Pope visits synagogue

COLOGNE, Germany – Pope Benedict XVI on Friday paid only the second visit to a synagogue by a Roman Catholic pontiff, decrying “the insane, racist ideology” practiced by his fellow Germans that led to the Holocaust and World War II.

Benedict, a conscripted teenage member of the Hitler Youth who was also forced to join the German military during the waning days of the war, memorialized the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, visiting a synagogue that was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 but rebuilt two decades later.

“The holiness of God was no longer recognized, and consequently contempt was shown for the sacredness of human life,” Benedict said. He quoted his predecessor, John Paul II, who said memories of the Holocaust must “never cease to rouse consciences, to resolve conflicts, to inspire the building of peace.”

Catholic and Jewish leaders described Benedict’s visit to the Cologne synagogue as an important milestone in relations between Jews and Catholics, which improved considerably during John Paul’s 27-year reign but have suffered some setbacks in recent months. They said the mere presence of a German pope – the first in 500 years – in a synagogue was something they could not have imagined until recently.

“This was an event that not only has exceptional meaning for Germany, not only for the Catholic Church, but also for the Jewish community in Germany and in the world,” said Paul Spiegel, director of the German Jewish Council. “It is a historic day, an event that will be thankfully remembered by future generations.”

Upon entering the Jewish house of worship, Benedict stopped to pray briefly at a memorial to Jews who died in the Holocaust, including about 11,000 from Cologne, which served as an important European center of Jewish learning and culture from the fourth century until the Nazis decimated the community.

Benedict, 78, whose trip to Germany is his first foreign mission since becoming pope in April, began his speech inside the synagogue with a few words in Hebrew, saying “peace unto you.” The only other pope known to have entered a synagogue in modern times was John Paul II, who visited one in Rome in 1986 and also made a historic visit to Jerusalem.

While Benedict spoke of the common theological ground between the Jewish and Catholic faiths, he did not apologize for the church’s failure to take a stronger public stand against the Nazis during World War II and the Holocaust, as many Jewish leaders have urged the Vatican to do in recent years.

Abraham Lehrer, a Jewish community leader in Cologne, asked Benedict during the synagogue visit to further open the Vatican’s World War II archives to detail the church’s response to the Holocaust. Such a gesture “would be a further sign of historical conscience and would also satisfy critics,” Lehrer said during the ceremony.

Benedict did not respond directly. But he made a general reference to such disputes, saying he “would encourage sincere and trustful dialogue between Jews and Christians, for only in this way will it be possible to arrive at a shared interpretation of disputed historical questions.”