Despite “remarkably durable and deepening relations with the Jewish community,” the mass media have distorted the Vatican’s positions on Jews and negatively influenced Jewish views toward Catholics, a senior U.S. Catholic prelate said last week.
“We bishops have been seen the impact of this misinformation on Jewish perceptions of Catholics,” Bishop William Keeler said at a meeting on ecumenism and evangelism held during an unprecedented four-day summit last week between 36 U.S. archbishops and Pope John Paul II and senior Vatican officials.
Keeler described efforts to heal the damage, including consultations with Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, who heads the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and representatives of major American Jewish groups.
“The response has been heartening,” said Keeler. “The American Jewish Committee, the Synagogue Council of American and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith are all circulating very helpful memoranda of clarification to their own constituencies.”
Keeler said that the recent document on “The Church and Racism,” which included condemnations of anti-Semitism and Nazism, had been positively received by American Jews and “will be of great help to our efforts.”
Keeler also said committees within the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American representative body, have issued two major documents over the past year aimed at bettering Jewish-Catholic relations.
The documents were guidelines on the presentation of Passion plays, and on the presentation of Jews and Judaism in Catholic preaching.
Still, Keeler did not gloss over differences with Jews, including frequently voiced Jewish concern regarding the pope’s failure to recognize the State of Israel.
“This friendship is not without challenges and divergences of perspective, stemming in the main from the tragedies of the past and, most poignantly, the Shoah,” said Keeler, using the Hebrew word for Holocaust.
He added, however, that “in the United States, with the largest Jewish population of any nation, there are remarkably durable and deepening relations with the Jewish community, both nationally and in the diocese.”
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