The Good Friday prayer for the Jews is an annual prayer in some Christian liturgies. It is one of several petitions, known in the Catholic Church as the Solemn Intercessions and in the Episcopal Church (United States) as the Solemn Collects, that are made in the Good Friday service for various classes and stations of peoples: for the Church; for the pope; for bishops, priests and deacons; for the faithful; for catechumens; for other Christians; for the Jews; for others who do not believe in Christ; for those who do not believe in God; for those in public office; and for those in special need. These prayers are ancient, predating the eighth century at least (as they are found in the Gelasian Sacramentary).
Roman Catholicism
Background
In the early 1920s, the Clerical Association of Friends of Israel, a Catholic organization founded in 1926 to foster positive attitudes toward Jews and to pray for their conversion to Christianity, requested that the phrase "perfidious Jews" (Latin: ; Italian: ) be removed from the liturgy. Pope Pius XI was reportedly strongly in favour of the change and asked the Congregation of Rites to review the matter. Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, who was among the Friends of Israel, was appointed to monitor this issue. The Roman Curia, however, is reported to have reacted very negatively to the proposal on the basis that if one change was made to the old liturgy it would invite other such proposals. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith dissolved the association on 25 March 1928.
Changes by Pius XII
After World War II, Eugenio Zolli, the former Chief Rabbi of Rome and a convert to Roman Catholicism, asked Pope Pius XII to excise the adjective "perfidis" from the prayer for the Jews. Professor Jules Isaac, a French scholar of Catholic-Jewish relations, did so as well in an audience with Pius in 1949. Pius responded with a public declaration that the Latin word "perfidus" means "unbelieving", not "perfidious" or "treacherous". Fifteen years later, Pope John XXIII made that change official.
The form used before 1955 read as follows:
At that time, the congregants did not kneel during the prayer for the conversion of the Jews (even though moments of kneeling in silent prayer were prescribed for all of the other petitions in the Good Friday rite), because, as the famous liturgist Dom Prosper Guéranger, O.S.B., said: Here [at this prayer] the deacon does not invite the faithful to kneel. The Church has no hesitation in offering up a prayer for the descendants of Jesus' executioners; but in doing so she refrains from genuflecting, because this mark of adoration was turned by the Jews into an insult against our Lord during the Passion. She prays for His scoffers; but she shrinks from repeating the act wherewith they scoffed at Him.
Others disagreed with this explanation; the Russian-Jewish historian Solomon Lurie wrote in his 1922 book on antisemitism in antiquity that this explanation was arbitrary and ad hoc invented: according to the Gospels, it was the Roman soldiers, not the Jews, who mocked Christ. Lurie quotes Kane who wrote that "all authors tried to justify the practice that had existed before them, not to introduce the new one. Apparently this practice (of not kneeling) had been established as a result of the populist antisemitism."
As part of his major revision of the Holy Week liturgy in 1955, Pope Pius XII instituted kneeling for this petition as at the other petitions of the litany, so that the prayer read:
Changes by John XXIII
On 21 March 1959, Pope John XXIII ordered that the word "faithless" () be removed from the prayer for the conversion of the Jews, This word had caused much trouble in recent times because of misconceptions that the Latin perfidis was equivalent to "perfidious", giving birth to the view that the prayer accused the Jews of treachery (perfidy), though the Latin word is more correctly translated as "faithless" or "unbelieving". Accordingly, the prayer was revised to read:
John XXIII demonstrated his commitment to the change during the Good Friday service in St. Peter's Basilica in April 1963. When the canon reciting the eight prayers included the word "perfidis" when chanting the Prayer for the Jews, the seventh prayer, the Pope signaled for the liturgy to stop and then had the sequence of prayers repeated from the beginning with the word omitted.