Pope Benedict will meet Jewish leaders in Washington and visit a synagogue in New York in acknowledgment of the Passover festival, which begins during his U.S. tour this month, U.S. bishops said on Thursday. The meeting and synagogue visit closely follow a disagreement between the Vatican and the Jewish community over the release of a new Good Friday prayer for the Latin Mass that appears to seek the conversion of Jews, a practice largely ended in Church reforms 40 years ago.
The pope, who visits Washington and New York April 15-20, will meet with 200 leaders of other religions on April 17 and will speak separately with Jewish leaders afterward, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement.
The meeting is "to present to them a message of his cordial greetings for the imminent feast of Passover," said Monsignor David Malloy, the general secretary of the United States Conference of Bishops.
The pontiff, on his first trip to the United States since being elected leader of the Roman Catholic Church in 2005, will visit Park East Synagogue in New York City. Its rabbi, Arthur Schneier, is a Holocaust survivor who lived under Nazi occupation in Budapest during World War Two.
Pope Benedict, who turns 81 on April 16, is the first German elected head of the Catholic Church since World War Two. Although his family opposed Hitler's regime, he was forced to join the Hitler Youth and later the German army before deserting at the end of the war.
'GOOD WILL'
The visit, on April 18, would be only the second time Pope Benedict has visited a synagogue and only the third time a modern pope has entered a Jewish place of worship.
"By this personal and informal visit, which is not part of his official program, His Holiness wishes to express his good will toward the local Jewish community as they prepare for Passover," Malloy said.
Pope Benedict visited a synagogue in Cologne, Germany, in 2005 to pay tribute to Jews from the city who died during the Holocaust. His predecessor, Pope John Paul, visited a synagogue in Rome in 1986.
The Passover festival, which begins April 19 this year, commemorates the Jews' escape from slavery from the pharaoh in ancient Egypt.
The pope's synagogue visit comes just two months after the Vatican surprised Jews by approving a revised version of a Good Friday Mass in Latin that included a line asking God to help Jews "acknowledge Jesus Christ as the savior."
Most churches celebrate Mass in the local language, so the Latin Good Friday prayer was heard by very few congregations worldwide. But Jewish groups expressed disappointment over the wording, viewing it as a step backward after decades of improvement in Jewish-Catholic relations.
Reforms in the 1960s led to the Church dropping references to conversion of Jews in Good Friday prayers and were seen by many Jews and Catholics as affirming that God had a covenant with the Jewish people.
Pope Benedict touched off the controversy last year when he agreed to make the old-style Latin Mass more available for traditionalists along with a missal, or prayer book, that had been phased out in reforms of the 1960s.
The pope had agreed not to use the traditional Latin prayer because of its references to Jews' "blindness" over Christ and other language considered offensive.
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