http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/world/europe/vatican-says-catholics-should-not-try-to-convert-jews.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=2Vatican Says Catholics Should Not Try to Convert JewsBy GAIA PIANIGIANI
December 10, 2015
ROME — Catholics should not try to convert Jews, but should work together with them to fight anti-Semitism, the Vatican said on Thursday in a far-reaching document meant to solidify its increasingly positive relations with Jews.
Despite a long history of mutual suspicion and conflict, Christianity and Judaism are deeply intertwined, and Christians should treat the subject of the Holocaust with sensitivity and repel any anti-Semitic tendencies, the Vatican wrote. Titled “The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable,” the document was issued by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews.
Addressing an issue that has been a sore point between the two faiths for centuries, the commission wrote that the church was “obliged to view evangelization to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views.” It specified that “the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”
Analysts said the language in the document seemed intended to put the issue to rest.
“It clearly states that salvation doesn’t come from the Jews’ conversion, but it’s very respectful of their own mission,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of a liberal Catholic research institution, the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna. He called the message “a courageous and important written document of the Catholic Church.”
Coming 50 years after the Vatican formally repudiated the idea of collective Jewish guilt for Jesus’ death, the document emphasized the tight and inescapable link between Christianity and Judaism. “A Christian can never be an anti-Semite, especially because of the Jewish roots of Christianity,” it stated.
Cardinal Kurt Koch, the president of the Vatican Commission, said on Thursday that the church’s dialogue with Jews was not just interreligious, but “intrareligious, or intrafamiliar.”
Jewish leaders praised the document and the way that Catholic-Jewish relations had progressed.
“To its great credit, this document seeks to reflect a sincere comprehension of Jewish self-understanding,” Rabbi David Rosen, the international director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, said on Thursday, sitting next to Vatican officials when the document was presented at a news conference. He noted that the document quoted extensively from Jewish rabbinical sources and recognized their interpretive validity, as well as the place of the Torah in the life of Jews.
“It’s a major step in Jewish-Catholic relationships even that a rabbi and Jewish thinker were on stage with Cardinal Koch and Father Norbert,” said Rabbi Eric J. Greenberg, the director of interfaith relations and outreach at the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees in New York City. (He referred to the Rev. Norbert J. Hoffman, the secretary of the Vatican commission.) “That they were invited to participate in a presentation of a Vatican document is such a great symbol,” Rabbi Greenberg said.
Before the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, Catholic prayers said on Good Friday, the day that commemorates Jesus’ crucifixion and death, called Jews “perfidious.” The revisions to the Mass ordered by the council eliminated that characterization, but some other language that Jewish groups found offensive continued to be said by ultratraditional Catholics using old-style Latin prayers, including a reference to “the blindness of that people.” Pope Benedict XVI ordered those prayers changed in 2008.
The Vatican’s efforts to improve relations with Jews gained major impetus under Pope John Paul II. He was the first pope to pray in a synagogue, the first to acknowledge the failure of individual Catholics to act against the Holocaust and the first to call anti-Semitism a sin “against God and man.”
According to the document published on Thursday, Catholic institutions that train priests should integrate into their curriculums both Nostra aetate, the 1965 declaration that condemned anti-Semitism, and the subsequent Holy See documents on Jews and Judaism.
