Was Pope John Paul II anti-Semitic?

The question is posed in this week’s Spectator Diary by Neil Tennant, the articulate Pet Shop Boy, following their tour of the Americas – Montreal to Lima. He rates the food in Peru, and is annoyed by fans snapping pix of the band on their cameras rather than watching the show, but more to the point he says:

One of the books I read on tour was Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known, a memoir by the distinguished Jewish-American historian who grew up in pre-war Germany and emigrated with his family to the US. The five Germanys are Weimar, Nazi, capitalist West Germany, communist East Germany and today’s unified Germany, and he provides an insider’s account of his experiences of all of them and America’s interaction with them. In 1987, he met Pope John Paul II and enthused about the large number of bright Asian students there are at American universities these days, remarking, ‘They have taken the place of the Jews.’

The Pope’s response was a little chilling: ‘Yes, but they [Jews] still control the media and finance.’

I think that there we have our answer to Tennant’s question. On an anti-Semitism scale of 10, I’d give that an 8.5. You can take the Pole out of Poland but. . .