In his article of April 24, Rabbi Hillel Katzir of Temple Shalom Synagogue in Auburn stated that from a Jewish perspective, only two popes in his lifetime deserve to be called holy, and not merely as a courtesy expressed by the papal title “His Holiness.” These two popes were John XXIII and John Paul II.

Rabbi Katzir considers these popes to have been holy precisely because of what they did to abolish traditional Catholic teaching on Jews and Judaism. But in light of that opinion, the rabbi’s assertion that “many” of their predecessors were holy in name only strikes me as disingenuous.

I mean, if, from a Jewish perspective, the traditional teaching is anti-Semitic and therefore malign, and if all their predecessors embraced it, as they in fact did, then shouldn’t they all be regarded as having been holy in name only?

Rabbi Katzir correctly stated that it was John Paul II’s teaching that the covenant between God and the Jews is irrevocable; hence, Jews are under no obligation of entering into what Christians hold is the new covenant brought into being by Jesus Christ.

In that regard, I’ll only point out, as a Catholic-turned-agnostic, that this teaching of John Paul II is diametrically opposed to the teaching the Catholic Council of Florence supposedly infallibly proclaimed in the 15th century in solemn confirmation of what the church had taught always and everywhere.

William LaRochelle, Lewiston