The Rt. Rev. Alexei Smith, ecumenical and interreligious officer of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, told JNS that his parish held a Bible study for children in the neighborhood, and at one point, the Jews were mentioned. A 6-year-old child raised his hand and said, “Now the Jews, Father, those are the ones that killed Jesus, right?”
Even though Smith believes that the Jews killed Jesus blood libel is on a “downward trend,” he told JNS that the instance in the Bible study shows that “someone is still perpetuating that, and that’s the challenge that we have to counter that each and every time we hear that.”
Smith was one of the speakers at an American Jewish Committee Los Angeles event on Nov. 3, held in conjunction with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Jewish Federation Los Angeles, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”), the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions” was promulgated by the Second Vatican Council on Oct. 28, 1965.
“The people there were enthusiastic about Jews and Catholics being together and celebrating 60 years, not just of the document Nostra Aetate but of the friendship that that document has engendered,” Smith told JNS.
He said the document was “one of the 16 major documents coming out of our Second Vatican Council” after Pope John XXIII wanted to address “the Jewish question” of “what was Catholic culpability in the Holocaust, leading up to the Holocaust.”
“That’s exactly what Nostra Aetate does: It totally reverses the Catholic approach to Judaism and Catholic thinking, and talks about not blaming every Jew for the death of Christ, condemns antisemitism, things like this,” he said.
‘Interaction between priests and rabbis’
Smith, who speaks at many Jewish houses of worship, recounted to JNS that he often has had congregants tell him that growing up, they would walk by a Catholic school wearing a kippah and hear murmurs of someone say, “There goes a Christ killer.”
“That type of reaction doesn’t happen today,” according to Smith.
In Los Angeles, he noted, the Catholic community has a “multifaceted relationship with the Jewish community.”
“We have a monthly priest-rabbi dialogue, where priests and rabbis get together and talk about any number of issues,” he said. “We attempted to write a book together at one time. Now, we’re doing little videos which we put up online for people to see the interaction.”
Smith added that two groups of Catholic and Jewish women also meet regularly and even hold conferences, discussing issues like religion and family, and through that time together forged “enduring friendships.”
AJC Los Angeles, along with the Martin Gang Institute for Intergroup Relations at Loyola Marymount University, holds an InterSem program in which “Catholic seminarians, Jewish seminarians, mainstream Protestant seminarians and today now even Muslim seminarians come together for like a 24-hour period to learn about each other from each other,” Smith said.
Smith said that the Catholic and Jewish communities are like “brothers and sisters, most of the time, we get along, but sometimes we still have hiccups in our relationship.”
“I can’t tell you that every Catholic automatically embraces everything that Nostra Aetate says,” he said. “This is only in effect for 60 years now, so it’s taking some time to filter down to the man and woman in the pew, and that’s our great challenge—to get people on board with the thinking of the document.”
There was a “great fear in the Jewish community” when, years ago, in 2004, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” came out, that the film would “spark a lot of antisemitism” here, acknowledges Smith. To help nip that in the bud, the archdiocese arranged for a private screening of the film with both a Jewish and a Catholic critic, when the two wrote their reviews of the movie and had them published side by side in a local Catholic newspaper, Smith said.
“It helped to alleviate the fears of many in the Jewish community that it would really spark a lot of antisemitism—and it did not,” he said.
When the 6-year-old said during Bible study that the Jews killed Jesus, Smith told the child that it’s false and that “the crucifixion was a Roman way of killing people, not a Jewish way of killing people.” He continued, saying that “our scriptures tell us that certain Jewish leaders pressed for the death of Jesus, but not every Jew, so we can’t hold every Jew responsible for that.”
In Smith’s view, “Nostra Aetate called us to rediscover the Jewish roots of Christianity, and we share so much together.”
“We have different versions of what the Messiah would be, certainly, but many of the other things we share—such as the belief in one God, living a meritorious life, the Jewish concept of healing the world, tikkun olam—we would say that would be doing good works,” he said.
Smith added that the teachings of the prophets “are as applicable now as they were then, they’re applicable to both Jews and Christians,” and that Jesus was referred to as a rabbi, meaning “teacher” in Hebrew.
When JNS asked about the most important takeaway regarding the Catholic-Jewish relationship that readers should know, Smith replied that “we can show the world that people can overcome animosities and hatreds and disrespect and disregard of others when those hatreds and disregards have been fostered by religion.”
Then, he got right to the point, stating that “we can become an example for the world.”
