Good Friday Prayer For The Jews - 2008 Prayer

2008 Prayer

The universal permission given to priests by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 to celebrate the so-called "Tridentine" liturgy resulted in complaints from Jewish groups and some leaders in the Roman Catholic Church over what they perceived as being a return to a supersessionist theology. In response to the complaints, Pope Benedict amended the Good Friday prayer. On 6 February 2008, the Holy See's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, published a note by the Vatican Secretariat of State, announcing that, with reference to the dispositions of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict XVI had decided to amend the Good Friday prayer for the Jews contained in the Roman Missal of 1962, and decreeing that the amended text "must 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:

Let us also pray for the Jews: That our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Savior of all men. (Let us pray. Kneel. Rise.) Almighty and eternal God, who want that all men be saved and come to the recognition of the truth, propitiously grant that even as the fullness of the peoples enters Thy Church, all Israel be saved. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

The new formulation continued to be met with reservations by groups such as the Anti-Defamation League. Though they considered the removal of "blindness" and "immersion in darkness" with respect to the Jews an improvement over the original Tridentine language, no reason was offered as to why the Good Friday prayer from the Reformed Rite of Paul VI was not simply used instead.