Good Friday prayer for the Jews

The Good Friday prayer for the Jews is an annual prayer in some Christian liturgies. It is one of several petitions, known in the Catholic Church as the Solemn Intercessions and in the Episcopal Church (United States) as the Solemn Collects, that are made in the Good Friday service for various classes and stations of peoples: for the Church; for the pope; for bishops, priests and deacons; for the faithful; for catechumens; for other Christians; for the Jews; for others who do not believe in Christ; for those who do not believe in God; for those in public office; and for those in special need. These prayers are ancient, predating the eighth century at least, as they are found in the Gelasian Sacramentary.
The original Christians first addressed their missionary sermons to Jews from the Judea region and called on them to repent, to enable them to escape from the expected final judgment (Acts 2:38). The New Testament (NT) does not testify to a special prayer for them.
After the separation of Judaism and Christianity around AD 100, some church fathers such as Justin, occasionally counted Jews among the enemies for whom persecuted Christians should pray according to Jesus' commandment of love of enmity (Matthew 5:45) and his own request for forgiveness on the cross (Luke 23:34). This followed the example of Jeremiah, who had called on the Jews exiled in Babylon to pray for the good of the city. (Jeremiah 29:7)
Since the rise of the church to the Roman state religion from AD 380, the Christian mission among Jews had very little success. Only a few theologians such as Hieronymus and Leo the Great admonished Christians around AD 400 to include the Jews as unbelievers in their prayers, since they were the root of the Church.
Since about AD 500, a special Jewish prayer in the daily Mass has been known. However, this was only included in some measuring orders in Spain since AD 586. The Roman, Milan and Gallican Liturgies of the 6th century, prayed for Jews, heretics and pagans only on Good Friday. The Sacramentarium Gregorianum around the late 6th century, contained such Good Friday prayers. They were according to the Ambrosian Rite in the 8th century, formulated equally for all three groups and demanded that all of them include a genuflection.
Around 800, for the first time in the Salzburg chapters, then in the church mass books among the Carolingians, the interceding for the Jews, the usual invitation to the prayers, otherwise usual in all prayers, was missing. Amalarius, justified this around 820 as follows:
With this, he wrote the sneering knee fall of Roman soldiers who scourged and tortured Jesus before his crucifixion, mentioned in Matthew 27:29 and Mark 15:19. This justification prevailed throughout the Church, as such, the genuflection in the prayer for the Jews was omitted.
A handwritten marginal note on the sacramentarium of Saint-Vast (10th century), translated in 1924 justified the elimination of the genuflection. It was as follows:
According to this, the hatred of Jews, forced the clergy to omit the genuflection. Many commentators followed this interpretation, because it relieved the church of its responsibility for anti-Judaism. Jules Isaac, on the other hand, emphasized in 1956 that "noxa" in medieval Latin never meant anger or hatred, but instead "sin". The phrase can therefore only be translated as "...because of the sin of the people and because of their anger", so it refers to Jews, and not Christians.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Good Friday and Easter week generally was a time of dread for Jews who often came under attack. The extent to which the language used in the Good Friday prayers contributed to this is a matter of dispute.
The form used between 1570 and 1955 read as follows:
Regarding the omission of the genuflection from this prayer, Liturgist Dom Prosper Guéranger, O.S.B., wrote:
The Russian-Jewish historian Lurie Solomon, on the other hand, wrote in his 1922 book on antisemitism in antiquity that this explanation was arbitrary and ad hoc invented since according to the gospels, it was the Roman soldiers, not the Jews, who mocked Christ. Lurie quotes Kane who wrote that "all authors tried to justify the practice that had existed before them, not to introduce the new one. Apparently this practice (of not kneeling) had been established as a result of the populist antisemitism." The French historian Pierre Pierrard recalled being struck in his youth by this failure to kneel as a lesson in antisemitism, as the Jews were consigned to a "moral ghetto".
In February 1926, Franziska van Leer, a Dutch Jew convert to Catholicism, had unsuccessfully asked Cardinal Wilhelmus Marinus van Rossum, to work for a change to the Good Friday prayer. On their initiative, the Clerical Association of Friends of Israel, a Catholic cleric organization, was founded to foster positive attitudes toward Jews and to pray for their conversion to Christianity. Based on their belief that Christ is "the first-born, the truth and the head of Israel" and the Jews as the chosen people, they campaigned for reconciliation between Catholicism and Judaism to facilitate the Jewish mission. They, therefore rejected the traditional anti-Judaistic conspiracies of the murder of God, ritual murders and the desecration of hosts and wanted to eliminate anti-Jewish elements in the Catholic liturgy.
In January 1928, the chairman of Benedikt Gariador submitted a document to Pope Pius XI, which requested for the removal or replacement of the expressions perfidis/perfidia and for the reinstatement of genuflecting in the prayer for the Jews. The document argued as follows:
Pope Pius XI had been reportedly in favour of the changes and asked the Sacred Congregation of Rites to review the matter. They commissioned Benedictine abbot Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, a specialist in the liturgy, to assess these proposals. He spoke out unreservedly for its implementation and described the omission of genuflecting, as biblically unjustifiable. The congregation recommended the acceptance of the requested changes and submitted its opinion to the Holy Office for review. They first consulted Dominican friar, Marco Sales, considered close to Pius XI. He initially accepted, that from the point of view of faith and doctrine, there was nothing to object to the proposed liturgical reforms. However, in view of the Catholic tradition, they were considered inappropriate and not useful and argued that:
Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, who had been appointed secretary of the Holy Office as a representative of anti-modernism, was himself a member of the Friends of Israel, At a meeting in February 1928, he was convinced, that the association, publicly discussed and wanted to reform the Good Friday prayer and promote Zionism. He immediately launched an investigation into Friends of Israel to have it banned. To shorten the procedure, he himself filed the complaint, which was otherwise only admissible from the outside, and demanded a papal decree to circumvent the otherwise required expert opinion and its double examination by consultants and cardinals. With the help of Pius XI, de Val sought to block their goals at reform. He wrote on 7 March 1928:
Pope Pius XI reluctantly accepted these views and the Holy Office dissolved the association on 25 March 1928.
After World War II, Eugenio Zolli, the former Chief Rabbi of Rome and a convert to Roman Catholicism, asked Pope Pius XII to excise the adjective perfidis from the prayer for the Jews. Professor Jules Isaac, a French scholar of Catholic-Jewish relations, did so as well in an audience with Pius in 1949. Pius responded with a public declaration that the Latin word perfidus means 'unbelieving', not 'perfidious' or 'treacherous'. Pope John XXIII later made that change official.
As part of his major revision of the Holy Week liturgy in 1955, Pope Pius XII instituted kneeling for this petition as at the other petitions of the litany, so that the prayer read:
Under Pope John XXIII, new approaches to the prayer for the Jews had emerged. As papal nuncio to Hungary from 1940 to 1944, Roncalli helped tens of thousands of Hungarian, Slovak and Bulgarian Jews persecuted by the Nazis to escape.
Without previously indicating any intention to reform, on 21 March 1959, John XXIII ordered that the word faithless (Latin: perfidis) be removed from the prayer for the conversion of the Jews, which was formalized on 5 July 1959, to take effect across the Church, the following year. This word had caused much trouble because of misconceptions that the Latin perfidis was equivalent to perfidious, giving birth to the view that the prayer accused the Jews of treachery (perfidy), though the Latin word is more correctly translated as 'faithless' or 'unbelieving'. Accordingly, the prayer was revised to read:
John XXIII demonstrated his commitment to the change during the Good Friday service in St. Peter's Basilica on Good Friday of 1963. When the canon reciting the eight prayers included the word perfidis when chanting the prayer for the Jews, the seventh prayer, the Pope signaled for the liturgy to stop and then had the sequence of prayers repeated from the beginning with the word omitted.
After the Second Vatican Council, the prayer was revised twice: firstly on 7 March 1965. Because of the possibility of a misinterpretation similar to that of the word perfidis, the reference to the veil on the hearts of the Jews, which was based on 2 Corinthians 3:14, was removed. The 1965 prayer is as follows:
This first modification was very significant, as for the first time, God's covenant with Abraham, the ancestor of all Jews, was recognized for the blessing of all peoples (Genesis 12:3), as a valid basis for Israel's hope of salvation. Thus, the theology of "hard supersessionism" was abandoned and an alternative to it was emphasized. The first sentence is based on the Aaronite Blessing, one of the oldest Jewish prayers that had already been adopted by early Christianity.
The prayer was revised again for the 1970 edition of the Roman Missal, following the approval of the declaration Nostra aetate in October 1965. The 1973 ICEL English translation of the revised prayer, which was to be retained in the rejected 1998 version, is as follows:
On 7 July 2007, the Vatican released Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio entitled, Summorum Pontificum which permitted more widespread celebration of Mass according to the "Missal promulgated by Pope John XXIII in 1962". The universal permission given to priests by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 to use the 1962 Roman Missal both privately and, under certain conditions, with a congregation was followed by protests from Jewish groups and some Catholic leaders over what they perceived as a return to a supersessionist theology that they saw expressed in the 1960 prayer. In response to these protests, on 5 February 2008, Pope Benedict XVI issued an amended Good Friday prayer for the 1962 Missal. On 6 February 2008, the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, published a note of the Secretariat of State announcing that Pope Benedict XVI had amended the Good Friday prayer for the Jews contained in the 1962 Roman Missal, and decreeing that the amended text "be used, beginning from the current year, in all celebrations of the Liturgy of Good Friday according to the aforementioned Missale Romanum".
The new prayer reads as follows:
Even the new formulation met with reservations from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League. They considered the removal of blindness and immersion in darkness with respect to the Jews an improvement over the original language in the Tridentine Mass, but saw no reason why the prayer in the rite as revised by Paul VI was not used instead.
Jewish reactions to Benedict's authorization underlined their concern that the traditional formulation, which Jews felt offensive, would be more broadly used.
In the form in which they appear in the 1962 Missal, the set of prayers in which that of the Jews is included are for: the Holy Church, the Supreme Pontiff; all orders and grades of the faithful (clergy and laity); public officials (added in 1955, replacing an older prayer for the Holy Roman Emperor, not used since the abdication of Francis II in 1806 but still printed in the Roman Missal); catechumens; the needs of the faithful; heretics and schismatics; the conversion of the Jews (without the word perfidis); the conversion of pagans.
In later editions of the Missal, the prayers are for: the Church; the Pope, the clergy and laity of the Church; those preparing for baptism; the unity of Christians, the Jewish people; those who do not believe in Christ; those who do not believe in God; all in public office; those in special need.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) complained about the document because the 1962 text for Good Friday includes the request asking God to "lift the veil" from Jewish hearts and to show mercy "to the Jews also." Abraham Foxman, the then director of the ADL responded to the liberalization of the Tridentine Mass by saying
Monsignor Dennis Mikulanis, vicar for inter-religious and ecumenical affairs for the Roman Catholic diocese of San Diego, responded to the ADL saying that "the Church has not restored antisemitic language." Mikulanis said that the ADL jumped the gun by issuing a statement before the official document had been released and not understanding it. Mikulanis stated that the previous "antisemitic wording from the liturgy" had already been removed from this missal. A letter from the Vatican stated, "Several media reports erroneously contend that the letter could in effect reinstate a prayer offensive to Jews from the Good Friday liturgy of the Tridentine Mass, which dates back to 1570." The Latin Mass before 1959 contained a reference to "the Jews, who do not have the Faith", which was deleted in 1959 and does not appear in the missal being permitted by Summorum Pontificum.
After having some time to study Summorum Pontificum and its implications for the Jewish point of view, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the ADL, reiterated its previously-stated position. Foxman wrote, "The wider use of the Latin Mass will make it more difficult to implement the doctrines of Vatican II and Pope John Paul II, and could even set in motion retrograde forces within the church on the subject of the Jews, none of which are in the interest of either the church or the Jewish people." He goes on to reiterate that the problem lies with a prayer that calls for the conversion of the Jews that "was removed by Paul VI in 1970".
At the same time, Foxman emphasized that "the Vatican is not an enemy of the Jewish people, nor is Pope Benedict XVI." Rather, he wrote, "the current controversy speaks to the need for direct and honest communication based on the friendly relations that have evolved. The church must be true to itself and its teachings, and it must understand that reintroducing this prayer – it was removed by Paul VI in 1970 and replaced with a positive one recognizing the Jews' eternal covenant with God – will play into the hands of those who are against better relations between Jews and Catholics."
Although the 1962 version does not include the phrase deemed most offensive (Orémus et pro pérfidis Judǽis), it is still criticized by some as a prayer that explicitly asks for the conversion of Jews to the Catholic faith of Christ.
Cardinal Avery Dulles responded that the church has a "God-given responsibility to proclaim Christ to all the world. Peter on Pentecost Sunday declared that the whole house of Israel should know for certain that Jesus is Lord and Messiah and that every one of his hearers should be baptized in Jesus' name (Acts 2:38). Paul spent much of his ministry proclaiming the gospel to Jews throughout the diaspora. Distressed by their incredulity, he was prepared to wish himself accursed for the sake of their conversion (Rom 9:3)."
The tradition of praying for various groups and purposes dates back to the Early Church (1 Timothy 2:1–5). Roman Catholics believe that on Good Friday in particular, they must acknowledge their common fallen nature, and that Jesus died for all (1 John 2:2). Catholics have long prayed for many classes of people, both inside and outside the church: for the church as a whole, for the Pope, for the hierarchy and the people (regular and lay), for the Emperor, for catechumens, for various needs, for heretics, for achismatics, for the Jews, and for pagans, wishing that all be called to conversion in Christ.
Given that, according to the rubrics of both the 1962 and the 1970 Missals, there can be only one celebration of the Good Friday liturgy in each church, the ordinary form of the Roman Rite (i.e. the post-1970 form, which omits the images of the veil and of blindness) is the one to be used almost everywhere.
Some have argued that the Good Friday prayers are liturgically similar to the Jewish prayers Birkat haMinim or the Aleinu or the Hagaddah, although this is controversial.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC), on the other hand, expressed "its appreciation to Pope Benedict XVI for his confirmation that the positive changes of Vatican II will apply to his recent decision regarding the Latin Mass, which has been reinstated by the Church". Rabbi David Rosen, the AJC's international director of Interreligious Affairs stated: "We acknowledge that the Church's liturgy is an internal Catholic matter and this motu proprio from Pope Benedict XVI is based on the permission given by John Paul II in 1988 and thus, on principle, is nothing new". The statement by the committee, after acknowledging the said quote from its president, affirmed: "However we are naturally concerned about how wider use of this Tridentine liturgy may impact upon how Jews are perceived and treated. Pope Benedict XVI, in a decree issued on Saturday, authorized wider use of the traditional Latin Mass, which in some liturgy contains language offensive to Jews. We appreciate that the motu proprio actually limits the use of the Latin Mass in the days prior to Easter, which addresses the reference in the Good Friday liturgy concerning the Jews [...] However, it is still not clear that this qualification applies to all situations and we have called on the Vatican to contradict the negative implications that some in the Jewish community and beyond have drawn concerning the motu proprio."
Among traditionalist Catholics, there were mixed reactions to the revised prayer for the Jews issued by Benedict XVI. The Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, defended the prayer that called for the conversion of Jews, insisting that both versions of the Good Friday prayer in the traditional form are "based on a solid biblical, more precisely: on a Pauline foundation" The Society of Saint Pius X, a canonically irregular group whose bishops excommunications were lifted the following year in 2009, described the revised prayer as a "superfluous and regrettable concession to representatives of Judaism."
In the May/June 2007 issue of its newsletter, the Committee on the Liturgy of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) published an unofficial English translation of Summorum Pontificum and its cover letter, together with commentary in the form of footnotes and 20 questions and answers. Answer 14 addresses the question of anti-Semitism:
Throughout his papacy, John Paul II worked to reconcile the Church with the Jewish people and to strengthen new bonds of friendship. In 1988, Pope John Paul II gave permission for the Mass to be celebrated according to the Missale Romanum of 1962 only as a pastoral provision to assist Catholics who remained attached to the previous rites, thereby hoping to develop closer bonds with the family of the Church.
In 2007 Pope Benedict XVI extended such permission for wider pastoral application, but he remained committed to "the need to overcome past prejudices, misunderstandings, indifference and the language of contempt and hostility [and to continue] the Jewish-Christian dialogue…to enrich and deepen the bonds of friendship which have developed".
As part of the ICEL English translation of the third edition of the Roman Missal, the 1970 prayer was retranslated as follows:
Since 2011, this version of the prayer is the only English version authorized for use in the ordinary form of the Roman Rite.
In 2007, a group of twelve Eastern Orthodox priests representing five different national churches, some in open defiance of directives from their church leadership, issued a ten-page declaration calling for the removal all liturgical passages they considered anti-Semitic.
The third of the Solemn Collects in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England is as follows:
Canon XIV of the Anglican Church of Canada provides for the deletion of this collect in the Canadian prayerbook.
Within the US-based Episcopal Church, the 1928 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, replaced "all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics", with "all who know thee not as thou art revealed in the Gospel of thy Son."
The 1979 edition, reflected the liturgical reform movement of the 20th century, and included, among other things, a clear revision of the entire Good Friday liturgy. The actual Collect prayer was greatly shortened, but after the sermon, a more extensive prayer series (The Solemn Collects) was introduced. As in 1928, these ask for all those who have not yet recognized Christ. The prayer is as follows: