Pope Releases New Book, Jewish Groups Protest Holocaust Reference

c. 2005 Religion News Service ROME _ In a new book, Pope John Paul II reflects on the “ideologies of evil” in the forms of Nazism, Communism and abortion and reveals that he believed he was dying when he was rushed to a hospital after an attempt on his life in 1981. The pope also […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

ROME _ In a new book, Pope John Paul II reflects on the “ideologies of evil” in the forms of Nazism, Communism and abortion and reveals that he believed he was dying when he was rushed to a hospital after an attempt on his life in 1981.

The pope also cites homosexual unions and the right for same-sex couples to adopt children as “other grave forms of violation of the laws of God.”


Even before its publication the book stirred controversy. Jewish groups protested reports that the pope compared abortion to the Holocaust, but the Vatican’s highest authority on doctrine said Tuesday (Feb. 22) that this was a misinterpretation.

The Rizzoli Publishing House issued a 227-page Italian edition of the book in a first printing of 330,000 copies on Tuesday. It is the fifth book that John Paul has written in his 26 years as Roman Catholic pontiff.

The book will appear in 14 editions in 11 languages over the next two months, including an American edition to be published by Rizzoli International, the publishers said.

Entitled “Memory and Identity: Conversations Between the Millenniums,” the book grew out of taped talks that the Polish-born John Paul held in the summer of 1993 in the garden of his country house at Castelgandolfo near Rome with the Polish philosophers Jozef Tischner and Krzysztof Michalski.

John Paul, who taught philosophy and moral theology before becoming pope, examines “the coexistence of good and of evil” and argues that “evil will always be radically defeated by good, hate with love” because of the redemption offered to mankind by Christ.

In discussing 20th century “ideologies of evil,” the pope cites the Nazi attempt to wipe out the Jews in the Holocaust of World War II and massacres of gypsies, Ukrainians, Poles and others by Nazis and Communists.

Now, he says, the same countries that had suffered from these regimes permit “the legal extermination of human beings conceived and not yet born.”


“This is a case of an extermination even decided by democratically elected parliaments in which there are appeals to the civil progress of society and of the entire humanity,” the pope said.

Based on pre-publication reports that the pope had compared abortion to the Holocaust, the presidents of the Italian and German Jewish communities issued statements of protest on Saturday (Feb. 19).

Paul Spiegel said in Berlin that there was “an enormous difference between a mass genocide and what women do with their bodies.” Amos Luzzatto, speaking in Rome, called any such comparison “an excess.”

But Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said Tuesday that the pope had “not compared facts or systems and does not put the Shoa and abortion on the same plane.”

“Rather, he draws our attention to present temptations so as not to fall anew into evil,” the German prelate said. “He tells us that also in a liberal system we are not immune to carrying out the violent destruction of human life although with the pretext of a majority having chosen this road.”

Ratzinger and Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls were among speakers Tuesday at the formal presentation of the book in a richly decorated reception room of the 14th century Colonna Palace in Rome’s historic center.


The book ends with an epilogue in which the pope and his Polish secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, discuss the attempt on his life by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca during an outdoor audience in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.

Dziwisz recalls that John Paul was bleeding heavily from a wound of the abdomen when he was wheeled into a hospital operating room and that on doctors’ advice he administered the last sacrament in case of death.

“By that time I was nearly on the other side,” the pope replies.

John Paul describes visiting his would-be killer in prison just after Christmas of 1983. The pope says that Ali Agca told him he could not understand why he had escaped death, and he speculates that others were behind the attempt.

“Ali Agca, as everyone says, is a professional assassin. This means that the attempt was not done on his initiative, that it was someone else who thought it up, that someone else commissioned him,” the pope says.

Authorities accused the Bulgarian secret service of planning the attack on orders of the Soviet KGB, but two trials of Bulgarian and Turkish defendants in Rome failed to establish the blame. John Paul later visited Bulgaria and told its leaders that he did not believe they had plotted against him.

It was the work of “one of the last convulsions of the ideologies of arrogance let loose in the 20th century,” the pope concludes.


John Paul’s other books are “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” in 1994, “Gift and Mystery” to mark the 50th anniversary of his ordination as a priest in 1996, the poetic meditation “Roman Triptych” in 2003 and “Arise, Let Us Be Going” about his years as a bishop in Poland in 2004.

Asked whether the pope is working on a new book, Navarro-Valls said, “As far as I know for the moment the pope is not planning to write another book,” but he added, “It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact.”

MO/JLK RNS END

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