Interreligious Community and Friendship

Forming relationships between communities that are in strain against each other can only be formed on an individual level. Obviously, there are sociopolitical factors at work that have to be dealt with, but ultimately, it is personal relationships across communities that creates relationship between communities. Pope John Paul provides an example of how these friendships can come into a greater social play than they ever began.

Jerzy Kruger was a Jewish boy who grew up in Wadawice with Pope John Paul, where as kids they had matching nicknames: “Dudek” and “Lodek”. In his strong friendship, and living in a house owned by a Jewish family, Pope John Paul grew up with relationships between Jews and Catholics being normal.

When Pope John Paul becomes the pope, he reconnects with Kruger, who is in Rome. It is Kruger, a childhood friend, who helps the head of the Catholic Church connect to Roman Jewish and Israeli authorities and improve Catholic-Jewish relationships. He helped Pope John Paul be the first Pope in the main Roman Synagogue.

After the war, Kruger had never returned to Poland. However, showing the strength of their relationship, he returned on the request of the Pope. He read a letter for blessing an old synagogue, which was the first time in 400 years that the papal seal was used.

On his own trip, Pope John Paul went to the Wailing Wall and prayed in the manner of the Jewish people who prayed there, and left a papal blessing.

There is no way to determine what his attitude would have been were he raised in a different context, without his closest friend being Jewish, but one can certainly see how his childhood would have formed him to create relationships where there were deep rifts in community. The way he was raised, had he never become pope, he still developed an attitude that relationships with Jewish people were normal and natural, that there was no reason Catholics and Jews could not be in positive relationship, and that would be one more person in the general public who thought that way, and each person who experienced that would add up.

However, he did become pope, and the effect was greater. One friendship, the environment of one boy’s childhood, brought together two communities that were meant to be close and friendly but were instead hostile and wary of each other. Individual experience matters; individual experience form socioeconomic experience and reality.

Joy and pain, thorns and roses intertwine in our lives. May the Blessed Virgin Mary teach us to turn this lot - which often leads us to the feet of the Cross, along with her - into our merit. - Pope John Paul