Germany's bishops have not welcomed the Pope's revision of the Good Friday Prayer for the Jews in the Tridentine Rite, the deputy head of the German bishops' conference has said, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.

The prayer, which expresses the hope that God will "illuminate their [the Jews'] hearts so that they may recognise Jesus Christ as the Saviour of all people", has angered a growing number of leading rabbis in Germany and some want to suspend Christian-Jewish dialogue. The prayer was published in February and used for the first time at Easter.

The deputy head of the bishops' conference, Bishop Heinrich Mussinghof of Aachen, told the German press agency dpa on Maundy Thursday that the German bishops would have preferred that the 1970 wording of the Good Friday Prayer for the Jews be used in both the Tridentine and the New Order of the Mass, because it emphasised the Jews' faithfulness to God's covenant and "the dignity of Israel" was thus preserved.

"The Pope's theology is a little different, however," Bishop Mussinghof said. He said that theologically he understood the Pope's point of view but "in Jewish ears this does not sound the same". He said he himself was "not happy" with the revised wording.

The Catholic chairman of the Christian-Jewish dialogue circle (Gesprächskreis) in Germany, Hanspeter Heinz, told the Frankfurter Rundschau that the Vatican had behaved "ruthlessly". Charlotte Knobloch, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which represents the country's more than 100,000 Jews, told Reuters that as long as the Catholic Church did not return to the 1970 version of the Good Friday Prayer there could be no Christian-Jewish dialogue.

The Chief Rabbi of Milan and president of the Italian rabbinical conference, Giuseppe Laras, told the Austrian daily Der Standard that Jews saw the revised text as an "unnecessary strong-man act" by the Pope and a return to "that anti-Semitic mindset" which had prevailed in the Catholic Church for centuries prior to the Second Vatican Council. The new chairman of the General Rabbinical Conference, Henry G. Brandt, said the publication of the prayer was " a most regrettable and potentially dangerous step backwards". Meanwhile in Rome, more than 500 Italian Catholics, many involved in theological and ecumenical work, have signed a petition denouncing the prayer for the Jews as a "regression" from the Second Vatican Council teaching on religious freedom.