By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
When the pope talks, people listen. So when the pope fumbles, the reverberations can be far-reaching. Sometimes, however, the aftermath of a debacle in the Catholic Church can have a positive outcome elsewhere in the world.
Such has been the case in Seattle following Pope Benedict VI’s decision to reunify, then re-excommunicate, a bishop in Argentina who had gone on record on several occasions to deny the Holocaust.
The inevitable cry of protest from many corners of the Jewish and Catholic communities worldwide resulted in apologies, an unprecedented admission from the Vatican that the Pope’s staff had failed to use the Internet to research Bishop Richard Williamson, the man in question, and, ultimately, a visit to Israel.
Between the time the news about the bishops’ reunification and the apology occurred, however, things were happening thousands of miles from either Vatican City or Argentina. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the Rev. Alexander Brunett, archbishop of Seattle, and his staff met with leaders from Seattle’s Jewish community to rekindle a trailed-off relationship.
“When the new pope took office, there were a number of things that happened — missteps or miscommunications — that to me warranted reaching out and trying to understand where the church was coming from,” said Rabbi Anson Laytner, former executive director of the Seattle chapter of the American Jewish Committee.
So Laytner, joined by a contingent of Jewish community members that included Richard Fruchter, CEO and president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and Rabbi James Mirel of Temple B’nai Torah, reached out to the local diocese to find out what was really going on behind the scenes of the Church.
“Especially because Archbishop Brunett is involved with the church on kind of a high level with interfaith activities, [we hoped] he might be able to clarify…their thinking on a variety of issues,” Laytner said.
Issues that stood out, aside from Williamson and three other breakaway bishops, were the reintroduction of the Tridentine Mass in Latin and canonization processes by Pope Pius II. As the Jewish contingent found out, there was not as much to worry about as they initially believed.
“The situation upset peace between Christians and Jews, as well as peace within the Church, something [the Pope] deeply deplores,” Fruchter said.
Conversations locally between the two religious communities had lain dormant for several years. Relations dropped off not for lack of goodwill, but because they had reached a point that conversations about issues between the two religious communities were deemed, almost unconsciously, unnecessary.
As a part of the rekindling of a new conversation, Archbishop Brunett sat down with JTNews last month, a few weeks after the initial meeting, to talk about Catholic-Jewish relations, and about his own history of working between the two communities that dates back to the early 1970s.
“When I first started in Jewish-Christian dialogue, when we had the first meetings of dialogue together, there were only two issues they ever wanted to talk about. One was the Holocaust, and the second one was the state of Israel, the existence of the state of Israel,” said Brunett. “They’re critical.”
When Brunett attended seminary in the 1950s in Rome, the horrors of the Third Reich had only begun to trickle out and be talked about.
“It wasn’t well-known, it wasn’t well-publicized, it wasn’t something that was in the press,” he said. “Then slowly things came to become more known, to be brought out…. There wasn’t a complete dossier on these things. The full horrendous reality of the Holocaust was not really brought into the public focus.”
Brunett visited Auschwitz during his time in Europe, which had an effect on him that set the stage for his life in the clergy.
“It was a horrendous thing, and just incredible to think that it could happen in human history, and happening right around you, and happening within a few years of your own personal history,” he said. “It was a difficult realization, and from there and then I was wholly onboard trying to change the minds of a lot of people.”
Brunett wrote his doctoral thesis on the Jewish roots of Catholic liturgy, and had one of his first tests in Jewish-Catholic relations upon his assignation to the Shrine of the Little Flower in Detroit, a parish served years earlier by the famously anti-Semitic Father Charles E. Coughlin, a priest whose radio show preaching theories about Jewish conspiracies reached millions of homes in the 1930s and ‘40s.
“When I became pastor there, one of the old rabbis in town, a very famous rabbi in town — we decided we’d have a reconciliation service at the Shrine of the Little Flower, because that had been the place where a lot of the stuff had been spewed out by Coughlin,” Brunett said. “There were still pickets that night, 30 or 40 years later…because a Jewish rabbi had been invited in.”
In 1970, Brunett was one of the founders of the first Catholic-Jewish dialogues and chaired the first national meeting that brought together the Church and the various Jewish organizations that dealt with interreligious affairs.
As Brunett advanced through the hierarchy of the Church, eventually landing in Seattle and later becoming archbishop, he continued to work on interfaith issues, though often from a distance due to his greater responsibilities. Then came the pope’s reunification brouhaha, and when the local Jewish leaders reached out, the archbishop quickly accepted the offer.
“We talked about the fact that there’s increased anti-Semitism in the world these days, and increased anti-Zionism, and part of that is whenever there’s a problem economically that somehow these things come down on the Jews,” Fruchter said.
Because of his interfaith work, Archbishop Brunett had been asked to join the pope on his Israel visit, but couldn’t make the scheduling work. But he agreed that restarting the dialogue between the two groups was of utmost importance.
“We need to kick-start the dialogue again by having an opportunity for us to sit down and say what our issues, what our points of departure are, what we really need to deal with together. Because we need to be really clear that we’re in this together — it’s not one against the other, or you against me or me against you,” he said. “We’re together on this.”
Thus far, there has been one meeting, though with the state of the economy keeping either side from having the resources to devote full-time staff to keeping the conversations and programming going, Laytner said he feared, that further meetings might not be possible. “Stuff like that takes a lot of time and energy and of course money, which is in short supply,” he said.
Still, Brunett said the two religious communities could work together, particularly on issues of human rights, where he said both must stand up and march arm-in-arm for what they believe.
“We can’t stand on the sidelines and be impartial observers,” Brunett said. “We have to stand up for the values of life that are represented there.”