Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Shalom in the Catholic Home: Shmuley Urges Pope To Have Shabbat Dinners

If doling out advice — from parenting to relationships to spirituality — to American Jews and Gentiles wasn’t enough, celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach has gone for the big score: the Bishop of Rome, the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope.

By consulting with Rabbi Shmuley, the Pope joins the ranks of Michael Jackson and Oprah, both of whom have looked to the host of TLC’s “Shalom in the Home” for guidance. In a meeting last week, Rabbi Shmuley encouraged Pope Benedict XVI, who’s currently embroiled in yet another round of hullabaloo surrounding the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, to hop on board with his “Turn Friday Night Into Family Night” initiative.

By putting Friday focus on the family, “America’s Rabbi” contends the Catholic Church can clean up its tanking image and shift its opponents’ criticism away from same-sex marriage and abortion. In promoting a Shabbat-style dinner, Rabbi Shmuley educated His Holiness on his concept of the “triple two.” The dinner can be accomplished by inviting two guests, discussing two different subjects and giving one’s children undivided attention for two hours.

Call it Shalom in the Catholic Home.

Read Rabbi Shmuley’s account in its entirety here.

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.