Every issue confronting Christians and Jews today, including the “supposed impasse” over separation of church and state, “can be resolved in mutual respect if both groups approached the problem in a spirit of humility, fairness and good will.” Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle. Archbishop of Washington, told the local chapter of the American Jewish Committee here tonight.
Cardinal O’Boyle was honored at the chapter’s annual meeting dinner, receiving the organization’s first Isaiah Award for Human Relations. The event was attended by 350 AJC members and dignitaries representing the various denominations and religious communities of the capital. David Lloyd Kreeger, a member of the national and Washington executive boards of the AJC, presented the award to the cardinal — a two-foot statue of the Prophet Isaiah. On the dais at the event was Archbishop Luigi Raimondi, the Vatican’s apostolic delegate to the United States, who made his first public appearance here at an interfaith meeting.
Mr. Kreeger and Rabbi Marc H. Tannenbaum, director of the interreligious affairs department of the AJC, lauded Cardinal O’Boyle for his achievements in the field of social justice in general and for what Rabbi Tannenbaum called “his invaluable support to the Vatican Council’s Declaration on Non-Christian Religions and to the progress of implementation of Jewish-Christian dialogue.”
After asserting that all Christian-Jewish issues can be resolved mutually, the Cardinal told the largely-Jewish audience: “Religion is often described as the social and institutional expression of the religious conscience of a people. Let us, together and through our respective communions, endeavor to set a shining example of that conscience, of faith in God and love of neighbor, for all the world to see. And let us join our voices in that ancient cry of the Hebrew peoples as they were driven in persecution and despair across the face of the earth, a cry repeated in Christian churches, in our cities, in the jungles half a world away, wherever there are witnesses of man’s inhumanity to man. Shalom, Shalom.”
Rabbi Tannenbaum called, in his address, for “radical transformations in attitude toward black militancy” on behalf of the white Christian and Jewish communities. Conceding that black militancy. “in its meaning of helping Negroes to achieve mastery over their own destiny, has a justifiable claim on our support and our compassion,” he stated, however, that “black nationalism, especially that brand that has assumed the ideological covering of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, must be repudiated as one of the most destructive forces, whose only outcome will be the undermining of everything that black militants want and have a right for their people.”
During the meeting, Robert H. Moses, an attorney here, was elected chairman of the AJC’s Washington chapter. Mr. Moses is the first white president of Hospitality House, a Negro settlement house.
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