This Martin Luther King, Jr. day at Saint John’s Seminary is devoted to workshops on the importance of the interreligious endeavor by the Catholic Church today. We are honored to welcome Rabbi Noam E. Marans, Director of Inter-religious and Intergroup Relations for the American Jewish Committee and Father David Michael, Associate Director for Inter-religious Relations for the Archdiocese of Boston.
"Francis is the first pope to rise within a Catholic Church transformed through the revolutionary 1965 Nostra Aetate and subsequent teachings, which have moved to right two millennia of Catholic enmity towards Jews and Judaism. Pope Francis, a friend of the Jewish people who has reflected on the horrors of the Holocaust and Christian complicity, would not knowingly be callous toward Jewish sensitivities. Rather than expressing syncretism, he is simply moved by the most instinctual Christian image of suffering — Jesus on the cross — as a means to identify with Jewish suffering. And he is not afraid to express that in a post-Nostra Aetate era."
-Rabbi Noam Marans
