Pope reiterates Church's commitment to rejecting all anti-Semitism

Vatican City, Feb 12, 2009 / 11:36 am (CNA).- The Church is “profoundly and irrevocably committed” to rejecting “all anti-Semitism” and to building better relations with the Jews, Pope Benedict insisted on Thursday as he spoke to a delegation from the  Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Given the deluge of negative reactions after he removed the excommunication of four Pius X Society bishops, one of whom denies the extent of the Holocaust, Pope Benedict used today’s meeting as an opportunity to once again reaffirm the Church’s commitment to Jewish relations.

The Pope began his address to the Jewish leaders by recalling his first visit to a synagogue, in the German city of Cologne in August 2005. Also on his mind was a trip he made to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in May of 2006.

"As I walked through the entrance to that place of horror, the scene of such untold suffering," he said, "I meditated on the countless number of prisoners, so many of them Jews, who had trodden that same path into captivity at Auschwitz and in all the other prison camps."

(Full story at CNA)