One can’t help but both admire and pity Montse Alvarado – the new prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication – for the poisoned chalice she has accepted. As director of communications every word will be scrutinised – not only in the present, but also from the past. Recently a video clip emerged from a 2022 podcast for which she has been criticised for stating that it is “obviously wrong” to believe “that all Jews should become Christians”.
The history of the Church’s relationship with the Jews is, of course, long and troubled. It is all too easy to interpret some passages from the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles as laying the blame for Jesus’s death at the feet of the Jews, thus establishing a foundation for centuries of anti-Semitism. In those early days St Peter and St Paul butted heads over the “Judaising” controversy – the question not whether all Jews should become Christians, but whether all Christians should become Jews.
