This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s jubilee-year pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a journey that can continue to help us understand the catastrophic struggles wracking that sacred place and its people.
I was fortunate enough to be freed from my desk-bound duties as an editor at Newsday to cover the seven-day pilgrimage alongside the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning religion reporter, Bob Keeler, and even to attend a week-long conference in Jerusalem for religion journalists before the pope’s arrival.
It was a hopeful time, compared to our own. When John Paul began his long-awaited trip on March 20, 2000, many wondered if the pope who had hastened the peaceful downfall of European Communism could somehow catalyze peace in the Middle East.
There was some basis for optimism. The 1993 Oslo Accords were being implemented, leading Israel to transfer some authority on the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority. Ten days before the papal visit, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat agreed to resume peace talks in Washington. Having broken through the Protestant-Catholic strife in Northern Ireland with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, it seemed at least possible that President Bill Clinton would succeed in the Middle East.
John Paul faced a delicate task. He wanted to reach out to Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Orthodox church leaders, and the Arab Christian community—but it’s difficult to avoid tripping over the barriers separating these groups. John Paul’s insistence that this was a spiritual pilgrimage and not a political or diplomatic journey didn’t dampen the scrutiny a huge number of reporters gave to the potential political significance of his words and gestures. I especially remember several French reporters working themselves into a frenzy when the pope kissed some soil presented to him by Palestinian children—a gesture he made on arrival during his many travels.
With the passage of a quarter-century, what I see now is not a cleavage between political and religious aspects of the trip, but rather that Pope John Paul II fused an intense, Christo-centric spirituality with a strong sense of social justice. His starting point in encountering the various parties was to recognize their suffering—in biblical terms, the gaze of Jesus. There was a political application for this compassionate view: John Paul advocated the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to homelands.
This even-handed approach finds fewer friends in this new jubilee year, 2025. It remains the position of the Holy See. But the United States has given up any attempt to be an honest broker and is apparently committed to President Donald Trump’s weird plan to turn Gaza into a luxury resort after forcing out its Palestinian residents. Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, is a Baptist minister whose Christian Zionism leaves no place in the Holy Land for the Palestinians and may not be especially concerned about the Jews, either, as the Union for Reform Judaism has noted.
It’s antithetical to the approach John Paul II advocated in the Holy Land. “The Holy See has always recognized that the Palestinian people have a right to a homeland,” he said at one point during his journey. In his 1984 letter Redemptoris Anno, he referred to this as “a natural right in justice.”
I don’t think most American Catholics are aware of how supportive the Vatican has been of Palestinians over the past eight decades. On his pilgrimage, John Paul recognized their suffering through his visit to the Dheisheh refugee camp. “It is deeply significant that here, close to Bethlehem, that I am meeting you,” he told the Palestinians gathered there. “Throughout my pontificate I have felt close to the Palestinian people in their sufferings.” Beyond material suffering, he continued, “Above all, you bear the sad memory of what you were forced to leave behind. Not just material possessions, but your freedom, the closeness of relatives, and the familiar surroundings and cultural traditions which nourished your personal and family life.”
John Paul had already demonstrated his concern for Palestinian suffering. In 1982, he dispatched Mother Teresa, by then a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, on an attention-getting mission of mercy to Lebanon after the Israeli invasion there. She “took personal care…of 37 crippled children she rescued from an Israeli-bombed mental hospital in west Beirut and planned to cross again into the war zone to save more abandoned youths,” United Press International reported.
Likewise, the pope addressed the wounds of the Jewish people at Yad Vashem, the haunting memorial to the Shoah in Jerusalem. As a Pole who came of age under Nazi and then Soviet occupation, his quiet reflection on Psalm 31—“I hear the whispering of many—terror on every side—as they scheme against me, as they plot to take my life”—resonated with personal experience.
Several days earlier, the chief Ashkenazic rabbi, Meir Lau, provided that context in a meeting with reporters. He recalled that the pope knew his grandfather in Krakow, and asked him after the war how many grandchildren he had: forty-seven. “And how many survived?” John Paul inquired. The answer was: five. At that, Rabbi Lau said, John Paul looked up and declared a commitment “to the continuity of our senior brother, the Jewish community…. He experienced Jewish suffering.”
It’s no coincidence that John Paul II was the pope who pushed the Holy See toward diplomatic recognition of Israel in 1994. It was not just a matter of his personal sensitivity toward the Jewish people, but also necessary for the Church to move forward in the spirit of the Vatican II document Nostra aetate.
The pope’s own jubilee plan emphasized the Church’s social-justice teachings as part of a celebration “aimed at an increased sensitivity to all that the Spirit is saying to the Church and to the Churches.” His 1994 letter Tertio millennio adveniente declared the Biblical tradition of the jubilee meant that:
the riches of Creation were to be considered as a common good of the whole of humanity. Those who possessed these goods as personal property were really only stewards, ministers charged with working in the name of God, who remains the sole owner in the full sense, since it is God’s will that created goods should serve everyone in a just way. The jubilee year was meant to restore this social justice. The social doctrine of the Church, which has always been a part of Church teaching and which has developed greatly in the last century, particularly after the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, is rooted in the tradition of the jubilee year.
The Holy Land pilgrimage would provide a window into the core of John Paul’s teachings, the highlight of a “Great Jubilee” he’d anticipated since the start of his papacy in 1978. “Since the publication of the very first document of my Pontificate, I have spoken explicitly of the Great Jubilee, suggesting that the time leading up to it be lived as ‘a new Advent,’” he wrote. “In fact, preparing for the Year 2000 has become as it were a hermeneutical key of my Pontificate.”
We tend to forget how important the Church’s social-justice doctrine was to St. John Paul II. For different reasons, both right-wing and left-wing commentary has focused more on where his teachings conflict with the liberal social agenda. But his writings included many passages that conservative commentators would decry as politicized if Pope Francis had penned them: John Paul saw the jubilee year as an occasion “to lay greater emphasis on the Church’s preferential option for the poor and the outcast.”
For the present Jubilee, Pope Francis has emphasized the need for hope, perhaps because it seems to be in such short supply. Indeed, it did not take long for the hopes surrounding John Paul II’s visit to the Holy Land to be dashed, as Michael La Civita, communications director for the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, told me.
Six months afterward, Ariel Sharon, then leader of the right-wing opposition, staged a heavily guarded visit to the holy place Israelis call the Temple Mount, which Muslims know as the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary. His incursion prompted riots that led into the second intifada.
This was the kind of religiously tinged antagonism that John Paul had tried to prevent. He got a taste of it, though. He hoped to create a tableau of peace by planting an olive tree with a rabbi and sheikh in Jerusalem. There was a lovely sixteen-page color booklet featuring children’s drawings on the theme of peace and music from a children’s choir for the occasion. The plan went awry after the rabbi thanked the pope for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal capital city” (which was not true), and the sheikh used his remarks to welcome the pope to Palestine’s “eternal capital,” then denounced Israel and walked out.
The gestures of reconciliation will be what’s remembered, I think. John Paul’s dramatic visit to the Western Wall—his slow, stooped walk under a blazing sun, the note he left asking God’s forgiveness for “the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer”—was on the front page of newspapers around the world. Likewise, I felt moved by the silence permeating his meditation on the flickering eternal flame at Yad Vashem, the smoke drifting up through an opening in the roof of the dark hall.
For me, memorable moments came during his outdoor Mass at Manger Square in Bethlehem, which I attended Since the Muslim call for prayer was due to come up during the Mass, the pope waited quietly and in apparent appreciation as the muezzin’s prayer sounded out from a nearby minaret. His silence demonstrated solidarity with Muslims. Bethlehem was “the heart of my jubilee year pilgrimage,” the pope said in his homily, and he used the occasion to dwell on the Palestinians’ plight. “Your torment is before the eyes of the world. And it has gone on too long,” he declared.
His response to this suffering offered what I take as a spirituality of social justice. John Paul implied that Jesus did not offer a political solution: “His kingdom is not the play of force and wealth and conquest which appears to shape our human history.” Rather, he said, Jesus offered “the power to heal the wounds which disfigure the image of the Creator in his creatures.”
This power to heal wounds can help make the world right—that’s what I heard. But first, we have to see the wounds.
