Vatican: Catholics Shouldn’t Try To Convert Jews
The Vatican has declared that Catholics should not attempt to convert Jews and should instead work alongside them to try and fight anti-Semitism.
A new document that has been created by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews has underlined more recent teachings from the church that Catholics and Jews were inextricably linked since God had never annulled his covenant with Jews.
The document reads, “The Church is therefore obliged to view evangelization (spreading Christianity) to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views.”
The document added, “A Christian can never be an anti-Semite, especially because of the Jewish roots of Christianity.”
It then went on to declare that Catholics need to be rather sensitive regarding the Shoah, which is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. They then added that the Vatican and Catholics across the world should “do all that is possible with our Jewish friends to repel anti-Semitic tendencies.”
Throughout history, there has been a lot of bad blood between the Catholic community and Jews, with the former denouncing the latter in prayers for not believing in Jesus.
One such prayer, which was used at Catholic Masses on Good Friday until around 1960, saw Jews labelled as “perfidious” before calling for them to be converted to Catholicism. This prayer was ultimately abolished when the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council circulated a new prayer book at Masses. Pope Benedict, the predecessor to Pope Francis, declared in 2008 that any prayers featuring language Jews found offensive should be re-written.
The bad relationship between the religions led some corners of the Catholic community to start a so-called “Jewish mission,” which was orchestrated to try and convert Jews to Catholicism because they hadn’t accepted Jesus as the Messiah.
The new document issues a “principled rejection of an institutional Jewish mission,” before explaining, “in concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”
Speaking about the importance of this document, Rabbi David Rosen, who is the international director of inter-religious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, told Reuters, “This is the first formal document that makes it clear there is no intentional desire to actively proselytize amongst Jews.”
The Jewish community has also heavily criticized the Vatican because they believe that the papacy during World War II turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. This is a charge that the Vatican has strenuously denied.
The release of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews’ new document coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Church’s disavowal of the idea that there should be Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. This, as well the attempt to start a dialogue about these theologies, have both been rejected by Jewish and Catholic traditionalists.
Edward Kessler, the director of the Woolf Institute for the study of inter-religious relations in Cambridge, said that more needed to be done in the education of young Catholics to stop the idea that Christianity had “replaced and substituted” Judaism.
Kessler insisted that both Catholics and Jews had to “ensure the transformation in relations is not limited to the elite but extends from the citadels of the Vatican to the pews of the Church as well as from the offices of the chief rabbis to the floors of our synagogues.”
This is the latest alteration from the Vatican and Pope Francis to move away from previous traditions and beliefs of the Church. Since Pope Francis was anointed, he has become more lenient on issues such as gay rights and re-marriage, as he has tried to modernize the Church.
[Image via Getty/Pool]
