About Jewish-Christian Relations

We present here the section of the Apostolic Exhortation that discusses relations with Jews and with Muslims.

In 1965, the Second Vatican Council published its declaration on relations with non-Christian religions. Paragraph 4, the longest in the document, dealt with relations with the Jewish people and marked a turning point in relations between the Church and the Jewish people.

We publish here an important part of the document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, "The Jewish People and their Scriptures in the Christian Bible", published in 2001.

The third Helsinki Consultation met in Berlin from June 29 until July 3, 2012 and the participants published the following statement.

On July 1, 2012, Yad VaShem published the following statement about the revision of the wording of the panel that deals with the attitude of the Pope and the Vatican to the Shoah.

On May 16, 2012, Cardinal Kurt Koch, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and of the Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews, spoke at a conference hosted by the Pontifical Angelicum University in collaboration with the John Paul II Center for Interreligious Dialogue, directed by Rabbi Jack Bemporad. His address was the fifth "Berrie Lecture," a series promoted by the Russel Berrie Foundation of New York. We present here the text of the talk.

On September 22, 2011, during his four day visit to Germany, Pope Benedict XVI addressed representatives of the Jewish community at the Reichstag in Berlin. We publish here the full address in English.

In 2010, the Catholic Church published a version of the Catechism suitable for young people and titled YouCat. This volume was widely distributed during the 2011 World Youth Day. We publish here the teaching of this volume on the relation between the Church and the Jews.

We publish here the text about the responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion taken from an excerpt of the book of Pope Benedict XVI on Jesus of Nazareth that will be published next week, on March 10, 2011. This excerpt has already drawn much praise from the Jewish world.

Here is the statement issued at the conclusion of a three-day meeting in Jerusalem of the Bilateral Commission of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, which was devoted to the theme: "Challenges of Faith and Religious Leadership in Secular Society".

On March 2, 2011, the Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee published a joint declaration after its meeting in Paris. This body brings together the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC) and the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews.

In the post-Synodal Exhortation, Verbum Domini, published by Pope Benedict XVI, he also refers to the relations between Jews and Christians. Due to the importance of this subject, we publish here this paragraph (number 43).

We publish here the speech of Pope Benedict XVI in the synagogue of Rome on Sunday, January 17, 2010. The speech appears on our site in Hebrew.

 We publish here the statement released on January 20, 2010 upon the conclusion of a four-day meeting of the Bilateral Commission of the Holy See and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, which ended in the Vatican.

 We remember with gratitude the visit of Pope John Paul II to the synagogue in Rome in 1986 where he was received by Rabbi Elio Toaff and the Jewish community. This was another turning point in the long road towards reconciliation, embarked upon by the Roman Catholic Church.

On Friday, August 29, 2014, Father George Hernandez, Latin parish priest of Gaza, met with Pope Francis in the Vatican.

Here is the full text of Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen's talk at the Synod of Bishops in Rome, delivered on October 6, 2008. We publish the text here in Russian too.

According to an article in the Israel daily “Yediot Ahronot” of March 20, 2013, the new Pope is very friendly with one of the rabbis of the Jewish community in Argentina.

The Holy See released a statement in which Pope Francis expressed his condolences following the discovery of the bodies of Gilad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrah.

Gary Spruch of the American Jewish Committee has written a fascinating article on the great American rabbi and thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel’s contribution to the writing of Nostrae Aetate during the Second Vatican Council.