It will come as a surprise to some that in 1990, a British academic theologian named Rowan Williams, now the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote comprehensively on the “Trinity and Pluralism” in a 1990 volume called “Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered,” edited by Gavin D’Costa, a Roman Catholic theologian of world religions.

The Williams article was in part a book review of Raimon Panikkar’s “The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man.” Panikkar, who spent many years in India as a Roman Catholic priest, is best known for his observation on his faith journey: “I ”˜left’ as a Christian, ”˜found’ myself a Hindu and ”˜return’ a Buddhist, without having ceased to be a Christian.”

A lively, expansive, intellectually inviting quality pervades the Williams essay, characteristic of his writings before he was elevated to his present post. His trinitarian vision is not frozen in time, but represents a steady unfolding of the fullness of Christ, always being discovered, and not locked into any conceptual pattern that reduces the full worth of other religions.

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I believe that both history and theology offer warrants for respecting the belief and practice of Jews rather than seeking their conversion to Christianity. Yes, I know in John’s Gospel Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (xiv, 6). I know that in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus mandates, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . .” (xxviii, 19). But we should not read these texts without attentiveness to how we have used them against Jews (and others as well). In the nearly 2,000 years since the evangelists wrote these texts, Christians have vilified Judaism and persecuted Jews as “Christ killers”. Ours is a shameful history: denigration of a people, compulsory baptisms, the crusades and Inquisition, confining Jews in ghettos and attacking them in pogroms. Particularly after the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered in the most barbaric ways, we must not use our sacred texts in ways that would mean the end of Judaism. Yet to seek conversion of Jews to Christianity is ultimately to seek Judaism’s demise.

It is fundamental to Christianity that God entered into covenant with the Jewish people ”” a covenant that, as Pope John Paul II said many times, was “never revoked”. God is faithful to covenants, and, therefore, the way of Judaism is salvific for Jews. Torah is a path to holiness.

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Recalling a visit to the Auschwitz death camp, Pope Benedict XVI wound up a sometimes fraught and often politically charged trip to Israel and the West Bank on Friday with a call for peace and a plea that the Holocaust ”” “that appalling chapter in history” ”” must “never be forgotten or denied.”

But, as he has since he arrived from Jordan on Monday on his first trip to the Holy Land as pope, he avoided evoking his German nationality and his personal history in Nazi Germany as some Israelis had demanded. Rather, he blamed the Holocaust on “a godless regime.”

The pope has sought to walk a narrow line between the tripwires of Middle East politics, addressing the concerns of Israelis and of Palestinians. As he left he spoke in a farewell statement from Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport of the separation barrier that Israel has built to fence itself off from Palestinian areas, saying it was “one of the saddest sights for me during my visit to these lands.”

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The controversy about the visit of Pope Benedict XVI is indicative both of the general political tension in our area, and of the loaded Catholic-Jewish relationship. Among its many paradoxes is the fact that this is a relationship between a small people of some 13 million, an ethno-religious group the majority of whom do not follow the religion of their ancestors anymore in any meaningful way but rather maintain a culture based on an ancient tradition in which that religion played a central role, and a worldwide religious body of some 1.5 billion members. We are talking about the relations between a gnat and an elephant, but the elephant, amazingly, developed from the gnat, and the gnat is a rare insect of tremendous importance.

The visit of John Paul II was an act that was hard to follow, and the present pope did his best in accordance with his personality and the tremendous pressures to which he is constantly subjected. It was not good enough. In his speech at Yad Vashem he used the term “compassion,” which was mistranslated into the Hebrew hemla (pity). Compassion means an effort to take part in someone else’s (harsh) experience, and is much more than top-down pity. It has a theological resonance in Christian thought and reflects Christian beliefs about the attitude of Jesus to human suffering.

THE POPE MEANT WELL, and tried to walk the tightrope between Arab-Palestinian-Muslim and Palestinian-Christian enmity to Israel and the Jews on the one hand, and the collective trauma of Jews in Israel and elsewhere regarding the Holocaust on the other.

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The Vatican on Tuesday sought to defend Pope Benedict XVI against criticism that his speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial on Monday was a disappointment coming from a German who experienced the Nazi terror firsthand.

But in seeking to clarify the pope’s wartime past, the Vatican further muddied the waters, appearing to revise ”” then retract ”” Benedict’s wartime history in the middle of his first visit to Israel as pontiff.

At a news conference on Tuesday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, seemed to contradict the pope’s own previous statements when he said that Benedict, growing up in Bavaria during World War II, “never, never, never” belonged to the Hitler Youth.

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: There’s a little-known multifaith initiative also working for Middle East peace, with support from the U.S. government and visiting delegations of American Christians, Muslims and Jews. They say there can never be peace in the Holy Land without strong relationships between religious leaders. Kim Lawton is in Jerusalem.

KIM LAWTON: Just outside of Bethlehem, an American group is touring the Aida Palestinian refugee camp. These are not typical Holy Land pilgrims. It’s is a delegation of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders who are part of an American faith-based initiative to bolster peace in this land of conflict. Former U.S. Ambassador Tony Hall is heading the initiative, along with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

Ambassador TONY HALL: I don’t think any of us are under any illusions that we’re going to solve the peace problem, but we also realize that you can’t have peace without religious leaders, and that’s why we come here and try to build these relationships.

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Visiting a mosque on the second day of his closely watched first visit to the Holy Land, Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday denounced the “ideological manipulation of religion” and called for greater understanding between the Christian and Muslim faiths.

Speaking outside Al-Hussein bin-Talal mosque in Amman, Benedict said that because of “the burden of our common history so often marked by misunderstanding,” Christians and Muslims alike should “strive to be seen” as faithful worshipers of God.

In a speech that also touched on a central theme of his papacy and thought, the tension between faith and reason, Benedict said that “the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends,” was often “the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society.”

Relations between the Vatican and Muslims were strained in 2006 when, in a speech in Regensburg, Germany, Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor who said Islam had brought things “evil and inhuman.”

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The Vatican’s representative to the Holy Land on Monday played down the controversies that could mar a visit next week by Pope Benedict XVI: the conduct of a wartime predecessor, a Roman Catholic prayer for converting the Jews and the church’s perceived lenience toward a Holocaust-denying bishop.

A papal visit to the Holy Land is not the time to “quarrel for this or that,” said Monsignor Antonio Franco, the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel.

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More than a hundred rabbis of various denominations will sign a message welcoming Benedict XVI to the Holy Land and encouraging dialogue between Jews and Christians.

The presidents of the International Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Education, Adalberta and Armando Bernardini, told ZENIT that the message is due to be published on the Web site of an Israeli newspaper, “Ha’Arezt.”

The initiative is being promoted by one of the foundation’s members, Rabbi Jack Bemporard, also director of the New Jersey based Center for Interreligious Understanding.

From May 8 to 15 the Pope will visit the Holy Land, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, in a visit described by the government of Israel as a “bridge for peace.”

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Muslim calligrapher Yasser Abu Saymeh has dedicated the past two months to Christian art, writing the Gospel of Luke in ornate Arabic script to be presented to Pope Benedict XVI when the Roman Catholic leader visits the Holy Land next month.

Abu Saymeh never read a New Testament text before he was picked for the prestigious assignment by Bethlehem’s Christian mayor. He said he has since come to appreciate the shared strands of the two faiths.

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(ACNS) The theme of the Commission’s meeting was ”˜Jerusalem’ and papers were presented by Rabbi Professor Daniel Sperber on behalf of the Jewish delegation and by Mrs Clare Amos on behalf of the Anglican delegation. Extensive discussions took place in a friendly and constructive atmosphere on the many issues raised by the papers

Both papers noted the conjoined terrestrial and celestial understandings of the significance of the city and the creative tensions between them and both appreciated the implications of the theological and scriptural perspectives for the present and future life of Jerusalem. In discussion it was noted that Jerusalem is at the centre of historical and contemporary Jewish identity and also the importance of understanding Jerusalem as a city to be shared between the religions, a house of prayer for all nations and a city which should make all people friends beyond possessiveness. The peace of Jerusalem for which Jews, Muslims and Christians pray should be such as to be a light to all nations

In his paper, Rabbi Sperber spoke of the traditional understanding of the degrees of sanctity emanating outwards from the heart of the temple, the Holy of Holies extending outwards and represented in the mediaeval view of Jerusalem as the navel of the world. The terrestrial Jerusalem is mystically connected to the celestial Jerusalem and is the point from which all creation expanded. The physical Jerusalem is thus a glimpse of the celestial and is the place to which all prayer is oriented and though which all prayers pass. He cited Nathan Sharansky’s understanding of Jerusalem as being the spiritual centre of gravity for all Jews and of the spark of Jerusalem’s sanctity in every Jewish soul.

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When Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders in Omaha, Neb., broached the idea of trying to construct a shared facility, they shared one common early fear. It wasn’t politics, fundamentalism or even doctrinal differences.

“It turned out the biggest fear they all had was evangelism,” said Nancy Kirk, director of the two-year-old Tri-Faith Initiative, “that one group would try to get another group to cross the line.”

Yet once a “no proselytizing” rule was in place, leaders from the three congregations gave the green light toward creating a space where all three groups could grow to appreciate””and even respect””each other’s traditions.

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Melbourne Anglican Archbishop Philip Freier is under fire from the Jewish community for hosting a function for former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami while he is in Melbourne this month.

Jewish Community Council of Victoria president John Searle wrote to Dr Freier saying the Jewish community found it inconceivable that the Anglican Church would host “such a man” or even meet him.

He declined an invitation to attend and asked Dr Freier to reconsider.

Mr Searle told The Age that although Mr Khatami, president of Iran from 1997 to 2005, was regarded as a reformist, he was a sponsor of terrorism, a Holocaust denier and leader of a country that has often threatened to “wipe Israel off the map”.

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(ACNS) Participants included bishops, clergy and lay people, both men and women, of ECS along with representatives of the Sudan Council of Churches and CMS. There was a representative from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Presentations were made on inter faith relations in each of seven clustered areas, covering the whole Province. Based on the presentations and the discussion which followed, a number of areas for consultation and dialogue ecumenically and with Muslim partners emerged: the relationship between the churches and the National Government; a review of provision for Christian teaching and curriculum in schools; devising an inter faith curriculum in theological institutions; issues concerning the safety and dignity of women and children; increased local interaction between Christians and Muslims to develop mutual understanding and respect, and to safeguard permanent prosperity.

Future immediate work will concern the strengthening of ecumenical relationships within the Sudan ”“ nationally and regionally ”“ clustered inter faith workshops with Muslim people. The Commission recognised the importance of positioning inter faith dialogue within the contexts of identity, mission and witness. It further recognised he interconnectedness of the dialogue of life and the dialogue of ideas.

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On behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, The Rt Revd Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester and Chair of the Council of Christians and Jews, hosted a reception at Lambeth Palace on 17 February 2009 for the participants in the first Inter Parliamentary Conference on anti-Semitism.

The Conference which is the first of a series, follows the work of the ‘All Party Parliamentary Committee on anti-Semitism’ which produced a major report in 2007 and is chaired by Mr John Mann MP. Since then, the Committee has engaged with Parliamentarians concerned with anti-Semitism around the world to create a network and now an agreement to hold regular conferences under the auspices of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition on Combating anti-Semitism.

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Pope Benedict XVI, meeting with Jews in an effort to mend fences after lifting the excommunication of a schismatic bishop who has publicly denied the scale of the Holocaust, said Thursday that the Catholic Church was “profoundly and irrevocably committed” to rejecting anti-Semitism.

He also condemned Holocaust denial as “intolerable and altogether unacceptable,” especially to clergy, and said it should “be clear to everyone” that the Holocaust was “a crime against God and humanity.”

Addressing a delegation of 60 from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella group, the pope also said for the first time that he planned to visit Israel. The Vatican has not yet officially announced the trip, but Vatican sources said it was expected to happen in May.

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They have raised more than £1,000 for a mobile dental clinic delivering frontline medical aid around the bombed out streets of Gaza. The clinic, which has been funded totally by the Church in Wales since 2000, is part of the work of family health centres in Gaza run by the Near East Council of Churches.

Members of the Young Muslim Community Organisation in Newport, South Wales, held a bazaar to raise money following an appeal by the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, for urgent aid for the work of the NECC clinics. The appeal was intensified after a direct missile attack destroyed one of the family centres in Shij’ia last month.

Ifthir Ahmed, chair of the YMCO, said the group was pleased to support a Welsh appeal for humanitarian aid.

He said, “We read about the destruction of the family clinic and the invaluable service the mobile dental clinic provides for so many people in the strip. We felt that some of the money we raised had to go to this very noble cause.

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Jewish groups are mending ties with the Vatican following a dispute over a Holocaust-denying bishop.

Representatives of the World Jewish Congress said Monday they were optimistic about Vatican-Jewish relations after meeting with top Vatican officials. In addition, a group of American Jewish leaders will meet with Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday to commend him for his “firm stand” to end the dispute over Bishop Richard Williamson.

And Israel’s chief rabbinate, the Jewish state’s highest religious authority, confirmed that it would resume theological talks next month that had been suspended in the wake of the Williamson affair.

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Israel’s chief Rabbinate is resuming dialogue with the Vatican after freezing ties over a Holocaust-denying bishop and the pope will meet major Jewish groups to try to make amends, a Church source said on Saturday.

The Rabbinate pulled out of a meeting with Vatican officials scheduled for March 1-4 in the midst of an international outcry over the Pope Benedict’s lifting of the excommunications of four traditionalist bishops, including Richard Williamson, who denies the full extent of the Holocaust.

The meeting will now take place in late February or mid-March and will most likely include a papal audience.

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Wednesday’s unsigned statement ”” a rare case of the Vatican’s diplomatic arm furthering earlier remarks by the pope himself ”” not only showed an age-old institution grappling with the 24-hour news cycle. It also seemed to be a clear indication that the Vatican was facing nothing less than an internal and external political crisis.

The day before, in a rare criticism from the head of a government, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called on the pope to clarify his position on the Holocaust, saying his previous remarks had not been sufficient.

Several prominent figures in the German Catholic Church joined in the criticism, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops also issued a statement condemning Bishop Williamson.

But the statement from the Vatican Secretariat of State seemed to go a long way toward calming the uproar. The chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, praised it, saying Wednesday that the Vatican had “clarified in an unequivocal way that every form of anti-Semitism should be condemned.”

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Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson must “unequivocally and publicly” change his views before he can be admitted to office in the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican said Wednesday.

Marking a major U-turn for under-pressure Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican statement also said that Williamson’s remarks were “not known” to the German pontiff “at the moment of lifting the excommunication” of the Englishman and three other renegade bishops last month.

Williamson is on record as denying that the Nazis used gas chambers to eliminate millions of Jews during World War II, saying only 200,000-300,000 Jews were killed in concentration camps.

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A leading member of Germany’s Jewish community said Monday that Benedict XVI, the German-born pope and leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics worldwide, was sowing divisions and abetting far-right groups by rehabilitating four ultra-conservative bishops, one of whom has denied the Holocaust.

Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in an interview that because of the pope’s nationality, Benedict had a special responsibility to avoid creating rifts between religious groups over the comments of the controversial bishop, Richard Williamson of Britain.

“The pope’s decision is particularly disturbing in that he is also a German pope,” Kramer said. “Yes, he made a statement pledging solidarity with the Jews. But, frankly, the statement was made nearly 13 days after Williamson’s interview. Why? The question is how the pope wants to proceed from here in relations with the Jewish community.”

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I am not a Catholic, and I agree with the church on only roughly half of its positions on such matters as war, abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment. So in some respects I have no standing here. But I have long valued the capacity of this 2,000-year-old institution to speak with moral authority on the social and political questions of our time ”” and to do so with a voice from the ancient of days. But this moral authority was badly eroded by the sexual abuse scandal of the past decade, and it is taking another hit by Benedict’s actions in this matter….

I would think we would be well beyond the point where Vatican spokesmen would need to inform us that the Holocaust did, in fact, happen.

Unfortunately, we are not.

My only hope is that this unfortunate incident cracks open Benedict’s study a bit to the world, and to the ecumenical spirit of John Paul II.

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But on the other hand, you know, this certainly is a serious crisis in Jewish-Catholic relations. And I think it will probably leave behind a residue of ambivalence and doubt about where exactly the pope comes down that will not be easy to erase.

Probably the next major test of what the future of the relationship will be will come in May when Benedict XVI is scheduled to visit Israel. I think, in some ways, this will be analogous to the trip he took in late November and early December 2006, which — to Turkey, which came three months after he had given a very controversial lecture in which he quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor to the effect that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, had brought things only evil and inhuman. That set off a firestorm of protest in the Islamic world.

Benedict’s trip to Turkey gave him an opportunity to exercise some damage control. And by all accounts, he did that quite artfully.

Clearly, assuming it goes ahead, his trip to Israel this May will be another chapter in his attempt to heal what is right now a very badly fractured relationship with another religious community, in this case, Judaism.

Caught this on today’s run from last night’s Lehrer News Hour. John Allen is one of the really good religion reporters out there. Read it all.

Israel’s chief rabbinate severed ties with the Vatican on Wednesday to protest a papal decision to reinstate a bishop who publicly denied 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

The Jewish state’s highest religious authority sent a letter to the Holy See expressing “sorrow and pain” at the papal decision. “It will be very difficult for the chief rabbinate of Israel to continue its dialogue with the Vatican as before,” the letter said. Chief rabbis of both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews were parties to the letter.

The rabbinate, which faxed a copy of the letter to The Associated Press, also canceled a meeting with the Vatican set for March. The rabbinate and the state of Israel have separate ties with the Vatican, and Wednesday’s move does not affect state relations.

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When the Archbishop of Canterbury and I led a mission of leaders of all the faiths in Britain to Auschwitz in November, we did so in the belief that the time has come to strengthen our sense of human solidarity. For the Holocaust was not just a Jewish tragedy but a human one. Nor did it happen in some remote corner of the globe. It happened in the heart of Europe, in the culture that had given the world Goethe and Beethoven, Kant and Hegel. And it can happen again. Not in the same place, not in the same way, but hate still stalks our world.

Nine years ago, when a National Holocaust Memorial Day was first mooted, Tony Blair asked me for my views. I said that I felt the Jewish community did not need such a day. We have our own day, Yom Hashoa, which is, for us, a grief observed. All of us, literally or metaphorically, lost family in the great destruction. All of us are, in some sense, survivors. To be a Jew is to carry the burden of memory without letting it rob us of hope and faith in the possibility of a world at peace.

But such a day might be valuable to all of us, Jew and non-Jew alike, were two conditions satisfied. The first was that, without diminishing the uniqueness of the Holocaust, we might use it to highlight other tragedies: Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and now Darfur. The second was that the day was taken into schools. For it is our children and grandchildren who must carry the fight for tolerance into the future, and we must make sure that they recognise the first steps along the path to Hell.

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Four different familes and faith traditions. Read it all.

A discussion on the sensitive topic has been tabled for the next meeting of the Church of England’s governing body amid fears that some clergy are ignoring their traditional missionary role.

Some members of the General Synod believe Christ ordered all Christians to recruit nonbelievers and followers of other faiths, and they want to see how many bishops and vicars agree with this view.

Among the speakers is likely to be the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, who earlier this year warned that Church leaders had “gone too far” in their sensitivity towards Muslims and were not doing enough to spread the word of God.

At the end of the debate at next February’s Synod meeting in London, bishops, clergy and lay members will vote on whether bishops should report to the Synod on “their understanding of the uniqueness of Christ in multi-faith Britain”, and give examples of how the gospel should be shared.

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Once diversity is received as a positive fact, it is necessary to make persons accept not only the existence of the other’s culture, but also the desire to be enriched with it. Addressing Catholics, my predecessor, the Servant of God Paul VI, enunciated his profound conviction in these terms: “The Church must enter into dialogue with the world in which she lives. The Church becomes word, the Church becomes message, the Church becomes conversation” (“Ecclesiam Suam,” No. 67). We live in what is usually called a “plural world,” characterized by the speed of communications, the mobility of peoples and their economic, political and cultural interdependence. Precisely in this, perhaps dramatic hour, though unfortunately many Europeans seem to forget Europe’s Christian roots, the latter are alive and should trace the path and nourish the hope of millions of citizens who share the same values.

Believers should always be willing to promote initiatives of intercultural and interreligious dialogue….[but] To be authentic, dialogue must avoid yielding to relativism and syncretism and be animated by sincere respect for others and by a generous spirit of reconciliation and fraternity.

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The real cause of the violence against Christians in Orissa, and now elsewhere in India, is the fear among extremist Hindu movements that many “untouchable” and “tribal” people will turn to the Christian faith because of the appalling treatment they receive from their caste-ridden communities and the love and care they are shown by Christian humanitarian organisations. Some of those who receive such care, but by no means all, become Christians of their own free will. Is this so unacceptable in secular and democratic India?

Scores of Christians have been murdered. Their homes, churches, presbyteries, convents and charitable institutions have been destroyed, allegedly in retaliation for the murder of a Hindu swami and some of his followers, probably by Maoist insurgents. During this time, it seems that the state authorities have not allowed Christians from other parts of India, let alone elsewhere, even to bring relief to fellow believers. The Federal Government also appears to have been paralysed and ineffective.

There is an outcry when a single Hindu is killed, and Christian leaders have strongly condemned any such incident. Christians in Orissa are, however, rapidly running out of cheeks to turn.

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