Egan Says Jewish, Catholic Leaders Must Discuss Current Social Issues

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The New York Sun

Addressing the status of Catholic-Jewish relations, Edward Cardinal Egan last night issued a challenge to Jewish leaders to sit down together with Catholic leaders and address the social issues of the day.

The rabbi of the Jewish Center, Ari Berman, introduced Cardinal Egan, saying he learned that it was not the first time the Cardinal had spoken at an Orthodox synagogue.

“But I am confident that it is not part of his regular, weekly routine,” Rabbi Berman added. The audience laughed.

Cardinal Egan reflected on the more than 40 years since “Nostra Aetate,” or “In Our Time,” the Catholic Church’s Declaration on the Relations of the Church with Non-Christian Religions. During his highly personal talk, he noted that once a month over breakfast he spends time with Jack Rudin, sponsor of the lecture series.

“One can get used to smoked salmon, gefilte fish, cream cheese,” and other foods, he said.

Cardinal Egan said he had studied Hebrew: his professor was Hungarian, the lessons took place in Italy and were taught in Latin, and the textbook was in German. “That being the case,” the cardinal said to audience mirth, “my Hebrew leaves much to be desired.”

He drew on his experience in Chicago with the civil rights movement, and said Catholics and Jews were “all aiming in the same direction.”

“Our faith as Catholics is the faith of Abraham,” he said.

Cardinal Egan issued a proposal to the Jewish leaders to join Catholic leaders in choosing the cause of “why don’t we get together,” explore what both agree on, and “go at it.”

“Sometimes when you work together,” he said, “you learn each other’s qualities” more easily. By working together on a common project, it is likely “we will not need another Nostra Aetate,” he said.

He was heartened that as a young boy, he played cello in a trio with a Jewish couple – a violinist and pianist who were neighbors. “Remember this,” he recalled his neighbor saying. “Anyone who has played the second movement of Schubert’s B flat” in a trio “are friends forever.”

Cardinal Egan’s speech came days after Pope Benedict XVI visited Auschwitz. The pope’s visit was viewed with disappointment by the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, who in a public statement said that while it represented “a vital link with the historic breakthroughs in Catholic-Jewish relations achieved by Pope John Paul II,” he was deeply troubled by the pope’s “failure to explicitly address the vicious anti-Semitism that led to the murder of more than 1.5 million Jews on the ground where he stood in Auschwitz.”

Mr. Foxman said Cardinal Egan’s talk was very warm and sensitive and that the cardinal “felt comfortable enough to publicly issue a challenge that Jewish community join with the Catholic community in New York and later with the Protestant Community, to address the social issues of the day, and was respectful enough not to set the agenda.”

Cardinal Egan was speaking as part of the May and Samuel Rudin Lecture Series at the Jewish Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.


The New York Sun

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