Vatican Advisor Offends Jews

Pope John Paul II is preparing for a historic visit to the Holy Land next week, part of his mission to heal longstanding wounds between Catholics and Jews. But as CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports, some of those wounds have just been re-opened.

It could hardly have been a worse send-off from the Vatican on the eve of the pope's trip to Israel. The ghosts of Christian anti-Semitism, which the pope tried to bury, have been raised again by an important papal advisor.

Father Peter Gumpel, who investigates candidates for sainthood, has used language long-forbidden by the church to describe Jews.

The Vatican official said, "Let us be frank and open about this as in all the things that I have said. It is a fact that the Jews have killed Christ. This is an undeniable historical fact."

In fact, Vatican II removed references to any Jewish blame for Christ's crucifiction from church rites more than 30 years ago on the grounds that such claims were historically debatable, hurtful and dangerous.

And the current pope has made repeated gestures of reconciliation toward Jews, beginning with his visit to Rome's central synagogue in 1986.

But Father Gumpel—from his own Vatican pulpit—expresses a view that may be unfashionable but still exists there.

"There is no possibility to deny that the Jewish authorities, religious authorities of the time, said he has made himself God and according to our law he has to die," Gumpel has preached.

Coming from the influential upper reaches of the Vatican in this day and age, references to Jews as Christ killers are not only astonishing, they are decidedly unhelpful to a pope about to embark on an historic tour of Israel.

Whatever gestures of reconciliation Pope John Paul himself may have made over the years, old attitudes here die hard. And these comments may have cast a pall over this entire trip.

According to Gacobo Saban of the Union of Italian Jews, "Bother me, I would say is not the correct term. Worry me, perhaps yes. I just see these remarks as a sign that the past has not entirely disappeared."

The pope's visit to Israel has been billed as a pilgrimage into Christianity's past. Despite his efforts, there are still some dark periods in that past that have not been fully confined to history.