Sister Rose Thering, who died Saturday at 85, was an activist nun whose campaign to foster better relations between Jews and Christians is widely credited with helping influence the Vatican to stop blaming the Jews for killing Jesus.

The official pronouncement came in the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate (“Our Time”), issued in 1965, overturning hundreds of years of at least tacit approval of Catholic anti-Semitism.

The document’s framers relied in part on Thering’s doctoral dissertation, which traced the history of representations of Jews in Catholic textbooks and literature, where Thering found “Terrible things – just terrible things. The Jews were accused of deicide,” Thering once said. “I almost got ill checking these books out.”

A long-time professor of Jewish-Christian studies at Seton Hall University, Thering led dozens of trips to Israel, and worked with numerous organizations to foster Jewish-Christian relations. She helped draft a New Jersey law mandating that the Holocaust be taught in public schools.

In 2004, a documentary about her, “Sister Rose’s Passion,” won the Oscar for a short subject.

Thering grew up on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin, in a large Catholic family devout enough to pray together three times a day. Her mother taught her that Jesus was killed by the Jews, and, despite or because of not knowing any Jews, her parents held the casually anti-Semitic views common in such places before World War II. In interviews, Thering said that even as a child she questioned such attitudes.

In 1940, when she was 20, Thering joined the Dominican order as a novitiate and began a teaching career in Sauk City, Wis. Motivated in part by a sense of injustice inspired by the portrayal of Jews in church textbooks, she undertook a doctorate at St. Louis University, which she completed in 1961. Her dissertation eventually came to the attention of Augustin Cardinal Bea, the head of the commission that was writing Nostra Aetate. The portion that she influenced most reads in part, “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

“There were 15 lines in Latin,” she said in 2002, “but they changed everything.”

In 1968, Thering came to Seton Hall to organize educational outreach programs for the university’s Institute of Judeo–Christian Studies. She planned and directed trips to Israel, to concentration camps in Europe, and also to refusenik families in the Soviet Union.

In 1986, Thering went to Vienna to protest the presidential inauguration of a former United Nations secretary-general, Kurt Waldheim, who, it had been shown, had concealed his past as a Nazi officer in a unit that committed atrocities in Yugoslavia during World War II.

“I have never experienced such overt anti-Semitism,” she said in a 1999 interview. “Austrians proudly flaunted pictures of themselves in Nazi uniform that they still carried in their billfolds 50 years after the war.”

She was harassed when she left the country, although the publicity it garnered for Austria made that nation look as bad as she must have hoped. “Strip-Searched By Austrians – Jersey Nun Humiliated in Vienna” was the headline in the New York Post.

Seton Hall made her emerita in 1988, but Thering kept plugging away. She was sprightly enough to serve on the board at Kean College, even while publicly protesting when speakers like Khalid Abdul Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan were invited to speak there. Among the awards she garnered were the Anti-Defamation League’s Cardinal Bea Interfaith Award, and the Jerusalem Award, which was presented to her by Teddy Kollek in 1987 after she testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of a bill that would move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

In 2005, philanthropist Leon Cooperman pledged $1.75 million to Seton Hall to create the Sister Rose Thering Endowment Chair in Jewish-Christian Studies. The school began raising an equivalent amount to complete the endowment. “I am hoping and praying the other arm of the chair gets built,” she was quoted as saying in the Bergen Record. “Because I cannot get out of a chair unless it has two arms.”

Thering seldom went out without her unusual crucifix, a cross superimposed on a Star of David. “I was born Catholic. I am Catholic,” she told New Jersey Jewish News in 2000. “Spiritually we are Semites.”

Rose Thering

Born August 9, 1920, in Plain, Wis.; died of kidney failure May 7 at a Catholic retirement home in Racine, Wis.; survived by two brothers and four sisters, and her Dominican associates.