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Have a care lest the vitriol heretofore reserved for Pope Francis spills over against the Jewish people as a traditional scapegoat. One sin is not equal with the other.

John Paul II was born Karol Wojtyla on May 18, 1920, in the Polish town of Wadowice, where he had Jewish friends and neighbors and was an eyewitness to the Holocaust. A few months before the war ended, Wojtyla rescued a starving 13-year-old Jewish girl at a train station by carrying her to the rail car in which he was traveling, feeding her and covering her with his coat. Later, he would affect even more Jewish lives.

Pope and Chief Rabbi
While Wojtyla was a bishop, he took part in the historic Second Vatican Council convened by Pope John XXIII, which modernized aspects of church practice and doctrine. The Council also radically changed the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people when it issued the Nostra Aetate declaration in 1965, which cleared Jews of responsibility for the death of Jesus, renounced its traditional claim that Jews had been rejected by God, condemned anti-Semitism, and called for “mutual understanding and respect” between Catholics and Jews. As Pope, John Paul II would turn these words into actions.

After his election as pope in October 1978, John Paul often devoted his energy to improving relations between Jews and Catholics. He frequently met with Jewish leaders, repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism, commemorated the Holocaust, and established diplomatic relations with Israel.

One of his first acts toward reconciliation occurred during his visit to Poland in 1979 when he knelt and prayed at Auschwitz. Seven years later, on April 13, 1986, he made an even more dramatic trip, this one just across the Tiber River, to Rome’s Great Synagogue, becoming the first pope to visit a Jewish house of worship. There he warmly embraced Rome’s chief rabbi, Elio Toaff, and described Jews as the “elder brothers” of Christians.

“In his speech, everyone felt his love, his affection,” Toaff recalled. “He made a tie between Judaism and Christianity and, in doing so, he found a way to move us all.’

On the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Pope John Paul II issued this appeal:

As Christians and Jews, following the example of the faith of Abraham, we are called to be a blessing to the world (cf. Gen. 12:2 ff.). This is the common task awaiting us. It is therefore necessary for us, Christians and Jews, to be first a blessing to one another (L'Osservatore Romano, August 17, 1993).

Pope John Paul II at Western Wall
In 1994, John Paul established full diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel. He said, “For the Jewish people who live in the State of Israel and who preserve in that land such precious testimonies to their history and their faith, we must ask for the desired security and the due tranquillity that are the prerogative of every nation . . .”

The Pope also was instrumental in the publication of “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” the 1998 document expressing the Church's “deep sorrow for the failures of her sons and daughters in every age.”

He visited Israel in 2000, publicly apologizing for the persecution of Jews by Catholics over the centuries, including the Holocaust, and depositing a note pleading for forgiveness in a crack in the Western Wall.

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Did JP II ever say the Jews need not convert to attain salvation?

Do you agree with Bergoglio that Jews need not accept Jesus Christ to attain salvation?

What do you think St. Paul did during his time on earth since his conversion?

Do you agree with Bergoglio that atheists can go to Heaven?