Jerusalem, Israel - The Vatican on Tuesday sought to defend Pope Benedict XVI against criticism that his speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial on Monday was a disappointment coming from a German who experienced the Nazi terror firsthand.
But in seeking to clarify the pope’s wartime past, the Vatican further muddied the waters, appearing to revise — then retract — Benedict’s wartime history in the middle of his first visit to Israel as pontiff.
At a news conference on Tuesday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, seemed to contradict the pope’s own previous statements when he said that Benedict, growing up in Bavaria during World War II, “never, never, never” belonged to the Hitler Youth.
Later in the day, Father Lombardi withdrew and clarified his comments, saying that Benedict had indeed been forced to join the Hitler Youth, a fact the pope, the former Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, had always openly said.
Father Lombardi added that he had intended to counter negative accounts, especially in the Israeli news media, that Benedict was an enthusiastic Nazi in his youth. “This fact of the Hitler Youth had no role in his life and in his personality,” Father Lombardi said.
The episode underscored the Vatican’s defensiveness on a day when the Israeli media was filled with criticism of Benedict’s speech at Yad Vashem, where he offered the “deep compassion” of the Roman Catholic Church for Hitler’s victims but never used the word German or Nazi.
On Tuesday, Benedict went to Jerusalem’s Old City to visit some of the most sensitive sites in the world — the Western Wall and the compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, which holds powerful symbolism for both faiths.
The compound is where the first two Jewish temples stood; the Dome of the Rock is built over the place where the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven. The location is Islam’s third holiest site after Mecca and Medina.
The pope removed his red shoes at the Dome of the Rock and prayed briefly in silence at the Western Wall, sacred to Jews. It was a tranquil moment, with the white-robed pontiff standing alone against the wall’s pale masonry.
Meeting the grand mufti, the Palestinians’ most senior Muslim cleric, the pope dwelled on the common roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the story of Abraham and Jerusalem. “Here the paths of the world’s three great monotheistic religions meet, reminding us what they share in common,” the pope said.
“I have come to Jerusalem on a journey of faith.”
The grand mufti, Mohammed Hussein, gave the pope a letter insisting that peace in the region “can only be achieved with the end of occupation and with our Palestinian people regaining their freedom,” The Associated Press reported.
The pope sought to offer both sides symbols of reconciliation.
Just as he observed Muslim tradition by removing his shoes at the Dome of the Rock shrine, so too he honored Jewish practice by placing a written prayer in a cleft in the wall.
In part, according to a text released by the Vatican, the written prayer said: “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, hear the cry of the afflicted, the fearful, the bereft; send your peace upon this Holy Land, upon the Middle East, upon the entire human family; stir the hearts of all who call upon your name, to walk humbly in the path of justice and compassion.”
Benedict was the first pope to enter the Dome of the Rock, news reports said.
At a meeting later with Israel’s chief rabbis, the pope said the Roman Catholic church was “irrevocably committed” to seeking “a genuine and lasting reconciliation between Christians and Jews.”
Later in the week Benedict, 82, is expected to visit a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem, and to celebrate a large open-air Mass in Nazareth. Israel has mobilized 80,000 security officers for Benedict’s five-day visit.
On Monday, at an interfaith meeting where the pope urged greater dialogue, Sheik Taysir Tamimi, the chief justice of the Palestinian Islamic courts, veered from the program and accused Israel of taking innocent lives.
Sheik Tamimi, speaking in Arabic, urged Muslims and Christians to unite to protest against Israel and called on Benedict to “pressure the Israeli government to stop its aggression against the Palestinian people.”
He also welcomed the pope to Jerusalem, which he called “the eternal political, national and spiritual capital of Palestine.”
The Vatican immediately condemned Sheik Tamimi’s remarks. “In a meeting dedicated to dialogue, this intervention was a direct negation of what a dialogue should be,” theVatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said in a statement.
He said he hoped the episode would not “damage the mission” of the pope in “promoting peace” in the region.
“We hope also that inter-religious dialogue in the Holy Land will not be compromised by this incident,” Father Lombardi added.
During Pope John Paul II’s historic trip to Israel in 2000, an interfaith meeting ran aground when Sheik Tamimi and Israel Meir Lau, who was then the chief rabbi of Israel, tangled over Israeli-Palestinian politics.
For Monday’s event, held at the Pontifical Institute of Notre Dame, organizers planned that only the pope would speak; other leaders on the podium included the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, and the chief rabbi of Haifa, Shear Yeshuv Cohen.
“It was discussed very clearly that neither the sheik nor the rabbi would give any kind of discourse,” said the Rev. David Neuhaus, one of the event’s organizers. “Sheik Tamimi simply hijacked the microphone.”
According to several people present at the event, as soon as Sheik Tamimi was finished speaking, Benedict shook his hand and was ushered off the stage by the papal entourage.
Just a few hours earlier, the pope had stood at Yad Vashem in the Hall of Remembrance, a dark cement vault. He was there to honor “the memory of the millions of Jews killed in the horrific tragedy of the Shoah,” he said, using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
“They lost their lives, but they will never lose their names,” Benedict said. “These are indelibly etched in the hearts of their loved ones, their surviving prisoners, and all those determined never to allow such an atrocity to disgrace mankind again.
“Most of all, their names are forever fixed in the memory of Almighty God,” he continued.
Yet Benedict’s visit to Yad Vashem did not entirely heal his vexed relations with the Jewish world four months after he revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, one of whom denied the scope of the Holocaust.
In his speech, he did not mention Germany, the Nazis or his own experience as an unwilling conscript into the Hitler Youth and Hitler’s army.
By contrast, in his visit to Yad Vashem in 2000, John Paul said: “My own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the war. I remember my Jewish friends and neighbors, some of whom perished, while others survived.”
After the event, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, Avner Shalev, said the pope’s visit had been “important.” But he said he was sorry that Benedict had not spoken about anti-Semitism or mentioned “the nature of the murderers, the perpetrators,” as “Nazis” or “Germans,” instead offering a more theoretical discourse.