Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday November 17, 2006

Nun spurs change in church, dialogue in South Bay

by janet silver ghent
correspondent

Pursuing a doctorate in the years before Vatican II, Sister Rose Thering was appalled by the plethora of anti-Semitic statements in Catholic texts. Bringing them to light, she was warned by her bishop not to hang out the church’s “dirty laundry.”

“I listened to what he had to say and then I hung it,” says the feisty Dominican nun in Oren Jacoby’s 2004 documentary “Sister Rose’s Passion,” which aired Sunday, Nov. 12 during the San Jose Jewish Film Festival.

Fighting prejudice and anti-Semitism to her last breath — for much of the film, she carries an oxygen tank — the scholar and Holocaust educator spearheaded dialogue between Christians and Jews, traveling to Auschwitz, Israel and the former Soviet Union. Wearing a necklace with a cross inside a Star of David, she condemns in the documentary the theology and the spirit of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”

“Shall we blame Jews for the death of Jesus?” she asks in the film. “Jews never crucified anyone. Romans did.”

Sister Rose died in May at age 85. But Sunday at the Camera 12 Cinema in San Jose, where the 39-minute documentary was screened, the interfaith dialogue she inspired continued. Diane Fisher, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Silicon Valley, introduced a discussion on how Sister Rose’s work propelled the local interfaith community.

Much of the discussion focused on Nostra Aetate, the 1965 Vatican II document that exonerated Jews for the death of Jesus and eased Jewish-Catholic relations. Sister Rose’s research is cited as instrumental in getting the church to change its position.

Sister Eloise Rosenblatt, a faculty member at Silicon Valley Law School who has made many visits to Israel, said Nostra Aetate not only transformed the portrayal of Jews in Catholic texts. It also spurred the dialogue she pursues in Silicon Valley. “The purpose is not to convert the other, but to have a respectful conversation,” she said.

That conversation has been continuing locally for three or four decades, said Bart Charlow, executive director and president of the Silicon Valley Conference for Community and Justice, one of the sponsors of the event. Other sponsors included the JCRC, the Anti-Defamation League and the Catholic Diocese of San Jose.

Rosenblatt noted that Nostra Aetate, combined with a multitude of events, many initiated by the Jewish community, have “changed the way the Old Testament or Hebrew Scripture is preached in our churches. The attitude in Catholic scholarship has undergone a change, [with a] quiet groundswell commitment over the years to change at the parish level.”

While he wasn’t around during Vatican II, Assistant Rabbi Aaron Schonbrun of Congregation Beth David in Saratoga has taken part in the dialogue it inspired. While studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, he took two classes from Sister Mary Boys, a professor at the Union Theological Seminary who appears in “Sister Rose’s Passion.”

“Don’t take for granted that Christians and Jews get along and everything is fine,” because there’s still work to be done, said Schonbrun, who was ordained in 2004, of the film’s message.

“Growing up in a comfortable environment, I was not too concerned about anti-Semitism,” he added. But students at his congregation still “get anti-Semitic things said to them.”

Charlow asked how the strides made by Vatican II had affected other Christian groups.

Said Rosenblatt: “Nostra Aetate was a summons to the Christian community … a mandate for not just Catholics but for churches … to re-examine their tradition.”

In Boys’ class, Schonbrun said, that examination spurred “guilt and confusion” among some Christians. “As a faith tradition, Christians see something that may not [have caused] the Holocaust but that led to it. It started to get people thinking.”

Asked whether the spirit of dialogue has extended to the Muslim community, Charlow said that has been taking place for 30 years, and also includes Buddhists and other groups.

While “you can find things that exhort people to violence” in many scriptures, and “there are people who are fanatical,” generally, good behavior in one tradition is considered good in another — although “you may have to change your diet,” he joked.

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.