ROME (EJP)---A Vatican cardinal in charge of relations with Jews on Thursday denied a new prayer for their conversion was offensive and said Catholics had the right to pray as they wish.
Meanwhile, the assembly of Italian rabbis called for a "pause" in the dialogue with the Catholic Church after the publication by the Vatican City of the new version of the prayer.
The Vatican on Tuesday revised a contested Latin prayer used by a traditionalist minority on Good Friday, removing a reference to Jewish "blindness" over Christ and deleting a phrase asking God to "remove the veil from their hearts".
But Jews criticized the modifications because the prayer still says they should recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men. It asks that "all Israel may be saved" and keeps an underlying call to conversion that Jews had wanted omitted.
In a press release signed by its president Gisuseppe Laras, the former chief rabbi of Milan, the assembly of Italian rabbis stressed that the new text substitutes the expression on "the blindness of the Jews" by another one "conceptually identical" " in spite of a formulation "obviously less strong", since it asks now for " God to enlighten them (the Jews)".
The most serious fact, the Italian rabbis especially deplored, "is that an appeal was introduced to the faithful to pray so that Jews finally recognize "Jesus Christ as the saviour of all men."
"The pope is certainly free to decide what he judges the best for his Church and his faithful, but the fact remains that the adoption of such liturgical formula contradicts clearly and dangerously at least forty years of a dialogue often difficult and tormented between Judaism and Catholicism, which so seems to have given no concrete result ", the rabbis said.
"This situation forces us to at least a pause of reflection in the dialogue with the Catholics in order to really understand what is their intent.”
'Decades of progress into doubt'
On Wednesday, Rome’s chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni said the new text of the Good Friday prayer had put "decades of progress into doubt".
In an interview in the leading Italian newspaper ‘Cooriere della Sera,’ Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican official in charge of relations with Jews, declared Thursday: "I must say that I don't understand why Jews cannot accept that we can make use of our freedom to formulate our prayers.”
"We think that reasonably this prayer cannot be an obstacle to dialogue because it reflects the faith of the Church and, furthermore, Jews have prayers in their liturgical texts that we Catholics don't like," Kasper, a German cardinal who heads the Vatican office that oversees religious relations with Jews, said.
"One must accept and respect differences," he added.
Kasper said the formula for the prayer came from the writings of St Paul and merely stated that for Christians, Jesus is the messiah and the Son of God.
"We will dialogue with all our strength but surely the object of dialogue cannot be the cancellation of essential differences," he told the newspaper.
Jewish groups complained last year when the Pope issued a decree allowing a wider use of the old-style Latin Mass and a missal, or prayer book, that was phased out after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965.
They protested against the re-introduction of the old prayer for conversion of the Jews and had asked the Pope to change it.
Major world Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee and The International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations have also criticized the new version.