Vatican marks historic end to official anti-Semitism

The Catholic Church today marked the 50th anniversary of a landmark declaration by which it ended centuries of officially condoned anti-Semitism and urged bridge-building with all other faiths.
The document "Nostra Aetate" (Latin for "In Our Time") most significantly repudiated the charge that all Jews should be held responsible for the death of Jesus.
Adopted on October 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI at the end of the ground-breaking Second Vatican Council, the declaration was credited with revolutionising Catholic relations with Judaism.
"The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God," the document said, insisting that Christians should decry "hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism directed against Jews at any time and by anyone".

Pope Francis led a special audience to mark the anniversary, stressing the document's significance for all interfaith relations.
"Mutual respect is a condition of interreligious dialogue and at the same time its goal: respecting another's right to life, to physical integrity, to fundamental freedoms -- freedom of conscience, of thought, of expression and religion," Francis said.

"The world looks to us believers, it urges us to collaborate with each other" on finding "effective answers to issues" such as "peace, hunger, the poverty which afflicts millions of people (and) the environmental crisis".
Critics said "Nostra Aetate" did not go far enough to apologise for Christian persecution of Jews as so-called "Christ slayers" -- a label that had fuelled anti-Semitism in Europe.

But experts say it did a great deal to expunge the "blood curse", so-called because of a passage in the bible in which Jews are portrayed despairing that Jesus's "blood is on us and on our children".