Catechism Edit 'Troubling,' Jewish Leaders Say

Alan Berger, a professor of Holocaust studies at Florida Atlantic University, called the change the latest "in a long line of mixed symbols. It's very troubling."

Deleting the sentence allows U.S. bishops to dodge the controversy, said Monsignor Daniel Kutys, executive director of evangelization and catechesis at the USCCB's committee on the catechism.

"Part of the decision was to skirt the issue rather than explain it," Kutys said.

The USCCB and individual bishops began receiving letters about the catechism in 2006, after a Pennsylvania man, Robert Sungenis, targeted the reference to Moses on the Web site of his Bellarmine Theological Forum, according to Kutys.

Sungenis, 53, of State Line, Pa., said he wrote to the Vatican and met with officials from the bishops' conference. "I tried all the proper channels and I think it worked," Sungenis said.

If the sentence were not deleted from the catechism, Sungenis said, it would "shake the faith" of lay Catholics by implying that people can be saved without believing in Jesus.

The amateur apologist -- Sungenis has a doctorate in religious studies from a British school without U.S. accreditation -- also asserts that "an anti-Christian, Jewish influence has infiltrated the Catholic Church at the very highest levels."

Sungenis's writings on Jews have been sharply criticized by fellow Catholics, who accuse him of anti-Semitism. His local bishop, Kevin Rhoades of Harrisburg, has demanded that Sungenis stop writing about Jews and made him stop using the word "Catholic" in his organization's name.

"I had hoped that he would cease from speaking or writing about Judaism and the Jewish people in a hostile, uncharitable, and un-Christian manner," Rhoades wrote to a former colleague of Sungenis's in February.

Sungenis might have been the first to raise the issue, but he shouldn't be given credit for revising the catechism, said the USCCB's Kutys. "It was changed, but not because of what he said," Kutys said. "People were misunderstanding it, and through that blog spreading that misunderstanding to other people."