Vatican City, 02 April, 2025 / 7:38 pm (ACI Africa).
The Vatican in collaboration with the Camille and Sandy Kress Project launched the first in a series of conferences titled “Jews and Catholics on Ethics: A Light to the Nations” this week, highlighting the significance of faith traditions in the world today.
The April 1–2 conference in Rome brought together Catholic and Jewish scholars from around the world to the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, also known as the “Angelicum,” to deepen the theological foundations of Jewish-Catholic dialogue as proposed by Pope Paul VI in his 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate.
In a message to conference participants, Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, said joint reflection on ethics is more urgent now than in the past as both religions — “which have their common origins in revelation” — face being undermined in societies that “marginalize our moral values.”
“As Pope Francis stated: ‘Jews and Christians share a rich spiritual heritage which allows us to do much together. At a time when the West is exposed to a depersonalizing secularism, it falls to believers to seek out each other and cooperate in making divine love more visible for humanity,’” Koch said in his April 1 message.
Both conference guest speakers — Shira Billet, assistant professor of Jewish thought and ethics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Judith Wolfe, professor of philosophical theology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland — said the shared belief that each person is made in the “image of God” provides Catholics and Jews a foundation for common ethics, norms, and values.
