Sister Rose Thering, Advocate for Jewish-Christian Ties, Dies at 85

(RNS) Sister Rose Thering, a Roman Catholic nun internationally recognized for fighting anti-Semitism and improving ties between Catholics and Jews, has died. She was 85.

Thering died of kidney failure Saturday (May 6) while living at the Siena Center of the Sisters of St. Dominic in Racine, Wis. Thering returned to her native state after she retired last year from Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., where she was professor emerita of education and the namesake for the Sister Rose Thering Endowment for Jewish-Christian Studies.

"For a half century she was an uncommon, inspired voice of reconciliation and dialogue among Christians and Jews," said Monsignor Robert Sheeran, Seton Hall's president.

"Her support for the nation of Israel, her determination to root out anti-Semitism wherever it exists, and her commitment to educating new generations about the evils of the Holocaust form her lasting legacy."

Thering was born Aug. 9, 1920, in Plain, Wis., the sixth of 11 children in a German-American Catholic family. Raised on her parents' farm, she joined Racine's Siena Center at 16, training to become a nun in the Sisters of St. Dominic. As a teacher, Thering discovered religious texts that portrayed Jews as Christ-killers. Those depictions, appalling to her, were the subject of her doctoral dissertation at St. Louis University in 1961.

A year later, the study was used by Cardinal Augustin Bea to draft portions of the Vatican document "Nostra Aetate," which ruled that Christ's death "cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today."

Thering's crusade continued in gestures big and small. She led more than 50 excursions to Israel sponsored by Seton Hall, where she taught for 36 years. She received more than 80 humanitarian awards, and was the first woman to be given the Anti-Defamation League's Cardinal Bea Interfaith Award in 2004.

She was the subject of "Sister Rose's Passion," a short documentary nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. She presented a menorah to Pope Paul VI in 1974, and wore a Star of David fused to the cross around her neck.

"She was a one-woman wrecking crew," said Rabbi James Rudin, senior inter-religious adviser for the American Jewish Committee, and a friend of Thering's for 36 years. "What she helped wreck was 2,000 years of the teaching of contempt, which was built into so much of Christian teaching. ... I can only describe her as an original, and there will never be another like her."

Thering is survived by six siblings, two brothers and four sisters. Her funeral is scheduled in Wisconsin on Tuesday.

-- Piet Levy