Catholic Priest Denies Jewish Religious Books Are Anti-christian

A Paris Catholic Institute priest told a Gregorian University audience here that it was “absolutely untrue” that such Jewish religious works as the Talmud or the Shulchan Aruch condemned Christianity or expressed antagonism to it.

He declared that charges of Jewish hostility against Christianity stemmed mostly from the fact that the Christian censors of the Talmud changed and substituted words, either in ignorance or with the purpose of “proving” Jewish enmity against Christians.

Father Hruby, the speaker, said that prior to the Crusades a “true dialogue” was beginning to develop between Christianity and Judaism, but that the era of the Crusades destroyed all such efforts. He noted that a basic principle of Judaism has always been to treat the stranger as a brother and to remember “because you have been strangers yourselves in Egypt from whence I have taken you out.” Father Hruby quoted the passage in Hebrew.

Father Hruby’s audience included Augustin Cardinal Bea, head of the Vatican Secretariat on Relations with non-Christian religions, who drafted the original text of the statement on Catholic-Jewish relations which was approved by the Ecumenical Council and promulgated by Pope Paul VI as official Church doctrine. It was noted that Cardinal Bea proposed, in a recent article, that religious leaders seek in their own textbooks, as well as in those of other religions, for expressions of “inter-religious” goodwill and mutual appreciation.