On eve of Yom HaShoah, two popes canonized

On April 27, 2014, , the Feast of the Divine Mercy, Pope Francis will canonize two popes, Blessed John XXIII and Blessed John Paul II, in the Vatican. This important event will take place on the day before Yom HaShoah, the annual commemoration of the Shoah in Israel. This coincidence is pregnant with meaning as these two Popes were active participants in the resistance to the Nazis and in offering Jews help during this dark period.

John XXIII, Angelo Roncali before his election, spent the war years in Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece as Papal Nuncio. Towards the end of the war he was transferred as Nuncio to France. Wherever he was, Roncalli served as an address for Jews in distress and is credited with saving thousands of Jews by providing them with false travel documents, which enabled them to flee to Turkey and some of them went on to Palestine. Later, when he was elected Pope, in 1958, he met regularly with Jewish leaders before the Council and then encouraged the Council to study the Jewish Question, which eventually led to the publication of Nostra Aetate and the revolution in relations between Catholics and Jews. He is remembered by Jews as “Good Pope John”.

John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, was a young seminarian during the war. He had many Jewish friends and he offered the help that he could to Jews in danger by trying to find safe hiding places for them. As a young priest, after the war, he refused to baptize Jewish children saved by Christians and preferred to try and track down their surviving Jewish relatives. As Pope, his dramatic acts put Nostra Aetate into practice: he is the first pope to have visited a synagogue, to have visited the Western Wall and to have visited Yad VaShem.

May John XXIII and John Paul II intercede for us and for the relations between Jews and Christians!