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	O'Malley to Refocus on Catholic-Jewish Ties Urges Increase in Links, Dialogue By Charles A. Radin Boston Globe May 10, 2006 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/05/10/ omalley_to_refocus_on_catholic_jewish_ties/ Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley and leaders of the Jewish community are attempting to reinvigorate efforts to build Catholic-Jewish relations, following a period of moral and financial troubles in the church. In a widely anticipated first address to the Jewish community tonight, Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley intends to emphasize the commitment of the church to the revolutionary 1965 document Nostra Aetate that repudiated centuries of teaching and tradition that held the Jewish people eternally responsible for the death of Jesus. Such traditions, Catholics now acknowledge, played a major role in creating the environment for the Nazi Holocaust, or Shoah, against the Jews of Europe. Cardinal Richard J. Cushing, who led the archdiocese in the aftermath of World War II, and Cardinal Bernard F. Law, O'Malley's predecessor, both put strong emphasis on good Catholic-Jewish relations, but until now O'Malley has rarely spoken on the subject. "We need to have more connection and dialogue" with the Jewish community, O'Malley said in a recent interview. "In the time I have been here, the demands on my attention have been such that I haven't had as much time as I would like for this." "Relations with other religions are also important," O'Malley said, but understanding the historic relationship between Judaism and Catholicism and building good relations is essential. "The Catholic Church comes out of the Jewish religion; the church is the daughter of the synagogue," he said. "The Mass, which is the center of our spiritual life, is basically a synagogue service and a Seder meal brought together. . . . Christianity and Catholicism can be understood only in light of our Hebrew roots." O'Malley said that he draws inspiration for his effort from Pope John Paul II, who by personal acts -- praying at Jerusalem's Western Wall, visiting Rome's central synagogue and the death camp at Auschwitz, recognizing the state of Israel -- improved Catholic-Jewish relations dramatically. The late pope "saw the 20th century as the century of the Shoah," O'Malley said. "He encouraged Catholics to come to grips with the meaning of the Holocaust." Boston has been the scene of both lows and highs in relations between the two religions. In the 1930s and 1940s, anti-Semitic priests like the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin and the Rev. Leonard J. Feeney were wildly popular here and tolerated by the church. But that changed radically under Cushing, whose censure of Feeney led to the priest's excommunication in the 1950s. Cushing, whose sister was married to a Jew, began building bridges between the religions even before Nostra Aetate, and in the 1990s an alliance between Law and Leonard P. Zakim, the late, beloved director of the Anti-Defamation League in New England, made the archdiocese a national leader in interfaith relations. In this archdiocese, completion of a curriculum on Catholic teachings about Jews and Jesus is required for a Catholic to become a certified teacher of Christian doctrine. But with the death of Zakim in 1999, the beginnings of the clergy sexual-abuse scandal and Law's resignation in 2002, and financial woes that continue to trouble the archdiocese, the interfaith effort faded from public prominence. "There was no conscious movement away from it," said Andrew Tarsy, who became executive director of the ADL last August, "but there had been a period in which a drift away from our common purpose seemed possible." Tarsy approached O'Malley last November at the archdiocese's 40th anniversary commemoration of Nostra Aetate, at St. Julia Parish in Weston, and the cardinal agreed to speak publicly on the subject of Catholic-Jewish relations. The address, at 7 tonight at the Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center in Newton, is free and open to the public. Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com.
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