Pope Francis crossed the Tiber River to visit Rome’s Great Synagogue Sunday. His 1.5-mile journey to the towering Tempio Maggiore shows that what was once unthinkable is now the norm. “Our meeting,” Rome Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni said, “aims to convey a very topical, important and urgent message — that belonging to a faith,…
Pope Francis will make his first pontifical visit to Rome’s Great Synagogue next year, the Vatican and the city’s Jewish community said in statements on Tuesday. Francis, who had a good relationship with the Jewish community in his native Argentina, will go to the synagogue on the bank of the Tiber River on Jan. 17…
Pope Francis said that attacks both on Jews and the state of Israel are anti-Semitic. “To attack Jews is anti-Semitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also anti-Semitism,” the pope said in a private meeting at the Vatican with Jewish leaders on Wednesday, according to a statement from the World Jewish…
Jewish leaders met with Pope Francis in Rome on the 50th anniversary of the Nostra Aetate, the declaration promulgated by Pope Paul VI that led to improved relations between Jews and Catholics. “Yes to the rediscovery of the Jewish roots of Christianity. No to anti-Semitism,” the pope said Wednesday morning during the public audience on…
Sitting in synagogue on Yom Kippur, three days before Pope Francis’s arrival in Philadelphia, I couldn’t help but think about the scene unfolding outside my house. Already, metal crowd-control fences were lining my property right across the street from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, where the pope would be sleeping. My little suburban block was in…
Media check-in time to see Pope Francis play Madison Square Garden was 11 a.m. on September 25, seven and a half hours before His Holiness was scheduled to process beneath the Jumbotron. Seven and a half hours is, in my opinion, too long to wait for anyone, even the Vicar of Jesus Christ, but the…
Nearly 50 years after the Vatican officially proclaimed Jews free of guilt in the killing of Jesus, Pope Francis made a surprise change to his schedule on the final day of his U.S. tour to convey his own message of respect for the Jewish people. In an unannounced event, the pontiff stopped Sunday to bless…
In a speech at the United Nations, Pope Francis praised the Iran nuclear deal and decried the persecution of minorities in the Middle East. “The recent agreement reached on the nuclear question in a sensitive region of Asia and the Middle East is proof of the potential of political good will and of law, exercised…
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