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Small Changes, Big Setbacks
Submitted by jgehring on Fri, 02/22/2008 - 12:22pm.
Story summary:
Paradoxical efforts by Pope Benedict XVI to promote interreligious dialogue and at the same time reassert Catholic superiority are visible in the current flap over reviving, then revising, the wording of prayers that some Catholics will use this Good Friday calling for conversion of the Jews. Language is a tool of both hospitality and affront. Unavoidably, the pope’s dual agenda has raised concerns that longstanding efforts to heal Jewish-Christian relations are being undermined.
Small Changes, Big Setbacks
National Catholic Reporter
2-22-08
It has taken four popes, beginning with Pius XII, to back the church away from language in the liturgy that referred to “the perfidious Jews” living in the darkness of unbelief and complicity in the death of Jesus Christ. This idea was directly confronted in the church’s 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”), which acknowledged the eternal validity of God’s covenant with the Jews and condemned every form of anti-Semitism. John Paul II, a witness to the Holocaust, worked tirelessly to reduce tensions and to advance Jewish-Christian dialogue. In March 2000, he prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, grieving for the long history of suffering inflicted on the Jews, our brothers and sisters, the children of Abraham.