Building bridges: 30 years of interfaith dialogue

A rabbi and a priest walked into a bar.

Actually, it was a Mexican restaurant and they both ordered enchiladas.

And the meeting between Jewish Rabbi Paul Citrin and Roman Catholic Rev. Ernest Falardeau was no joke.

They talked about all sorts of things at that first meeting, not the least of which was their shared Judeo-Christian background and their differences. And they agreed to meet again, and again.

Those lunches at the M&J Sanitary Tortilla Co. in downtown Albuquerque began in 1982. In short order, Father Falardeau was invited to attend a Sabbath service at Congregation Albert and to speak after the service. His topic was the influence of Vatican II on Catholic-Jewish relations. Then Rabbi Citrin was invited to attend an Ash Wednesday Mass at the Aquinas Chapel and to speak after the service. His topic was appropriate to the day: Repentance in the Jewish tradition.

Those initial meetings 30 years ago eventually led to the formation of the Jewish-Catholic Dialogue, a formal organization devoted to bringing together Catholics and Jews for the study of scripture, interfaith prayer services and understanding.

The bridges built by Falardeau and Citrin have been bringing people of different faiths together for decades now to talk about everything from nuclear disarmament to the history of the Gospels to doctor-assisted dying. Last year, the organization changed its name to the Jewish-Christian Dialogue to reflect the inclusion of Protestant denominations.

An important outgrowth of the dialogue is the annual Spring Colloquium, which attracts Jewish and Catholic speakers from around the country. This year the topic is the 50 years since the Vatican II reforms, and the two evening speakers are well-known to dialogue members — Falardeau and Citrin.

I wanted to catch up with the two before the conference to reminisce about the past and look at what the dialogue has accomplished. We couldn’t get together at M&J; sadly, the restaurant closed some years ago and anyway Falardeau has moved away to a parish in New York City.

I caught him on the phone after noon Mass at St. Jean Baptiste Church, and he warmly remembered his lunches with the rabbi.

“Those meetings cemented our relationship,” he said.

Falardeau, now 84, said the introduction to Citrin came at a fortuitous time. The Second Vatican Council, completed in 1965, was an opening of the Catholic Church to the world. “It understood the mission of the church to be to reconcile people, to understand our commonality, our common humanity,” Falardeau said.

The discussions between members of the Jewish-Catholic Dialogue were always on a religious level, the conversations centering on faith and theology. But that hasn’t meant other understandings haven’t come about.

“There was something special about it,” Falardeau said. “We could talk about our faith and do that in a very calm way, in a very positive way with respect and try to see what we might learn.”

When I sat down with Citrin, who left Congregation Albert for another temple, retired and then returned to Albuquerque, he had only warm memories of the meetings of the Catholic and Jewish teams — six to eight people of each faith.

“We had regular meetings, at least once a month,” he said. “When you spend time together, all the stereotypes and all the distrust begins to break down in favor of the human connection.”

What was there to understand and overcome? Stereotypes about priests and rabbis, about Catholics and Jews, about the Old and New Testaments. And the Catholic Church’s long-standing teaching that Jews, as a whole and today, were responsible for killing Jesus, which was reversed by Vatican II.

The goal then and now has nothing to do with winning converts or finding the “right” interpretation of a religious text.

“The goal is not to change the mind of the other but to understand where the other is coming from,” Citrin said. “And it wasn’t only about intellectual understanding. There was real affection on both sides.”

The world has changed a lot in 30 years, and our way of defining and discussing our differences has hardened. It seemed to me it might be tougher to get an interfaith dialogue off the ground today.

Both men agreed the obstacles would probably be greater today but also that some other two men with a desire for connection and an appetite for lunch would surely step up and begin to talk.

“I think there is a timeless value of people entering into dialogue,” Citrin said.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal