Bishops' Catholic-Jewish expert of past 30 years prepares to retire

Published: 2007-05-15

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Eugene J. Fisher said he currently has five books in the works and also hopes to do some teaching when he retires at the end of June after 30 years as associate director for Catholic-Jewish relations in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. In a May 11 interview with Catholic News Service, he said the Catholic-Jewish crisis of the summer of 1987 was the most memorable moment in those 30 years. Pope John Paul II was due to visit Miami in September and have his first meeting on U.S. soil with representatives of American Jewry. Then the pope met in June with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, whose connection with a Nazi military unit that committed war crimes had recently come to light. "The Jewish community was quite understandably upset with that," Fisher said. "During my tenure there were a number of crises, and most of them were around the Holocaust," he said. But he spoke mainly of the building of relations that has taken place over those three decades. He said Catholic and Jewish leaders took up the seminal new teaching about Jews and Judaism found in "Nostra Aetate," the Second Vatican Council's declaration on relations with non-Christian religions, and worked through the implications "step by careful step ... building the edifice, brick by brick."

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