San Francisco will be home to a new interfaith institute that has grown out of the University of San Francisco’s Jewish studies program.
The Jesuit-run university will inaugurate its Flannery-Hyatt Institute for Interfaith Understanding with a symposium next March.
Andrew Heinze, director of USF’s Swig Judaic Studies Program and head of the new institute, said the time is ripe for dialogue. Relations between Christians and Jews “are in a real state of flux now,” said Heinze, who is Jewish.
“Recently there has been a whole new impetus toward dialogue, with the Vatican’s statements last year on the Holocaust,” he said, referring to the church’s official repentance for its inaction during the genocide. Many Jewish leaders considered the statement inadequate.
“Sometimes conversation has taken place under heat,” Heinze noted, “sometimes with mutual understanding.”
The institute, which will primarily function as host of an annual conference on Jewish-Christian relations, will further the work of the late David Hyatt.
Hyatt, a Catholic, championed interfaith dialogue as head of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the International Council of Christians and Jews before his death in 1992.
Hyatt’s widow, Lillian, of San Francisco, said she proposed the creation of the institute because “my heart has been breaking to see all the work my husband did going down the drain. Everybody has abandoned Christian-Jewish relations.”
The late Rev. Edward Flannery, the other namesake of the institute, was an outspoken priest who crusaded against anti-Semitism before his death last year.
Flannery’s book “The Anguish of the Jews,” published in 1965, won acclaim as one of the first books by a Catholic priest to chronicle Jewish persecution. The institute will use Flannery’s book in a course each year on interreligious understanding.
Lillian Hyatt hopes the institute will train a new wave of young leaders, enabling them to continue to find creative ways to develop and deepen interfaith understanding.
Heinze and others are currently soliciting donations to help fund the institute.
The institute will focus on academic issues as a complement to the public interfaith debates, said Heinze, an associate professor of history.
“What we can do at USF is bring the scholarly dimension into the Jewish-Christian dialogue. We want to bring scholars together with public speakers and promote interfaith activism.”
The institute’s location inside a welcoming Jesuit university will also work to its advantage, Heinze said. “In Israel, people are stepping on each other’s throats” over territorial issues. “I think the Bay Area is where we can have a forum so that many groups with adversarial interests can stake out some higher ground.”