COMMENTARY : Jewish-Catholic Relations Still Need Work : Interfaith: Although there have been great strides made, more needs to be done, two scholars contend. They say there is a need to attract more young people into the dialogue.

It has been 25 years since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council when the world’s Roman Catholic bishops called for a dramatically different relationship between the Church and Jewish people. The bishops publicly condemned anti-Semitism as sinful and laid the groundwork for a new theological understanding of Jews and Judaism.

Since 1965, there have been more positive Catholic-Jewish encounters, especially in the United States, than there were in the first 1,900 years of the church’s history. But have Catholic-Jewish relations, as some critics charge, gone sour? Do the controversies of recent years mean that we are reverting to negative stereotypes and prejudice, or even worse, to indifference?

The period of novelty and excitement that Jews and Catholics experienced after 1965 in “explaining” themselves to each other is ending. It has been 4 1/2 years since Pope John Paul II spoke in Rome’s Grand Synagogue, and it is no longer news in this country when a rabbi speaks in a cathedral or a cardinal in a synagogue.

It does appear that relations have dramatically improved. Indeed, a new generation of young Catholics and Jews has grown up, studies have shown, which has never experienced the alienation, mutual suspicion and bigotry that so often poisoned earlier Catholic-Jewish relations.

But there is no cause for complacency. The improvement in attitudes may hide another problem. Many of the traditional Catholic-Jewish dialogue groups in the United States are failing to attract younger members. Interreligious relations continue to be a low priority for many Catholic and Jewish seminary students. And there are disturbing reports of increased anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe and on American college campuses. Is all the work done? We think not.

The traumatic shocks of the past few years, especially the Pope’s meetings with Kurt Waldheim and Yasser Arafat and the intense controversy surrounding the Auschwitz convent, vividly illustrate how frail Catholic-Jewish relations really are.

During the Waldheim episode, some Jews criticized the Pope and his office with a virulence that at first surprised, and then angered Catholics. The wartime activities of the Austrian president were often lost as the charges and countercharges swirled around John Paul II and one of his predecessors, Pius XII. Catholics sometimes sensed a latent anti-Catholicism in the Jewish community.

Catholics believed the papacy was being vilified and they felt the urge to close ranks around their spiritual leader.

The Auschwitz convent crisis revealed how little we really know about each other’s religious symbols and sacred histories. Jews were accused of somehow being against prayer and the spiritual values of the Carmelite nuns, while Catholics were accused of attempting to whitewash the uniqueness of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.

The convent crisis was an explosive mixture of separate memories, separate symbols and separate angers. Fortunately, cooler heads and hearts prevailed, and construction of a new convent, away from the death camp, is under way.

Most Jews and many Catholics have continually urged the Holy See to enter into formal diplomatic relations with Israel. Some Jews have even argued that no significant Catholic-Jewish relations can take place until the Vatican and Jerusalem exchange ambassadors. While we desire such diplomatic ties, we do not believe the Catholic-Jewish encounter should be held hostage to one aspect of our complex and multifaced relationship.

Old enmities and suspicions die hard. Sometimes, they appear to die only to be revived in new and dangerous forms, as the recent statement by the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace warned: If anti-Semitism has been the most tragic form that racist ideology has assumed in our century, with the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, it has unfortunately not yet entirely disappeared. Anti-Zionism serves at times as a screen for anti-Semitism.

Something irreversible has happened in the two-millennium history of Catholic-Jewish relations, and our generation has the opportunity to shape that relationship for centuries to come.

Set against the increasing ethnic, racial and religious hatreds throughout the world today, Catholic-Jewish relations, at their best, emerge with high marks.

Peace appears to be breaking out between us even as we fuss and fret. That fussing and fretting, lamentably done too often through press releases and headlines, rather than face to face, actually indicates how much we expect and demand from one another.

The stakes in Catholic-Jewish relations are high and rising. We are engaged in a unique effort that can be a model for other ethnic, racial and religious groups. That effort is about more than surviving as religious communities in a hostile world. It is about what we are as faithful children of the One God of Israel.