The Vatican is playing down reports from Jerusalem about a groundbreaking new Vatican document that reportedly will place unprecedented “co-responsibility” and “guilt” for the Holocaust on the Roman Catholic Church.
“It is a draft,” Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls said of the document. No church authority has approved it yet and it does not reflect an official position of the church at this stage.”
He noted, however, that the church had “clearly expressed” its condemnation of anti-Semitism on numerous occasions, including in statements by Pope John Paul II and in the new Universal Catechism.
Italian newspapers Thursday headlined reports of the new draft document as carried by Israeli Radio and commented upon by Rabbi David Rosen, director of interfaith relations and Vatican liaison for the Anti-Defamation League in Jerusalem.
The draft document had surfaced in Jerusalem at a conference of the International Liaison Committee for Relations between Jews and the Vatican.
The acceptance of guilt stated in the document stunned Jewish participants in the conference and was hailed by Jewish interfaith experts in Jerusalem and the United States.
The Italian newspapers called the reported document a “mea culpa” — self accusation of guilt — for the Holocaust by the church.
Newspaper reports in Italy described Vatican officials as “irritated” by what La Repubblica newspaper described as “the tendency by the Israeli side to take as given — and to launch as scoops on the international scene — matters that are still under consideration.”
Because of the U.S. Memorial Day holiday, the JTA Daily News Bulletin will not be published Monday, May 30.
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