Latin Mass Dispute Complicates Pope's Visit with Jewish Leaders

Latin Mass Row Clouding Pope's N.Y. Visit - that's a headline in The Jewish Week newspaper's New York edition. It's a reference to Pope Benedict's decision to encourage use of the Catholic Church's 1962 missal - what's known as the traditional Latin Mass. Its Good Friday rite offends Jewish leaders because it includes a prayer for Jews to acknowledge Jesus as Christ.

The Vatican made some changes in advance of the pope's visit but, as The Jewish Week sizes it up in the remainder of its headline, "Vatican's attempts at damage control over prayer not seen as satisfactory."

Nonetheless, two of the Jewish leaders who'll meet with the pope said today that they are focused on the big picture - the remarkable change in Jewish-Catholic relations over the past 40 years - and not the controversy over a prayer in a rite that is rarely used.

"Any time that something like this happens, where the pope takes time out of what is an extraordinary schedule to make certain that Jewish-Catholic dialogue has a priority in his journey, is a very powerful and important statement about the changes that have taken place over the course of the years. It’s monumental," said Rabbi Charles Klein of the Merrick Jewish Centre. "These are monumental occasions because of what it suggests about how far we have come." It suggests "that there is a long way yet that we are prepared to travel," he added.

Rabbi Klein, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, is part of a group of Jewish leaders scheduled to meet with Benedict next Thursday in Washington.

"The liturgy needs to be understood a little bit differently than when the words were written 2,000 years ago or 1,500 years ago," he said when asked about the Good Friday prayer. "We read them with a different heart … We have moved beyond what was the very, very difficult period of church-Jewish relations in which there was such pain."

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn, who also will meet with Pope Benedict, said the fact that Jews and Catholics can discuss such differences openly shows how much progress has been made in their relationship. "A belief is measured by behavior. What people do determines what they believe," he said.

Benedict, he noted, will visit Manhattan's Park East Synagogue on his trip to New York, the first time a pope has gone to a synagogue in the U.S. "It's another historic moment," he said.

Still, as Newsday previously reported, some would like to see the pope address the Good Friday prayer on his visit. Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum of Temple Israel in Lawrence - he'll also be part of the meeting with Benedict - said: "One question I will ask ... there's a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews. It exists only in the Latin, which very few Catholics recite. This has been a source of contention and hurt ... to the Jewish community. This prayer has existed, and the pope did change the very hurtful language that existed, but still in all, there is a level of concern and of pain on the part of the Jewish community."

Photo: Rabbi Charles Klein.