Rome – Rabbi Pulls Out of 140-hour Bible TV Reading Session

Rome – The chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, has pulled out of a planned marathon reading of the entire Bible on Italian television with Pope Benedict XVI next month on the grounds that the event is “too Catholic”.

The reading, which will last 140 hours, will be broadcast on RAI, Italian state television, over six days and nights starting on October 5. It will open with the Pope reading from Genesis. The pontiff will be followed by 1,300 readers drawn not only from Christian ranks – including Protestant and Orthodox churches – but also from Rome’s Muslim community.

However, Rabbi di Segni said “The Bible is not the same thing for Jews and for Christians. For us, it is the Old Testament, but not the New Testament”. He said he also objected to the choice of venue, the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme – one of the seven pilgrim churches of Rome – because it was where St Helena, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, brought Christian relics such as fragments of the True Cross back from the Holy Land to underline the fact that the centre of the new religion – Christianity – was not Jerusalem but Rome.

Rabbi Di Segni said he also felt that the event, instead of being a joint effort by the “People of the Book”, had been organised solely by the Roman Catholic Church. “I am not slamming the door behind me” he told Il Messaggero, the Rome daily. “But the event has been imposed in rigorously Roman Catholic terms, and this has created an embarrassing situation. I have therefore decided not to take part”.

There was no immediate comment from the Vatican. Launching the project in June, Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said it was “an appeal to the Catholic Church to go back to studying and deepening its knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.”