Several German-speaking rabbis and Christian theologians have sharply criticised Benedict XVI for his newly published article on Catholic-Jewish dialogue, which appears in the current issue of the international theological journal Communio.

One rabbi went so far as to say that the article encourages “a new anti-Semitism,” while another said it was “most problematic” that the former Pope insists that Christians instruct Jews on how the Old Testament is to be interpreted from a Christological point of view. Benedict’s new text, Grace and Vocation Without Remorse, appeared in the German edition of the July-August issue of Communio, a major theological journal Joseph Ratzinger co-founded in 1972 with Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac.

The 18-page article is dated Oct 26, 2017 and is signed “Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI.” It was originally written as a reflection on the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 declaration on the Church’s relations with non-Christian religions.

It was intended as an internal document for the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, which is under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, the pontifical council’s president since 2010, convinced Benedict to have the article published in Communio. The 68-year-old Swiss cardinal provides a one-page introduction to the former Pope’s reflections.

“After going over it very carefully… I came to the conclusion that the theological reflections it contained ought to be introduced to the future dialogue between the Church and Israel,” Koch wrote.

But several leading scholars on Jewish-Catholic relations in the German-speaking world reacted negatively to the article’s publication.

The first was Father Christian Rutishau-ser, provincial superior of the Society of Jesus in Switzerland and scholar of Jewish studies. The 52-year-old Jesuit said Benedict’s newly published article is “hardly a contribution to dialogue with the Jews.”

In a seven-page critique of the article that appeared on July 8 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), he concluded that it was highly problematic for the former Pope to insist that Christians continue to push their interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures on the Jews.