On the occasion of 40 years of official relations between Jewish organizations and the Catholic Church, the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee (ILC) held a meeting in Paris, France. Representatives of the International Jewish Committee for Inter-religious Consultations (IJCIC) – of which the World Jewish Congress is a prominent member – and church leaders from the United States, Europe, Israel, Australia, Latin America and Africa took part. The conference highlighted the increasingly good relationship since the Second Vatican Council declaration ‘Nostra Aetate’ in 1965 concerning the relationship between the Catholic Church and other religions.
Relations have had ups and downs in the 40 years since the ILC first met in 1971. Current tensions over the planned beatification of wartime Pope Pius XII or the Holocaust denial by the traditionalist bishop Richard Williamson came up briefly at the conference. “The issue is how to interpret them,” IJCIC Chairman Rabbi Richard Marker told the ‘Reuters’ news agency. “While one might argue that, in the scheme of all our achievements, these issues are merely symbolic, the fact that they speak to sensitivities in the community makes them important,” he said, adding that demographic changes would affect how the two faiths related to each other in future. “Catholicism is becoming a southern hemisphere religion. They are not familiar with Judaism, they are not familiar with each other and they’re all different from European Catholicism.” Delegates to the ILC had traditionally been “northern and western,” he noted, and that would probably have to change.
In recent decades, Catholics and Jews around the world have held countless meetings, discussions and mutual visits to houses of worship to improve contacts between the two sides. The ILC also sponsored a three-day conference in Paris called the ‘Emerging Leadership Delegation’, which brought together young people from both communities in order to discuss the challenges of the future. These delegates were invited to participate in the ILC plenary sessions. The conference agreed that it was a common religious duty to help relieve the consequences of poverty, injustice, discrimination and the denial of universal human rights. Participants were sensitive to the call of the younger generation for true freedom and full participation in their respective societies, and the gathering also discussed the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.
Speakers expressed sadness at repeated instances of violence or terrorism “in the name of God”, such as attacks against Christians in the Muslim world and calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. The ILC delegates deplored every act of violence perpetrated in the name of religion.
The gathering also took up the question of increasing contacts with Muslims without setting out any new initiatives. “We spoke about a trialogue of Catholics, Jews and Muslims because we have a lot in common,” Cardinal Kurt Koch, the Vatican’s chief official in a charge of inter-faith dialogue, told ‘Reuters’, adding: “But there are also problems. Some terms don’t always mean the same thing for us.” Marker said that IJCIC’s experience in bringing together different strands of Judaism could be a useful model for Muslims trying to create a world body to speak for them with Christians and Jews. “I think there will be two tracks,” he was quoted by ‘Reuters’ as saying. “There will be some space for trilateral dialogue and there will be a necessity to maintain bilateral dialogue.”
The ILC committed itself to work for a peaceful future for the people in the Middle East and the wider world, to continue the outreach to Jewish-Christian dialogue groups in Europe and Latin America, to work together on social and ethical issues, and to support the next generation of young leaders.
