Pope To Jews: ‘A Christian Cannot Be An Anti-Semite – Because We Share Roots’
Pope Francis Image by Getty
(JTA) — Pope Francis lamented anti-Semitic attacks and spread a message to ban the anti-Semitism during an audience with Jewish emissaries.
The Pope on Monday received for first time delegates of the World Congress of Mountain Jews at the Vatican.
Two weeks after the attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11 worshippers Francis said in a statement to the delegation: “Sadly, anti-Semitic attitudes are also present in our own times,” during his meeting with the emissaries of the Mountain Jews, the descendants of Jews who left ancient Persia and settled in the Caucasus.
“A Christian cannot be an anti-Semite; we share the same roots. It would be a contradiction of faith and life. Rather, we are called to commit ourselves to ensure anti-Semitism is banned from the human community,” he said.
The day after the Pittsburgh attack the head of the Catholic Church said in his weekly prayers that “all of us are wounded by this inhuman act of violence.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
