Let Us Recognize How Far Jewish-Catholic Relations Have Come

The death of Pope Francis was mourned by many Jewish groups, a sign of how far Catholic-Jewish relations have come in recent decades. Indeed, in a world where it is difficult to find positive developments for the Jewish people, the changes in the church’s attitudes toward the Jews is one of the most positive developments, which needs more attention that it gets within our own community.

It all began with Vatican II in the 1960s. This conclave of bishops from around the world showed that it had learned from the horrors of the Holocaust that centuries of antisemitism inculcated by, among other elements, church teachings, had opened a path to the Nazi assault against the Jewish people. It was time to turn a page, particularly regarding the church’s promotion of the antisemitic deicide charge, the notion of collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ.

At Vatican II, Church leaders bit the bullet and made clear that Jews cannot be held responsible for the singular moment in Catholic theology. This didn’t resolve deeply embedded antisemitism, but did open a pathway toward escaping from this poison.

And so as other doctrines emerged, as the Vatican recognized the legitimacy of the State of Israel and the Jewish connection to the land, a new Catholicism regarding the Jews emerged. The old canards were no longer being taught, and normalization between Catholics and Jews was beginning to take hold.

ADL, which had been an integral part of the Jewish community before and during Vatican II, was concerned that these noteworthy changes at the top of the Vatican hierarchy, might not be filtering down to the younger generation.

So, in the early 1990s, in coordination with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, ADL inaugurated an annual program for Catholic school teachers across the country. Each summer, 30 to 40 teachers came to Washington, D.C. to attend a week-long ADL program called Bearing Witness, where participants learned about Jewish and Catholic interpretations of the Bible from a rabbi and priest, dealt with issues of bias, met Jewish representatives from the community, and visited a local synagogue.

During that program, I delivered a three-hour talk on the history of antisemitism, which covered three thousand years. What was so amazing about this experience, which I was involved in for almost a quarter of a century, was the willingness of these Catholic teachers to listen to and absorb a lot about their own church in this history.

I would begin each session by suggesting to the group that they were going to hear some difficult stuff about their own church, but that they need to recognize that the only reason we could engage in this difficult exercise in the first place was because the church had come such a long way in reforming its doctrine and attitudes toward the Jewish people. And so, with open minds and hearts, year after year, the teachers heard the history and pledged that the future would be different.

For me, these events were among the most moving and encouraging in my long career at ADL. It gave me hope that real change for the better was not just a dream and that the past need not be repeated in the future.

Today, while there remain outstanding issues, such as the church’s acknowledgement of Pope Pius XII’s role during the Holocaust and how the church was too quick to buy into some of the most hostile views of Israel’s conduct against Hamas after the October 7^th massacre, the framework for conversation and dialogue, even the most difficult, is completely different.

And we as a community need to make clear more than we have, particularly at a time that antisemitism is roaring back including here in the United States, as evidenced by ADL’s release of our annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, that one of the true bright spots for the Jewish people is this reversal of the Catholic Church.

As we mourn the passing of the Pope, let our two communities recommit to continuing the process of mutual respect and education, so that together we can take on the challenges of antisemitism that once again threatens our community.