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, in the Evangelical-Lutheran Churches as the Bidding Prayers, and in the Episcopal Church 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.
Western Christianity Catholic Church Background 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 does not testify to a special prayer for them.
Some early 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 Christianity as the Roman state religion from AD 380, the Christian mission among Jews had limited success. Around AD 400, writers such as Jerome and Leo the Great referred to the practice of including Jews in Christian prayers as unbelievers, drawing on Pauline theology that presents them as the root of the Church (Romans 11:18).Peter Browe: Die Judenmission im Mittelalter und die Päpste. Universita Gregoriana Editrice, Rom 1973, ISBN 88-7652-432-0, S. 134 f. ().
Since about AD 500, a special Jewish prayer in the daily Mass has been known.Hubert Wolf: Perfide Juden? In: Papst und Teufel. Die Archive des Vatikan und das Dritte Reich. 2. Auflage. München 2009, S. 108. 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. According to the Ambrosian Rite in the 8th century, they were 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:Amalarius von Metz: De ecclesiasticis officiis 1, 13. In: Jean Michel Hanssens: Amalarii episcopi liturgica omnia. drei Bände, Rom 1948–1950. Zitat und Übersetzung nach Jules Isaac: Genesis des Antisemitismus, Wien 1969, S. 222f.
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:
Throughout the Middle Ages, Good Friday and Easter week generally was a time of dread for Jews who often came under attack.Roth p. 132 The extent to which the language used in the Good Friday prayers contributed to this is a matter of dispute.Roth p. 168
Tridentine version
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."See p.7 in Solomon Lurie, Antisemitism v Drevnem Mire, in Russian, published by "Byloe", Petrograd, 1922. 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".
First attempt at reform 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, abbott Benedetto Gariador submitted a document to Pope Pius XI, which requested the removal or replacement of the expressions perfidis/perfidia and the reinstatement of genuflecting in the prayer for the Jews. The document argued as follows:Ralf Tooten: Augen der Weisheit. Das spirituelle Gesicht der Religionen. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 2002, ISBN 3-451-27011-0, S. 74.
Historically, Christians have prayed very early for the conversion of the Jews to Christ, not for their conversion to Christianity. The expression "perfidis" was originally only related to concrete violations of the law of certain Jews, only later understood as "complete corruption" and was thus reinterpreted as the unchangeable character of all Jews. The alleged mocking kneeling before Jesus by Jews is not in the New Testament and is rather a fiction added later. The prayer is now being abused as an argument for antisemitism, which the Catholic Church itself even propagates in its services. As such "perfidiam Judaicam" should be replaced by "plebem Judaicam" (the "Jewish people"), as stated in a manuscript of the Manuale Ambrosianum from the 11th century.
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.Hubert Wolf: Papst und Teufel. München 2009, S. 107. 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 no reason to object to the proposed liturgical reforms. However, in view of the Catholic tradition, they were considered inappropriate and not useful and argued that:Hubert Wolf: Papst und Teufel. München 2009, S. 112 – 115
All the criticized parts of the Jewish prayer, including the omission of the kneeling and the 'Amen', had already appeared in the ancient Church. As "venerable holy liturgy, dating back to antiquity", they escape any reformability. If such interference in this tradition were to be allowed to a private association, one would not come to an end and could just as well allow the removal of offensive passages in the apostolic credo, the improvers and the curse psalms from the liturgy. These contained much harsher formulations for Jews. "Perfidis" always means a breach of words and contracts: This is exactly what God himself accuses the Jews in the Bible. Sales referred to Deuteronomy 20:27, 31:16, Psalm 78:57, 2 Corinthians 17:15 and Acts 7:5. Just as God had only made a covenant with the Jewish people, only those who had broken this covenant and continued it constantly: therefore the expression "perfidis" is appropriate for them, and not for the pagans. No one could accuse Pope Pius V, the author of the Missale Romanum, of antisemitism, since he had always stood up for the Jews. According to Matthew 27:25, the Jews themselves assumed responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ.
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.
Changes by Pius XII 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 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 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:
Changes by John XXIII
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 () 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.Vorgrimler, H., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II: Volume III, New York, 1968, 5. This word had caused much trouble because of misconceptions that the Latin 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 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."The Catholic Church and the Holocaust: 1930–1965", Michael Phayer, p. 209, Indiana University Press, 2000,
Changes by Paul VI