VATICAN – Engaging in any form of anti-Semitism is a direct contradiction with the Christian faith, Pope Francis said.

VATICAN – The 30,000 members of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem fund about 80 percent of the annual budget of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, ensuring that Catholic parishes and seminaries, schools and hospitals in Israel, Palestine and Jordan continue to function, said U.S. Cardinal Edwin F. O'Brien.

JERUSALEM – The controversial Israeli Nation State law must be repealed because non-Jews also are citizens of Israel, said the Catholic ordinaries of the Holy Land.

VATICAN – Sharing the same roots as their Jewish brothers and sisters, Christians cannot be anti-Semitic and must work to ensure anti-Semitism is banned from society, Pope Francis said.

Electoral successes for the ultra-right across Europe is being accompanied by a frightening rise in attacks on Jews, while left wing parties give ethical cover to anti-Semites with constant criticism of Israel, Fr. Patrick Desbois said at an event hosted by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Theatre Oct. 15.

A surge in vandalism and hate speech against Jews and Muslims has prompted a call for the revival of a national platform for Christian-Jewish or Christian-Muslim dialogue.

Canada’s Christian population is less educated than Canadian Jews, Muslims, Hindus and even those who have no religious affiliation.

The identity of Britain’s Labour Party is at stake as its leaders struggle to address accusations that anti-Semitism is rife within its ranks.

JERUSALEM - Pope Francis spent the last morning of his three-day pilgrimage to the Holy Land meeting with Muslims and Jews and calling for closer relations among the three major monotheistic religions as the basis for peace in the region.

VATICAN CITY - In trying to help people understand how belief in God is a natural part of life and provides grounding for the values that protect human dignity and peaceful coexistence, Pope Benedict XVI saw Jews and Muslims as natural allies.

The prodigious Catholic novelist, historian and journalist Piers Paul Read has just produced his 23rd book, a non-fiction account of the most infamous miscarriage of justice in French history, The Dreyfus Affair. Read’s account of the wrongful conviction of junior military officer Alfred Dreyfus in late 19th-century France on charges of treason — and the campaign to overturn that injustice which set off riots and exposed the shocking depth of anti-Semitism bubbling under every strata of society — represents a perfect marriage of writer and subject.  

Read’s skills as an historian would be required just to do justice to the main event of this many-peopled saga that takes almost 12 years to play out from Dreyfus’ exile and incarceration on Devil’s Island to his full social restitution. But Read’s story is much larger than that. To properly set the scene, Read devotes the first 70 pages of this very readable account to exploring the historic tensions between Jews and Catholics in France, going back to the French Revolution a full century before. And on the other side he brings the story (or at least the implications of the story) forward to the mid-20th century, showing how the Dreyfus Affair gave the world a nasty foretaste of the widespread persecution of the Jews that would be the distinctively horrific hallmark of the Second World War.

ROME - The Catholic Church's relationship to Judaism as taught by the Second Vatican Council and the interpretations and developments of that teaching by subsequent popes, "are binding on a Catholic," said the Vatican official responsible for relations with the Jews.

Swiss Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, spoke to reporters May 16 after delivering a speech on Catholic-Jewish relations in light of Vatican II's declaration "Nostra Aetate" on the church's relations with non-Christian religions.

OTTAWA - As religious leaders from Ukraine sat in the gallery, the House of Commons passed unanimously on April 24 a motion honouring Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky for his courageous efforts to save Jews during the Second World War.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's motion said Sheptytsky, who headed the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church from 1900 until his death in 1944, courageously spoke out against violence against Jews and sheltered and saved the lives of more than 160 Ukrainian Jews, many of them children.