopted by the Israeli Knesset on December 27, 1977, seemed to jeopardize the entire Catholic position in the Holy Land. There were no ongoing serious contacts between officials of the Holy See and the government of the State of Israel. The Camp David peace process, beginning in 1977, intensified concerns about a bilateral “solution” to the question of the holy places, even as it held out welcome prospects for some measure of peace. As the 1970s gave way to the early 1980s, the situation seemed, in a typical Middle Eastern paradox, frozen into volatility.

  Changing the Context

  John Paul II was hardly unaware of the history he had inherited on his election in 1978. Pius X had told the founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, that the Church could not “encourage this movement.” No Pope had ever referred publicly to the “State of Israel.” The Holy See did not have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. And while this did not mean that the Holy See did not “recognize” Israel—the Holy See could hardly be accused of not “recognizing” the United States prior to the establishment of full diplomatic relations in 1984—John Paul was aware, from his friend Jerzy Kluger and many others, that the absence of full diplomatic relations was regarded by Israelis and by Jews around the world as a depreciation of the State of Israel and a failure to fulfill the promise of the new Jewish-Catholic relationship envisioned at Vatican II. He knew that the Vatican bureaucracy and the Middle Eastern Catholic hierarchy included men who had neither internalized the Council’s teaching on Judaism nor reconciled themselves to a sovereign Jewish state. The well-informed Pope was also aware that, in Israel itself, more than a few Jewish intellectuals and government officials believed the Holy See could not have full diplomatic relations with Israel for theological reasons. Full diplomatic relations would require an unthinkable alteration in the Church’s doctrine about the Jews and Judaism in which, or so they imagined, Jewish dispossession of the Holy Land was a core tenet.

  In that sense, at least, the question of the Holy See’s relationship to the State of Israel could not be disentangled from the broader question of the revolution in Jewish-Catholic relations John Paul was proposing—the reconstitution of a theological conversation broken off more than 1,900 years before. As an abstract matter, the papal diplomats were right. There was no logical linkage between the Jewish-Catholic theological dialogue and the Holy See’s diplomatic relations (or lack thereof) with the State of Israel. But John Paul touched the deeper crux in grasping that, whatever the objective realities might be, many, even most, of the Jewish interlocutors he wanted the Church to engage regarded the question of diplomatic relations as part of the overall question of Jewish-Catholic relations. That was how they experienced the issue. And so, at a profoundly human level, that was indeed a part of the issue.

  There were other dimensions to the difference Karol Wojtyła brought to sorting out this tangled web. Since he had not been part of the Vatican diplomatic process in the Middle East prior to his election, he was able, as Pope, to look at issues with a fresh eye and to see how once-legitimate concerns might have hardened into shibboleths. He was a longtime defender of the rights of nations who understood the relationship between the Jewish catastrophe of the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel. He had never harbored doubts about the legitimacy of Israel.46 Above all, John Paul was acutely aware that a kairos, a special, providential moment, was at hand in the ancient entanglement of Jews and Christians. That conviction did not drive the negotiations that led to the Fundamental Agreement. It did shape the context in which the negotiations leading to the Fundamental Agreement came about.

  John Paul II signaled his willingness to take a fresh look at the Middle East early in his pontificate, in an October 5, 1980, homily at Otranto on Italy’s Apulian coast. Reviewing the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the abiding character of God’s covenant with the Jewish people and the Church’s appreciation for Islam’s faith in the God of Abraham, the Pope then surveyed in broad strokes the recent history of the Middle East. He related the founding of the State of Israel—the first papal usage of the phrase—to the “tragic experiences connected with the extermination of so many sons and daughters” of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, while at the same time noting “the painful condition of the Palestinian people…a large part of whom are excluded from their land.” The torments of Lebanon were also on John Paul’s mind in Otranto, as was Jerusalem.47

  Largely unremarked at the time, John Paul’s Otranto address set the strategic framework for
the Holy See’s Middle East policy in the 1980s and 1990s, according to Monsignor Luigi Gatti, the official responsible for the region in the Secretariat of State’s “foreign ministry.”48 Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate had established the new interreligious context. Religious freedom for all would be the primary human rights concern, and thus the primary diplomatic concern. The Church would pursue a historic religious reconciliation in which, as John Paul put it, Jews, Christians, and Muslims would “feel as brothers, no one superior, no one in the debt of others.”49 And historical facts—like the fact of the State of Israel, the fact of Palestinian nationalism, and the fact of Lebanon’s disintegration—would be faced squarely. The era of euphemisms was past.

  Less than a year later, according to Jerzy Kluger, John Paul II authorized his old friend to initiate private, informal discussions with Israeli diplomats in Rome to clarify the issues involved in moving toward full diplomatic relations. Kluger was also authorized by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to speak on its behalf. One immediate result of these discussions was a papal telegram of good wishes to the President of Israel on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in October 1981. John Paul, by Kluger’s account, also used his Wadowice classmate as a sounding board for thinking out loud about the history of relations between Catholics and Jews and the relationship of that history to the question of diplomatic relations. The two friends agreed to disagree about John Paul’s meetings with Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, which Kluger sharply criticized. Jerzy Kluger’s private diplomatic explorations do not seem to have led in any direct way to the negotiations that eventually produced the 1993 Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and Israel. But like the Otranto address, the Kluger initiative confirms how early in the pontificate John Paul had these questions on his mind. And the conversations Kluger opened may have helped begin to change attitudes among habitually skeptical Israeli politicians and foreign ministry officials.50

  John Paul’s own actions during the early- and mid-1980s—his regular meetings with Jewish groups in Rome and on his pastoral pilgrimages, his condemnations of terrorist attacks on synagogues in Vienna and Rome, his 1982 meeting with Israeli foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir, his numerous commemorations of the twentieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, his historic visit to the Synagogue of Rome in April 1986—helped break down that skepticism even further. And the 1987 Vatican statement that there were “no theological reasons in Catholic doctrine that would inhibit” full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel should have laid that false issue to rest. But old habits of mind die hard, and not only in the Vatican.51

  Further groundwork for negotiations between the Holy See and Israel was laid in April 1990, when John Paul appointed Archbishop Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo as apostolic delegate in Jerusalem. Montezemolo, who had demonstrated his ability to handle delicate situations while nuncio in Nicaragua during the 1983 papal pilgrimage there, was also the son of an Italian victim of the Nazis, which helped ease his relations with his Israeli interlocutors. That John Paul would not have told his new representative in Israel of his desire to address the full range of issues between the Holy See and the Israeli state—including the Church’s legal status in Israel, diplomatic relations, and the ongoing question of international legal guarantees for preserving the special character of Jerusalem—seems very unlikely. Strategic thinking within the Vatican’s Secretariat of State had also begun to shift. Perhaps the multilateral approach had run its course. Perhaps, it was thought, the Holy See could continue to press its position on international legal guarantees for the holy places while reaching a bilateral agreement with Israel on the Church’s legal position there. In any case, by the summer of 1991—after the Persian Gulf War but before the Madrid peace conference called in its wake—Montezemolo was telling associates in Israel that he had a mandate from the Pope to pursue a bilateral negotiation with Israel.

  The “John Paul II difference” had created the conditions for the possibility of dramatic change. Events now began to move rapidly.

  The Negotiation

  In August 1991, Archbishop Montezemolo began to work out the blueprint for negotiations with Father David-Maria Jaeger, OFM, a Franciscan priest teaching canon law at his order’s seminary in Jerusalem.

  Jaeger, then thirty-six, had been born in Tel Aviv, the son of an Israeli father and a Brazilian mother of Jewish heritage. The Jaegers were a mildly observant family and young David was sent to state-run religious schools. As a teenager, he became intellectually convinced of the truth of Christianity and sought to become a Catholic. But he could find no Catholic priest willing to baptize an eighteen-year-old sabra, a native-born Israeli. So Jaeger was baptized an Anglican and then presented himself in Nazareth to the Latin-rite patriarchal vicar for Israel, saying, “Okay, now you can receive me as a Protestant convert.” Jaeger got involved in Church-state issues in Israel in 1977, working informally with the apostolic delegate. He also helped launch a program on Christians in the Holy Land at the ecumenical Tantur Institute for Theological Studies, just outside Jerusalem, and began to work as the Jerusalem correspondent of the London-based international Catholic weekly, The Tablet. Having completed neither high school nor college, the autodidact and polyglot Jaeger entered the Franciscans in 1981 and was sent to Rome for studies. He was dispensed from the prescribed basic course, having taught himself theology during his work at Tantur and elsewhere, and received the bachelor’s degree in theology after being examined by a specially appointed pontifical commission in the spring of 1983. After making his solemn vows as a Franciscan in September 1985, he was ordained a priest on March 19, 1986—the only native-born, Hebrew-speaking Israeli to be ordained since the independence of the State of Israel. After completing doctoral studies in canon law in Rome he returned to Jerusalem to teach, and successfully defended his doctoral dissertation—on the role of papal diplomacy in securing Christian legal rights in the Holy Land—in 1989.

  Father David Jaeger was quite possibly the only man in the world with the requisite skills the Holy See needed in the impending negotiations with the State of Israel. He was a native Hebrew speaker whose work had given him an intimate knowledge of Israeli law. He had a doctorate in canon law and was an expert on the vastly tangled legal history of the Holy Land. He had extensive, personal, on-site experience with the problems to be resolved. He was a tough-minded negotiator whose commitment to the security of Israel could not be questioned. And he was a priest who, from the Secretariat of State’s point of view, could be trusted with the Church’s interests.

  Jaeger insists that the blueprint for negotiations he developed in the summer of 1991 with Archbishop Montezemolo was not driven by the Madrid peace conference process, but had its own logic and integrity, based on the longstanding positions of the Holy See. The next “real event” in the process, as he puts it, came on May 20, 1992. Archbishop Montezemolo led a Holy See delegation, including Jaeger, to the Israeli foreign ministry in Jerusalem to work out the text of the announcement, to be made a few months later, of a “Bilateral Permanent Working Commission of the Holy See and the State of Israel.” It was a serious meeting, and Jaeger suggests that journalistic renderings of this and other events—“A two-car convoy bearing diplomatic license plates entered the parking lot of the foreign ministry, carrying a bevy of blackclad clergy hiding behind dark glasses and being whisked away… ,” as he once put it—miss the real drama of what happened, which was substantive.

  The announcement itself was not difficult to devise. Jaeger drafted it on a yellow legal pad, the two heads of delegation signed it, photocopies were made, and in the confusion, Jaeger ended up with the original. The real argument had to do with defining the bilateral commission’s agenda. The Holy See insisted that there could be no announcement without an agreed agenda. Jaeger returned to the foreign ministry on July 15 for what he later called “the toughest of the many tough meetings I took part in.” The Israeli position had been that everything was negotiable—Chu
rch-state relations, legal and property issues, taxation questions, and so forth—once diplomatic relations were fully established. The Vatican delegation, for its part, knew that Israel badly wanted diplomatic relations with the Holy See, and both sides knew that diplomatic relations were the only trump card in the Holy See’s negotiating hand.

  The idea that had begun to be floated in the Vatican in 1991 now came back into play. Why not make diplomatic relations one item on a list of issues to be discussed and resolved by the bilateral commission—“the menu,” as Archbishop Montezemolo came to call it. The Holy See position at the crucial July 15, 1992, meeting was simply put: “You have a whole menu of items you want to discuss; so do we. Why not discuss them all together?” The leader of the Israeli delegation, Ambassador Moshe Gilboa, finally agreed, despite strong objections from his delegation’s legal advisers.

  The real breakthrough that made the Fundamental Agreement possible thus came from a change in longstanding Israeli policy, authorized by the government of Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir’s ambassador to Italy, his former press secretary Avi Pazner, had made the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Holy See a personal project. Through his direct access to his old friend, the prime minister, Pazner had pressed the case for a change in policy. Foreign minister David Levy wanted to make his mark by solving a continuing irritant in Israel’s foreign relations. Shamir, well-known for his acid remark about Poles imbibing anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk, had come to understand that John Paul II did not fit his stereotype. Several factors, which John Paul would likely regard as another example of providential noncoincidences, combined to change what had long been the bipartisan Israeli position—that nothing would be negotiated with the Holy See until after diplomatic relations were established.