Happy New Year! I pray that 2023 will be a year of blessings for all of us. Next week I will resume the series on the Doctors of the Church. Today I want to draw your attention to an interview that Wilton Cardinal Gregory gave to Michael J. O’Loughlin, national correspondent at America magazine. The interview was conducted on December 8, 2022—the day after Cardinal Gregory’s seventy-fifth birthday. It was posted online on December 12, 2022. In addition to being Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Gregory serves as the Catholic co-chair of the National Council of Synagogues consultation for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Cardinal Gregory is also a previous chair of the bishops committee for interreligious dialogue. The first question Michael O’Loughlin asked Cardinal Gregory was how Catholics should respond when they encounter the stories of high-profile persons exhibiting antisemitic behavior. Cardinal Gregory replied that it was important that Catholics be properly informed and have their facts straight. He also said that it was important that we acknowledge the damage that those kinds of attacks on individuals or Jewish institutions do to the lives of people. These people may include our neighbors, our friends, and our colleagues. Cardinal Gregory also noted that it is important that we Catholics stay on top of what is happening and witness the destructive forces that seem to be constantly erupting in too many places in our nation. Later in the interview Michael O’Loughlin asked Cardinal Gregory if he has noticed a tendency in young Catholics not to have antisemitism on their list of concerns. Cardinal Gregory thought that this was a perception that touched the lives of many young people. It seems that the farther away we get from a terrible moment in history, there are a fewer people who have firsthand knowledge of it. Cardinal Gregory also mentioned that both Catholic and Jewish participants acknowledge that too many of our young people do not have a proper appreciation, knowledge, and investment with their religious history. Young Catholics don’t know our history. That is why it is important for us to reintroduce the reasons why documents and dialogues were established, why they had to be published, and why they have to be reread and reconfirmed in almost every decade and in every generation. Cardinal Gregory said that at a recently concluded Jewish-Catholic dialogue that the Jewish and Catholic partners agreed that we need to go to the institutions that prepare leaders, both from the Jewish and Catholic perspectives, and begin there. We have to prepare our future leaders in the Jewish theological schools, Catholic seminaries and religious houses to speak forthrightly, carefully, accurately, and compassionately about the causes of violence, antisemitism, and racism. If our leaders are not prepared, the problems we face won’t have a solution that is worthy of the people that we represent. Perhaps a New Year’s resolution that we could undertake in 2023 would be to read once again the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions from the Second Vatican Council that was promulgated on October 28, 1965 by Pope St. Paul VI—nearly sixty years ago. A parishioner gave a succinct answer as to what we need to do and why this is important in a recent conversation with me: “We have to teach the history to each new generation. I also liked that he [Cardinal Gregory] emphasized that it is not a matter of picking which issue (of racism) to highlight, but ‘seeing them as interrelated hatred.’” Until next week, Fr. John