Jewish groups welcomed a senior Vatican official’s comments that the Good Friday Latin prayer to convert Jews could be removed from the reintroduced Latin liturgy.
Holy See Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who ranks second to Pope Benedict XVI, told reporters last week that the Vatican might study the possibility of substituting the prayer with another one.
“We hope that Cardinal Bertone’s public conjectures will shortly result in putting Catholic-Jewish relations back to the positive mode we were in before all this,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman.
The ADL has called on the Holy See to re-examine its decision to sanction the anti-Jewish Good Friday prayer, which is included in a new papal decree that grants wider usage of the Latin Mass, a worship service that has been restricted since the progressive reforms of the Second Vatican Council and the landmark Nostra Aetate document in the 1960s.
