ADL unsatisfied with clarification on Good Friday prayer

Apr. 7, 2008 (CWNews.com) – A Vatican statement issued last week “does not go far enough to allay concerns” about the implications of an amended version of the Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews, the Anti-Defamation League has complained.

While welcoming the Vatican’s assurance that the Catholic Church remains fully committed to inter-religious dialogue, the ADL said that Good Friday prayer in question– a text that is read only in Latin, and only in the few parishes where the extraordinary form of the liturgy is the norm for Easter Triduum celebrations– remains problematical.

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the ADL in America, explained that the clarification issued from Rome “still does not specifically say that the Catholic Church is opposed to proselytizing Jews.” The ADL statement continued with an expression of disappointment that the Vatican had not “explicitly rejected calls to conversion or to proselytizing Jews.”

Moreover, Foxman pointed out in his critical remarks, the statement of clarification from Rome will not be read aloud when the Good Friday prayer is recited during that day’s solemn liturgy. The prayer will stand alone, he observed, “with its call for Jews to recognize Jesus as the savior of all men and its hope that ‘all Israel will be saved.'”