IJCR Upcoming Events
Pope Francis: Successes and Challenges in Interfaith Dialogue
Remembering His Visit to Hawk Hill in September 2015
Thursday, October 16, 2025, 5:00-6:30 P.M.
Campion Student Center: Doyle Banquet Hall South (campus map)
Throughout his pontificate (2013-2025), Pope Francis prioritized dialogue as urgent for intergroup solidarity, even after centuries of alienation or during ongoing war. Experienced in dialogue with Jews when Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, as pope he visited the Great Synagogue of Rome, Auschwitz, and Israel and Palestine. While he also was very committed to deeper relations with Islam, this program will concentrate on Catholic-Jewish relations.
This program, featuring two veterans of interfaith dialogue, will consider Pope Francis’s important theological statements, tensions raised by his preaching, and challenges he faced in addressing conflicts in the Middle East. It will also recall his visit to SJU ten years ago to bless the sculpture “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time.”
Rabbi Noam Marans is Director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, heading that agency’s global interfaith outreach and advocacy.
Dr. Elena Procario-Foley is the Br. John G. Driscoll Professor of Catholic-Jewish Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Iona University in New Rochelle.
Facing the Future as Friends: Catholics, Jews, and Muslims
Trilateral Relationships Sixty Years after Nostra Aetate
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2025, 9 A.M. TO 1:00 P.M. (lunch to follow)
Campion Student Center: Doyle Banquet Hall South (campus map)
Registration Required
Registrants will receive detailed free parking information near the program date.
Organized in collaboration with the Peace Islands Institute, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia, the City of Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, and the City of Philadelphia Office of Muslim Engagement. Sponsors include the American Jewish Committee, the Bishops' Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, the Jewish Community Relations Council, Majlis Ash-Shura, and the National Council of Synagogues.
On October 28, 1965, the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church issued an authoritative declaration on its relationship with other religions. Entitled Nostra Aetate, Latin for “In Our Time,” it called for interreligious dialogue, devoting special attention to Jews and Muslims. To mark its sixtieth anniversary, we will reflect together on the new possibilities for interreligious friendships that declaration enabled, consider the religious topics we need to keep exploring, and discuss how to continue building the interreligious solidarity that is desperately needed in today’s divided and violent world.
Keynote Speaker: Cardinal Wilton Gregory
His Eminence Cardinal Wilton Gregory is Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, having served as its seventh Archbishop from 2019–2025. He is co-chair of the dialogue between the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Council of Synagogues. Cardinal Gregory will be introduced by Philadelphia's Archbishop Nelson Pérez.
Panel: The Past and Future Impact of Nostra Aetate on Catholic relations with Jews and Muslims
Rev. Russell K. McDougall is the Executive Director of the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
Rabba Rori Picker Neiss serves as the Senior Vice President for Community Relations at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA).
Dr. Zeki Saritoprak is a Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Bediuzzaman Said Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies at John Carroll University.
Facilitated Process: Interfaith Friendships in Times of Crisis
Rabbi Or Rose is the founding Director of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership and also of the Center for Global Judaism at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.
Dr. Homayra Ziad is Dean of the Divinity Program and Director of the Hassan Institute for Interfaith Encounter at the American Islamic College, Chicago.
Seeing the Unseeable: Jewish and Orthodox Christian Visions of God, Image, and Incarnation
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2025, 5:00 - 6:30 P.M.
Teletorium in Mandeville Hall (campus map)
Can God be pictured? For centuries, both Jews and Orthodox Christians have wrestled with how to honor the mystery of a God who cannot be seen—and yet, in some ways, chooses to be seen. While their answers have often seemed to diverge sharply, a closer look reveals unexpected areas of resonance, especially in how both traditions navigate the tension between divine transcendence and the use of material signs. This talk explores the deep theological questions behind sacred images, the role of the human as image-bearer, and why what may appear as irreconcilable differences can sometimes conceal shared intuitions. Along the way, we’ll uncover how ancient insights continue to speak powerfully to modern debates about representation, reverence, and the presence of the divine in our world.
The Very Rev Dr Geoffrey Ready is the director of Orthodox Christian Studies at Trinity College within the University of Toronto, where he teaches liturgy, Biblical studies, and pastoral theology. His research interests focus on the enacted narrative of God and Israel in the Orthodox liturgy. Under the auspices of the Orthodox Theological Association in America, Fr Geoffrey chairs Orthodox Christians in Dialogue with Jews, a working group of theologians and dialogue partners studying and making recommendations to tackle elements of anti-Judaism in Orthodox preaching, teaching, and worship.
Catholic Canon Law & the Rights of Non-Catholic Parents: The Mortara Case
Tuesday, February 24, 2026, 5:00 - 6:30 pm
Teletorium in Mandeville Hall (campus map)
In 1858, a six-year-old Italian Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, was taken from his family by Vatican authorities when it was reported that their Christian housekeeper had secretly baptized him as an infant. Since canon law and civil law stipulated that a baptized child must be raised Catholic, Pius IX used his power as head of the Papal States to remove Edgardo from his family so he could receive a Christian education. In litigation brought by the parents, the Vatican invoked Thomas Aquinas to justify the child’s seizure. The family’s efforts failed to reunite them with Edgardo, who went on to become a Catholic priest. The case has relevance for the current Catholic Code of Canon Law about the infant baptism of children of non-Catholic parents and to the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on religious freedom and the Jewish people.
Dr. Matthew Tapie has recently published the definitive book about the Mortara case, The Mortara Case and Thomas Aquinas’s Defense of Jewish Parental Authority, which includes all the relevant documents in English translation. He is Associate Professor of Theology, and Director of the Center for Catholic-Jewish Studies at Saint Leo University, Saint Leo, Florida. His teaching and research interests are in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Judaism and Christian theology, and Catholic-Jewish relations.
Jesus: Good Jew, Bad Jew, or Anti-Jew?
Thursday, March 19, 2026, 5:00 - 6:30 PM
Teletorium in Mandeville Hall (campus map)
The fact of Jesus’ Jewishness should be so obvious as to need no discussion. Despite the clear statements in the New Testament, there have been many people, from the second century to the present, who have denied and/or qualified Jesus’ Jewishness, and others for whom his Jewish identity comes as a surprise.
This program will trace the development of these perspectives, from the unequivocally Jewish Jesus of the Gospels, to the “baptism” of Jesus as a Christian at the hands of the Church Fathers and later theologians, to the Nazi “Aryan Jesus,” and to Jesus’s “reconversion” to Judaism in the 20th century. It will suggest that uneasiness about Jesus’ Jewishness, while shaped primarily by historical and social factors over the millennia, can be detected even in the Gospels themselves, as the evangelists, like later theologians, were trying to square Jesus’ Jewish identity with the increasingly Gentile composition of the Jesus movement.
Dr. Adele Reinhartz is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. Her main research areas are the Gospel of John, ancient Jewish/Christian relations, and Bible and Film. In 2021 she won the Konrad Adenauer Prize, awarded to one Canadian annually by the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Her most recent book is Ethics in the Fourth Gospel (2025).