WHEN Pope Benedict XVI travels to Jerusalem today, he will step into that city's swirl of political and religious currents. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict defines the immediate turmoil, and the pope can be expected to seek balance between Israel's security needs and the right of Palestinians to live free from occupation. Beleaguered Arab Christians will draw the pope's support. Jewish leaders, meanwhile, await reassurances that Benedict, after recent gaffes, has not withdrawn from his predecessor's firm commitment to Jewish-Catholic reconciliation.
At Yad Vashem today, the German pope can be expected to affirm the importance of Holocaust remembrance. Tomorrow, the pope's itinerary will take him to Islamic shrines, the Dome of the Rock, and al Aqsa Mosque, where Muslims, aware of other papal gaffes, will seek reassurances of their own. The Vatican has called the pope a pilgrim of peace, although one Catholic observer proposed that he go as a penitent pilgrim.
Each of the three monotheistic religions stands on the one foundation of compassionate love, yet historic antagonisms have often trumped that benign character. The Dome of the Rock, for example, was built by Muslims in 691 expressly on the place revered by Jews as their mythic foundation stone, the rock of sacrifice on which Abraham was instructed to sacrifice Isaac. The word "supersessionism" is from Latin, meaning "to sit upon," and that is exactly what the Islamic shrine does, sitting upon a prior Jewish holy place. That Islam equally superseded Christianity is made explicit in the Dome's elegant Arabic inscription, which rebukes Trinitarian belief and the idea that Jesus is the son of God. Yet Muslim supersessionism only repeats the "sitting upon" that defined Christianity's earlier rejection of Judaism, which in its turn had set the pattern by seeing an endless rivalry between late-born children and earlier (Cain versus Abel; Isaac versus Esau; Joseph versus his brothers).
For 3,000 years, Jerusalem has been the bull ring of such conflict. Indeed, after Jews were driven from the city by the Romans in the first century, their absence from the place of their origins was taken by the Catholic Church as proof that Jews were rejected by God. The theology forbidding the return of Jews to Jerusalem was not fully overturned until Pope John Paul II's visit in 2000. Such a past does not mitigate the burden of the present Israeli-Palestinian war, but it suggests that history itself is a party to that fight. For a full millennium, European Christians dreamed of rescuing the Holy City from the infidel, prompting crusades and spawning colonialism (Christopher Columbus identified the re-conquest of Jerusalem as one of the goals of his voyage to the Indies). So fertile was that dream of a restored Jerusalem that it lodged in the American imagination, too - the paradigmatic city on a hill. When Jerusalem became a dominant metaphor for heaven, the earthly city dropped a little closer to hell.
Abstracting from the complications of Pope Benedict's own record of omni-directional religious insult, his role as a living emblem of what remains of Christendom, the generating core of Western Civilization, is enough to give his journey to Jerusalem special gravity. As the head of a church that has earnestly grappled with its legacy of anti-Semitism, yet understands how that legacy infects the air to this day, he can represent to Arabs the urgency of purging their own attitudes of its ongoing effect. Anti-Semitism no more. The popes who sent wave upon wave of crusaders to Jerusalem have been reversed only in recent years, and Benedict surely longs to continue that reversal. Crusades no more. As the Vicar of Christ in whose name so many colonial adventures were launched, he can stand repentantly with Palestinians who refuse to be treated as a colonized people. Colonialism no more. As the ultimate European, in the ultimate world city, he can acknowledge the new condition of human survival - that it belongs as a right not just to the "superior races," but to all.
However inhibited by strictures of institution or imagination, Benedict is a man of good will. Yet his role transcends his person. A symbolic figure on pilgrimage to a symbolic place, he has opportunities to heal ancient and modern wounds. So we wish him well.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
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