Pope John Paul II credited with transforming Catholic-Jewish relations

As Roman Catholics celebrated the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, an unease rooted in centuries of discrimination spread among Jewish leaders. Was the first Polish pope infected with the same virulent anti-Semitism that had pervaded his native country?

Jews soon learned their worries were baseless.

Over the 26 years of his pontificate, John Paul stripped away any lingering justification for anti-Jewish prejudice within the church, transforming Catholic-Jewish relations in a stream of forceful statements and dramatic gestures.

He repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism as sinful and, among his many symbolic acts, prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest site.

"When he came in, there was an enormous amount of skepticism within the Jewish community," said Rabbi James Rudin, who met the pope several times as interfaith director for the American Jewish Committee of New York. "I'm here to tell you the skeptics were wrong. He was the greatest pope for Catholic-Jewish relations in the history of the church."

John Paul wrote more than any other pope about the two peoples' spiritual bond.

He called Jews "our dearly beloved brothers" and said "no theological justification could ever be found for acts of discrimination or persecution against Jews." He said Christians bear a "heavy burden of guilt for the murder of the Jewish people," and said that guilt must be "an enduring call to repentance."

"Anti-Semitism is for him a fierce violation of human rights," Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, said last year during a speech in Rome. "It is against the dignity of every human person."

The pope demonstrated this belief in numerous public acts.

In 1979, John Paul knelt before a memorial to Holocaust victims at Auschwitz. In 1986, he was the first pontiff to visit the Great Synagogue of Rome, located in what was once the city's Jewish ghetto, where Jews were kept separate through the endorsement of some previous popes.

In 1993, the Holy See established diplomatic relations with Israel, despite disagreements over the situation in the Middle East. In 2000, as part of a marathon apology for wrongdoings by Catholics to many different groups, John Paul expressed sorrow for past hostility toward Jews.