Sister Rose Thering, 85; Catholic Scholar Battled Anti-Semitism

Sister Rose Thering, a Roman Catholic nun who was a leading voice for reconciliation between Christians and Jews during more than half a century as an activist, scholar and teacher, has died. She was 85.

Thering, a professor emerita at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., died early Saturday at the Siena Center of the Sisters of St. Dominic, a convent in Racine, Wis. The cause of death was kidney failure, according to the university.

The author of a highly influential doctoral dissertation on anti-Semitic characterizations in Catholic school texts in the 1950s, Thering was the subject of a 2004 film, “Sister Rose’s Passion.” The short documentary was nominated for an Academy Award.

“For a half-century she was an uncommon, inspired voice of reconciliation and dialogue among Christians and Jews,” Msgr. Robert Sheeran, president of Seton Hall University, said in a statement. “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.”

A statement from the Anti-Defamation League called her a “woman of valor” and said her work “changed the course of history.”

“Her deeds set a standard for people of all faiths to emulate. Her legacy resides in all those she taught and touched,” Barbara B. Balser, the group’s national chairwoman, and Abraham H. Foxman, the group’s national director, said in the statement, posted on the league’s website.

The middle child of 11, Thering was born Aug. 9, 1920, in Plain, Wis. Her parents were farmers and second-generation German Catholics who prayed three times a day and sent their children to Catholic schools. At 16, Thering entered a Dominican convent.

She recalled hearing as a child her father’s whispered characterization of the new pharmacist in town as a Jew. Surprised by his tone, she asked him to explain the reason for his hushed comment. He did not respond, and when Thering later asked her mother for clarification, she was told that “Jews were the killers of Jesus.”

In school, Thering was independent and curious enough to question textbooks that perpetuated anti-Jewish themes. And she found it very troubling.

“It was strange that I was never taught that it was my sins Jesus was sacrificed for,” she told the New York Times in 2004. “I was fed only [that] we were the true ones. We were the ones who would be saved.”

She earned her bachelor’s degree at Dominican College in Racine and a master’s from the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., as well as one from Seton Hall.

But it was while working toward her doctorate in philosophy at St. Louis University that she made one of her more lasting contributions. For her dissertation, she decided to look at how Catholic textbooks characterized other faiths as well as ethnic and racial groups.

“And to my sorrow and -- not surprise, but sorrow -- I found some very ugly terms. It was frightening. For instance, one statement in the books was, ‘Jews asked for it because they said His blood be upon us and upon our children,’ ” she said in “Sister Rose’s Passion.”

She added that studying the books’ references almost made her sick.

“The whole blood libel; it was really ‘God-killers’ they were calling the Jews.”

Published in the anthology “Catechetics and Prejudice (1973),” her pioneering study resulted in excisions and revisions of negative material about Jews in Catholic school texts. When the Second Vatican Council convened in 1962, part of her study was used to draft portions of the 1965 document “Nostra Aetate” (“In Our Age”), which set a new course in church policy on the death of Jesus.

The policy stated that what happened to Jesus “cannot be charged against all of the Jews without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

With regard to teaching, the document stated that Jews “should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.”

Her study fueled not only change in the Catholic Church but also her own activism.

In 1968, she went to work at Seton Hall to establish an educational outreach program. She joined the faculty in 1973 and became a professor of education specializing in Christian-Jewish studies.

Over the years, her activism led her to Vienna to protest the inauguration of Kurt Waldheim as Austrian president after he had been implicated in World War II atrocities. She went to the Soviet Union to show solidarity with Russian Jews before the era of glasnost allowed their exit for friendlier countries.

In the 1990s, she protested a visit by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to what is now Kean University in New Jersey.

She made more than 50 pilgrimages to Israel to study at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and in New Jersey was a leading force in getting a bill passed that made Holocaust education mandatory in every school.

In 1992, Seton Hall established the Rose Thering Endowment for Jewish-Catholic studies for graduate education.

Thering is survived by two brothers and four sisters.