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Expert available for comment on “Latin mass”: implications for christian-jewish relations
By Sacred Heart University
Jul 27, 2007 - 4:50:34 AM

Rabbi Eugene Korn, Ph.D., an expert in Christian-Jewish relations and executive director of Sacred Heart University ’s Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding (CCJU), is available to comment on Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio (a personal papal executive order) authorizing wider use of the 1962 Roman Missal and its implications on Christian-Jewish relations

The Good Friday liturgy in the 1962 Roman rite contains a call for the conversion of Jews who are considered ‘blind’ and for God to lift the ‘veil from their hearts’ so that they might know Jesus Christ. In the 1970 reform of the liturgy inspired by the Second Vatican Council these prayers were modified to affirm the biblical covenant between God and the Jewish people. According to Rabbi Korn, “the pejorative references and the call to conversion in the 1962 rite have caused deep pain for the Jewish people who remain committed to their ancestral faith and to their biblical covenant with the One Creator of Heaven and Earth.”

“Many Jews and Christians understand the authorized use of the Good Friday liturgy in the 1962 rite to be a reversion to the preconciliar understanding of the relationship of the Church to Judaism. The theology of these prayers appears inconsistent with the Church’s binding commitments undertaken in the Second Vatican Council declaration, Nostra Aetate (1965), to deplore anti-Semitism and eschew negative depictions of Jews,” Rabbi Korn asserted.

Rabbi Korn graduated from Yeshiva University , where he studied math, philosophy and Talmud, and was ordained by the Israeli rabbinate. He received a Ph.D. in moral philosophy from Columbia University and worked for years in Jerusalem at the Shalom Hartman Institute, considered to be the foremost Jewish think-tank in the world.

Prior to joining CCJU, he was national director of Interfaith Affairs at the Anti-Defamation League and adjunct professor of Jewish Thought at Seton Hall University .

Founded at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Sacred Heart University has always expressed a deep respect for other religious and cultural traditions, and the CCJU has become a world leader in dialogue and interreligious cooperation.

To speak with Rabbi Eugene Korn, please contact Funda Alp at 203-396-8241 or alpf@sacredheart.edu.

About Sacred Heart University:

Sacred Heart University , the second-largest Catholic university in New England, offers more than 40 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs on its main campus in Fairfield , Connecticut , and satellites in Connecticut , Luxembourg and Ireland . Approximately 5,800 students attend the University’s four colleges: Arts & Sciences; Education & Health Professions; University College ; and the AACSB-accredited John F. (Jack) Welch College of Business. The Princeton Review includes SHU in its “Best 366 Colleges: 2008,” U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges 2007” ranks SHU in the top tier of Master’s Universities in the Northeast, and Intel rates it #11 among the nation’s most “unwired” campuses. SHU fields 32 division I athletic teams, and has an award-winning program of community service.

www.sacredheart.edu

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