Judaism and the Vatican
Mr. John Sharpe
|
The mystery of the redemption of the human race was fulfilled in Christ's Passion....Consequently the prescriptions of the Law must have ceased then altogether through their reality being fulfilled. As a sign of this, we read that at the Passion of Christ "the veil of the temple was rent" (Mt. 27:51).1 This is really a new Kingdom of God to be transferred to a new nation and governed by a new set of rulers, although it is no less truly the continuation of the Kingdom of God under the Old Covenant....2 ...at the most basic level, John XXIII was responding to the Holocaust.3 |
 |
"The Jewish wait for the Messiah is not in vain."4 Such are the words that graced page A8 of the January 18, 2002, New York Times, extracted from a Vatican document approved just over 18 months ago by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Chief Theologian of the Catholic Church and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The Times was quoting from a 200-page document released by the Pontifical Biblical Commission5 entitled The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, which, according to a Zenit wire transmitted on the same day the NYT article was filed, had been in the works since 1997,6 and was finally published in November of 2001 by the Vatican Press.
Two months later there was a minor stir in both the Catholic and non-Catholic press, which touted the document for making some rather extraordinary claims. (Since then the document has become available at the Vatican's web site in English, its original Italian, and other languages.) The document does in fact make extraordinary claims. Not surprisingly, certain aspects of the study were exaggerated or misrepresented by the press, though most of the statements quoted were presented quite accurately. It will be useful to examine what was said about the document; for it is certainly not exaggeration to state that often the political and diplomatic impact of such a declaration is based less upon what it actually says and more upon how it is presented to the world through the media.
The Zenit wire quotes from Cardinal Ratzinger's Preface to the study, in which, citing §22 of the document, he invites Christians to recognize "the Jewish reading of the Bible as a possible reading."7 The wire story itself implies that prior to the publication of this document the Church did not adequately recognize the value of the Old Testament: "A new Vatican document says it is not possible to understand Christianity fully, without reflecting on divine revelation as contained in the Jewish Bible";8 and, citing a rather loose translation of the Italian of §84 of the study,
the document recognizes that "in the past, errors were committed by unilaterally insisting on the discontinuity" that exists between the Jewish Bible (Old Testament) and the Christian Bible (Old and New Testament).9
Most shocking is the suggestion by the wire report, purporting to quote directly from the document, that in "light of the Scripture, the rupture between the Church of Christ and the Jewish people should not have happened."10
The New York Times went even further in drawing attention to the remarkable novelty of the study. The Vatican spokesman, in an interview also published on the 18th of January, is quoted as saying that for Jews, the expectation of the Messias is not an act of futility. The NYT story reads:
The new document also says Catholics must regard the Old Testament as "retaining all of its value, not just as literature, but its moral value," said Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the pope's spokesman...."The expectancy of the Messias was in the Old Testament," he went on, "and if the Old Testament keeps its value, then it keeps that as a value, too. It says you cannot just say all the Jews are wrong and we are right"11 (emphasis mine).
To her credit, the NYT reporter tries to put Navarro-Valls on the spot:
Asked whether that could be taken to mean that the Messiah may or may not have come, Dr. Navarro-Valls said no. "It means it would be wrong for a Catholic to wait for the Messiah, but not for a Jew," he said.
The Vatican spokesman's suggestion that it is perfectly acceptable for the Jews to continue to await the Messias can only be understood in the context of complete relativism. Only in a world of philosophical meaninglessness and civil indifference to religion does it make sense to hear someone suggest that something that is true for one group can easily be not true for another. What is most disturbing about the statement is that it comes from the Vatican.
There are all kinds of possible excuses that come to mind as to how Dr. Navarro-Valls could get away with saying such a thing: 1) The New York Times fabricated the interview. Well, it's possible, but not likely. The spokesman's words are very believable in light of 40 years of Jewish-Catholic dialogue, and even the New York Times has to maintain a degree of credibility if it is going to remain an effective instrument of apology for globalist liberalism.
2) Navarro-Valls is ignorant of the Catholic Faith. This too is possible, but the man speaks officially on behalf of the Vatican, the Headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church. Ignorance is hardly an excuse.
3) Dr. Navarro-Valls knows exactly what he said, and counting on the receptiveness of the modern mind to the general notion that "my truth doesn't have to be your truth," he figured on taking advantage of the opportunity to do his part toward eliminating the centuries-old antagonism between the Church and the Jews. This option seems highly likely, for the new document (in spite of its merits and notwithstanding the way it was spun by the press) seems merely to be the most recent of a long history of concessions, statements, declarations, and events on the part of the Church or its Pontiff to appease Jewish angst over the decidedly anti-Jewish–religiously speaking–stance of the Church since she was founded in A.D. 33.
It may be a worthy cause, but there is no doubt that the traditional means of mitigating Jewish-Catholic tensions by converting them to the Faith has been more or less abandoned. In place of that traditional means has been placed, it would seem, the more palatable attempt to reconcile Catholic teaching with Jewish sentiments.
That the Biblical Commission's recent document is yet another step toward that larger goal seems more and more obvious in light of what the document says. Let's look at a few of the points in detail.
Rehabilitating the Old Testament
The January 18th NYT article says that "the Rev. Albert Vanhoye, a Jesuit scholar who worked on the commission, said the project sees Scripture as a link between Christians and Jews, and the New Testament as a continuation of the Old, though divergent in obvious ways."12 This is obviously supposed to be taken as exciting news. Otherwise, why bother with a 200-page three-year study? The problem is that it is decidedly not news. The Catholic Encyclopedia effectively sums up the teaching of the Church on the Old Testament:
It is a fact of history that in the time of Christ the Jews were in possession of sacred books, which differed widely from one another in subject, style, origin and scope, and it is also a fact that they regarded all such writings as invested with a character which distinguished them from all other books. This was the Divine authority of every one of these books and of every part of each book. This belief of the Jews was confirmed by Our Lord and His Apostles; for they supposed its truth in their teaching, used it as a foundation of their doctrine, and intimately connected with it the religious system of which they were the founders. The books thus approved were handed down to the Christian Church as the written record of Divine revelation before the coming of Christ.13
So it cannot be that the Church has recently "discovered" the value of the Old Testament. The Old Testament has always been considered to be divinely inspired and a part of Revelation. There must, therefore, be more to it than that.
Reinterpreting the Old Testament
There is more to it than that. It may very well be that the point of the "rediscovery" is to understand the Old Testament in a new way. There really isn't any other logical explanation. For the credence which Catholics have traditionally given to the Old Testament is that it made reference to the Messias that historically did come and was essentially about Him. Because
the Biblical literature is pre-eminently one. Its two sets of writings are most closely connected with regard to doctrines revealed, facts recorded, customs described, and even expressions used. Above all, both collections have one and the same religious purpose, one and the same inspired character. They form the two parts of a great organic whole the centre of which is the person and mission of Christ. The same Spirit exercised His mysterious hidden influence on the writings of both Testaments, and made of the works of those who lived before Our Lord an active and steady preparation for the New Testament dispensation which he was to introduce, and of the works of those who wrote after Him a real continuation and striking fulfillment of the old Covenant.14
Any of the Jewish prophets, patriarchs, and fathers who were saved were saved not because of their expectation of a generic messias, whom they were free to accept or reject, but rather because
The holy Fathers, by doing works of justice, merited to enter into the heavenly kingdom, through faith in Christ's Passion, according to Heb. 11:33: The saints "by faith conquered kingdoms, wrought justice," and each of them was thereby cleansed from sin, so far as the cleansing of the individual is concerned (emphasis mine).15
St. Thomas elsewhere further explains that the Old Testament believers had the same faith which we have as Catholics, with the simple difference that we were born, respectively, on different sides of the historical coming of the Redeemer: "The unity of faith under both Testaments witnesses to the unity of end....Yet faith had a different state in the Old and in the New Law: since what they believed as future, we believe as fact."16
There is a sense to Dr. Navarro-Valls's words that implies that he is not suggesting the faith of the Old Testament is valid insofar as it views the coming of the Redeemer from a point in history before His arrival. The impression is that the expectation of the Messias continues today in a perfectly legitimate and valid way. "The expectancy of the Messiah was in the Old Testament...and if the Old Testament keeps its value, then it keeps that as a value, too."17 The only possible context of such a statement is to be asked to accept the Jewish perspective as valid as "our Truth." As we have seen, Cardinal Ratzinger, in his Preface, encourages such a view. He specifically draws attention to the document's concession that "the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one." And what is the Jewish reading if not the expectation of a future messias who has not yet come? This complete absence of any sense of the historical reality that Christ has already come is evident in the interpretive comments made by Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the Sant'Egidio Community18: "In the past, we've talked about an ancient, common heritage," he said, "but now, for the first time, we're talking about our future waiting for the Messiah and the end of time."19And Navarro-Valls's own words provide the key to the essentially relativistic outlook: "[The document] says you cannot just say all the Jews are wrong and we are right."20
Dispensing with Traditional Wisdom
We are told, in a more or less accurate paraphrase from §87 of the document, that it "affirms that it is mistaken 'to use as a pretext for anti-Judaism' the 'warnings' that the Christian Bible addresses to Jews,"21 an "anti-Judaism" which is defined in the text as "an attitude of contempt, hostility and persecution of the Jews as Jews." But the term has another sense, more broadly construed, within the larger body of literature coming from the Vatican on Christian and Jewish relations. A 1998 document prepared by the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews expresses it as
the prevailing mentality down the centuries penalized minorities and those who were in any way "different." Sentiments of anti-Judaism in some Christian quarters, and the gap which existed between the Church and the Jewish people, led to a generalized discrimination, which ended at times in expulsions or attempts at forced conversions. In a large part of the "Christian" world, until the end of the 18th century, those who were not Christian did not always enjoy a fully guaranteed juridical status. Despite that fact, Jews throughout Christendom held on to their religious traditions and communal customs. They were therefore looked upon with a certain suspicion and mistrust....
In a climate of eventful social change, Jews were often accused of exercising an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Thus there began to spread in varying degrees throughout most of Europe an antijudaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious.22
Summarizing, We Remember defines anti-Judaism as "long-standing sentiments of mistrust and hostility."23 That this vague, broader sense is not totally foreign even to the new document is clear from the fact that in addition to calling for "an attitude of respect, esteem and love for the Jewish people" (§87), it calls for "respect" and "esteem" for their errors, suggesting that "the main condition" for elimination of "anti-Jewish feeling among Christians" is the avoidance of a "one-sided reading of biblical texts" (§86), a suggestion surpassed by Cardinal Ratzinger's call to a "new respect for the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament" (emphasis mine). This new respect would admit, as we have seen, that the "Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one" (§22), thus dispensing, at least to some extent, with the religious and philosophical anti-Judaism formerly sanctioned by the traditional teaching of the Church, and by common sense.
At this point, two major questions come to mind. Firstly, what is it that would prompt or encourage the continued flow of documents and announcements from Rome evidently designed to convince the world and the Jewish people that the Church no longer officially opposes Judaism? Secondly, can it be maintained, in light of both history and theology, that such a "truce" is either licit or prudent?
The Search for a Motive
Only God can search hearts and minds, but we can examine on the natural plain what may be driving modern Churchmen in their evident rush to convince the world, and the Jewish people particularly, that Rome no longer harbors its ancient theological and practical antagonism towards those whom it formerly accused of complicity in the murder of the Son of God.
The Church Under Fire
Before 1960, the Church rarely cared about what people thought of her "intolerance." A true sign of contradiction as the world fell out of step with our Lord, the Church came to expect She would be reviled and despised just as the Bridegroom was during His life. The fifth identifying mark of the Church, it is casually but illustratively said, is persecution. But lately her ministers seem to be awfully concerned with what the newspapers and the TV reporters are saying, and how modern she seems to be in the eyes of the leaders of opinion.
These same leaders of opinion seem to be either members of Judaism or sympathetic to it. Jewish historians, politicians, and journalists, and their non-Jewish academic, political, and journalistic colleagues have recently attempted to convict the Church and its wartime Pope, Pius XII, of not just inaction during the "Holocaust," but of sponsoring and fostering the mindset which actually caused it.
James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, published in January of 2001, is one such attempt to convict the Church of encouraging a deep-seated hatred of the Jews that would erupt in the Germany of the 1940's. Of the reforming efforts of John XXIII, he says that "the Church's failure in relation to Adolf Hitler was only a symptom of the ecclesiastical cancer Pope John was attempting to treat."24 Review pages reveal such unreserved praise as: "A triumph, a tragic tale beautifully told...";25 "Whatever the solution, in the end, understanding the conflict is half the battle. It's a battle Carroll wins in this historical tome";26 and "For two thousand years Jews have been longing for a Christian who would understand their experience."27Andrew Sullivan writes in the New York Times that Carroll's "deepest insight...is to see in John Paul II's transforming papacy a deep grasp of how central the Jewish question is to the current state of the church (sic)."28
September of 2001 saw the appearance on the scene of yet another contribution to recent "scholarship" purporting to demonstrate roughly the same thesis: The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, by David I. Kertzer. According to a London Times reviewer, this book asserts that "the Roman Catholic Church's endorsement of anti-Semitism in the 19th century paved the way for the Holocaust."29 Issued in the U.K. as The Unholy War one month later, the book makes a nice companion volume to Carroll's tome. Surpassing what John Cornwell attempted to do with Hitler's Pope: the Secret History of Pius XII,30 Kertzer in his interview with the Times suggested that
this outpouring of books on Pius XII and the Holocaust misses the point. The Holocaust was going to happen anyway by the time he became Pope. The important point is that anti-Semitism was nurtured by the Church for so many centuries before that, making so many people susceptible to Nazi ideology.31
We have Daniel J. Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today, published last year.32 Goldhagen already distinguished himself by asserting, in Hitler's Willing Executioners,33 that those who perpetrated the "Holocaust" were ordinary Germans acting on sentiments of anti-Semitism that had permeated German society for over a hundred years prior to World War II.34 Expanding his thesis for his newest book, Goldhagen suggests, in a recent interview with the London Times, that "he is taking Cornwell's 'moral reckoning' even further, treating Pius not only as a Nazi sympathizer but as the very symbol of Christianity's 'dishonorable past.'"35A dishonorable past that has been examined for us by Messrs. Carroll and Kertzer.
What's the Connection?
If it is true that history repeats itself, we may be witnessing a kind of sequel to de Poncins's Judaism and the Vatican. All of this ground was covered 40 years ago in the run-up to the Vatican's Declaration on the Relation of the Church to non-Christian Religions.36 The history of the machinations which took place relative to Nostra Aetate is related in Chapters 3, 13, and 15 of de Poncins's book. Jules Isaac (who maintained in his 1948 work Jesus and Israel thai St. Matthew's account of the Passion is "tendentious" and "not based on solid historical foundations"37), along with B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Conference, played a large part in pressuring Vatican officials to reconsider the Church's relationship with the Jews in the period before and during the Second Vatican Council. Count de Poncins summarizes the events:
The whole affair had been hatched in semi-secrecy and with supreme skill by Cardinal Bea, Jules Isaac, and a small group of progressives and Jewish leaders, whose antagonism to traditional Christianity was veiled under appearances of Christian charity, ecumenical unity and common biblical relationship (emphasis mine).38
His summary is merely a more detailed version of one that appeared in a now-famous article in Look magazine on January 25, 1966.39 Not surprisingly, Carroll makes a warm reference in Constantine's Sword to Pope John XXIII's June 1960 reception of Jules Isaac ("who traced the Church's anti-Semitism to the Gospels," Carroll says), and the then Pope's resultant commitment to ensure that the Council "take up the Church's relations with Judaism as a matter of priority."40
That meeting with Isaac, and the Council generally, both seem to have confirmed authoritatively a process which began over 50 years ago and seems now to have a momentum of its own. For the last 40 years the Vatican has been extremely careful to appear appropriately sensitive to the question of the Church's relationship with the Jews. Documents range from the instruction on implementing Nostra Aetate,41which suggested that Catholics who dialogue with Jews should have "respect for [their] faith and [their] religious convictions"; to the Vatican's "Notes"42 on presenting the Jews and Judaism in catechetical instruction, which instruct us to "rid ourselves of the traditional idea of a people 'punished,'" remember that modern Israel "remains a chosen people," and "remind ourselves how the permanence of Israel is accompanied by a continuous spiritual fecundity"; to We Remember,43 which tells us that the Jews continue to bear "their unique witness to the Holy One of Israel and to the Torah" (II) and which exhorts us to "build a new future in which there will be no more antiJudaism among Christians" (V); to Memory and Reconciliation which, itself quoting We Remember, reprimands Christians because, during the "Holocaust," "'the spiritual resistance and concrete action of other Christians was not that which might have been expected from Christ's followers.' This fact constitutes a call to the consciences of all Christians today so as to require 'an act of repentance (teshuva)"'44; to the Holy Father's exhortation that "a fresh mutual and sincere attempt must be made at every level to help Christians and Jews to know, respect and esteem more fully each other's beliefs and traditions" as "the surest way" to overcome anti-Semitism;45 to, finally, a statement by Walter Cardinal Kasper, President of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, suggesting that "the Church believes that Judaism, i.e., the faithful response of the Jewish people to God's irrevocable covenant, is salvific for them."46
The latest of these attempts to assure the Jewish people that Catholics recognize the validity of their present-day religious experience as opposed to merely appreciating the historical way in which the Old Testament looks forward to the Redeemer is the Biblical Commission's study, with Cardinal Ratzinger's Preface and the Vatican Spokesman's spin. The parallels to Isaac's interaction with John XXIII are too similar to discount.
Generally, we may be permitted to speculate that the continued indirect yet very public pressure put on Rome by the likes of Carroll, Cornwell, Kertzer, and Goldhagen helps to ensure that John Paul doesn't ever experience a change of heart regarding his "deep grasp of how central the Jewish question is to the current state of the church (sic)."
We may be permitted to note the overwhelming coincidence between Carroll's recommendations for the way in which the Church should be reformed and this latest release from the Biblical Commission. In "Part Eight–A Call for Vatican III" of Constantine's Sword, Carroll demands the Church reinterpret the New Testament, recognizing, among other things, that: 1) the Gospel narratives were "invented," 2) the coincidence between our Lord's life and the Old Testament Messianic prophecies is a result of "inventing" details of our Lord's life to force conformity with the Old Testament, and 3) that the anti-Jewish texts of the New Testament are a "betrayal" of the message of Jesus. Carroll further fantasizes about the ideological implications of such recognitions by Rome: 1) an acceptance of the faith of modern Judaism as still valid, i.e., "The Jews remain the chosen people of God. The Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Son of God is an affirmation of faith that Christians must respect";47 2) a recognition that "the Kingdom of God is unfinished," and the resultant expectation "among Jews...informs messianic hope, but among Christians...takes the form of faith in the second coming of the Lord";48 and 3) a repudiation of the "slander" that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, a slander which caused "incalculable" damage to the Jews through the centuries.
Can these blasphemous suggestions directly parallel aspects of the Biblical Commission's new document, particularly those aspects emphasized by the media coverage that surrounded its release? 1) Cardinal Ratzinger's Preface suggests "new respect for the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament," and draws attention to the document's assertion that the "Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one." 2) The document further tells us that "Like [the Jews], we too live in expectation. The difference is that for us the One who is to come will have the traits of the Jesus who has already come and is already present and active among us." 3) Finally, according to the NYT summary, it "apologize [s] for the fact that certain New Testament passages that criticize the Pharisees, for example, had been used to justify anti-Semitism."49 The correspondence between the document and Carroll's demands is striking and scandalous.
Carroll is the son of an Air Force general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency. Carroll received several awards for his writing on religion and politics from 1972-75. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; he was a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he researched the "Holocaust" and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School where he led a seminar entitled "The Cross at Auschwitz." He is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University; and as a Harvard Fellow, he participated in the Jewish-Christian theological dialogue at the Shalom Hartman Institute50 in Jerusalem in 1998 and in 2000.51 His biography at Brandeis University labels him "a novelist and a journalist whose writings on politics, religion, and culture have challenged thinkers and government leaders in America and elsewhere."52
Politics and Religion
The leaders of the religion on behalf of which Carroll does most of his lobbying these days are quite pleased that the Church has apparently decided to take his recommendations to heart. Chief Rabbi Joseph Levi of Florence told the Italian press that the document "is a total novelty," and that he is "especially pleased with the objective of the document: to manifest officially 'the amazing force of the spiritual ties that unite the Church of Christ with the Jewish people'"53 (emphasis mine). Referring to Dominus Iesus, which dared to imply that Christ and His Church is in some way necessary for salvation, Rabbi Piattelli calls the Biblical Commission's study "a step forward" in closing, according to the NYT, "the wounds opened by that earlier document." (No doubt Cardinal Kasper's "clarification" of Dominus Iesus aided the healing process as well). "It recognizes the value," the Rabbi said, "of the Jewish position regarding the wait for the Messias, changes the whole exegesis of biblical studies, and restores our biblical passages to their original meaning."54 According to an Associated Press report:
Tullia Zevi, an Italian Jewish leader who lives in Rome, said the document, part of an ongoing attempt by the Vatican to improve relations with the Jews, "is very noble in a certain sense. It carries weight."55
On the political front, the success is the same. A letter to the editor of the NYT from Seymour D. Reich, Chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, and former President of B'nai Brith International, is straightforward in its praise of the Vatican's decision to publish the study:
The document by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the pope's theologian, acknowledging that the Jewish concept of a future Messias does not conflict with the Christian belief in Jesus is a historic one. It should go a long way to clarify church doctrine and counter the confusion over the earlier Dominus Iesus, the study released in the cardinal's name last year that appeared to some to assert that salvation for the Jewish people was possible only through the church. The latest statement reflects remarkable progress in the 55-year Catholic Jewish dialogue.56
History Repeated
Regardless of the intentions of those currently running the Vatican, there can be no doubt that the series of documents at which we have glanced briefly have successfully created the impression that the Church has now officially recognized the modern Jewish religion as "just as valid" as her own. Regarding the Conciliar declaration, John M. Oesterreicher writes:
[E]ven though it is not spelled out in the text that Judaism is a living force, it is implicit in these recommendations of the Council. It is not to the Israel of old that the Church extends her brotherly–or if you prefer, sisterly–hand, but to the Jews here and now.57
And Dr. Eugene J. Fisher, Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs for the US Catholic Bishops, says that the elimination of the Good Friday prayers for the Jews signals that the Church hopes not for the conversion of the Jews, but merely that they continue in "faithfulness to the Judaism given them by divine revelation."58 This is the same Fisher who has written to Icon Productions, Mel Gibson's film production company, "requesting that a panel of Christian and Jewish scholars review the script [of The Passion] before it is released,59 referring to Gibson's upcoming film on the last twelve hours our Lord's life. A March 9, 2003, article in the New York Times magazine quoted a friend of Gibson who maintains that the film will lay the blame for the death of Christ where it belongs.60
The wisdom of fostering an impression that the Church now admits the "validity" of modern Judaism is another issue. In 1967 Count Leon de Poncins posed this rhetorical question in reference to the Council Fathers of Vatican II, "Doubtless [they] are well acquainted with the biblical Judaism of the Old Testament, but what do they know of contemporary talmudic Judaism?"61 The same question may be asked of those leading the Church today who foster the opinion that the recent document is an attempt "to question the validity of past attitudes of the Church, and seems an attempt to move [Jews and Christians] closer to together."62 Even the astute Vittorio Messori63 suggested that though John Paul II is "inspired and has his reasons...he seems to say [in his many apologies] the Church itself has been wrong in its teaching."64
Picture
Pope John Paul II lays a wreath for victims of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem (March 2000).
Do the modern Churchmen know that expressing appreciation on Jewish terms for the Old Testament and the value that it retains is not to reverence it insofar as it heralds the coming of our Lord? Do they know that the Jews do not see in the Old Testament the expectation of a personal Messias that the faithful Fathers and Prophets saw? Let it be made clear here, at least.
For Catholics, and in truth, both theologically and historically, "the death and resurrection of Jesus fulfilled the ancient types and prophecies concerning Him (cf. Lk. 24:26-27)."65 Catholics
see realized and harmonized in our Lord all the conflicting Messianic hopes, all the visions of the prophets. He is at once the Suffering Servant and the Davidic King, the Judge of mankind and its Savior, true Son of Man and God with us.66
For Jews, any attachment to the idea that the Christian religion is a fulfillment and continuation of the Old Covenant is noxious and unacceptable:
It is the obstinate Christian claim to be the sole heir to Israel which propagates anti-Semitism. This scandal must terminate sooner or later; the sooner it does, the sooner the world will be rid of the tissue of lies in which anti-Semitism shrouds itself.67
Not to mention that the Messias which the Jews of the Christian era continue to anticipate is distinctly not our Lord Jesus Christ, as the ex-rabbi Drach makes clear:
The just of the Old Law did not attribute to the Messias they expected, as does the modern synagogue, the mission of restoring our nation to Palestine, and bestowing upon it glory and the goods of this world, but that of winning spiritual salvation, as in the point of fact our Lord Jesus Christ has done....
The Messias, whose coming the Jews obstinately expect, in spite of the fact that he on his side obstinately refuses to appear, is to be a great conqueror who will reduce all the nations of the world to the condition of slaves of the Jews. The latter are destined to return to the Holy Land in triumph, laden with the riches taken from the non-Jews. Jerusalem is to have a new temple.68
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "Pharisaism became practically synonymous with Judaism," and the result of both the Machabean wars and the conflicts with Rome (A.D. 66-135) "was to create from the second century onward...the type of Judaism known to the western world."69 And for this type of Judaism, the messianic notion was one which
looked to the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God under the Son of David, the conquest and subjugation of the heathen, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple, and the gathering in of the Dispersed.70
Repeated calls for Catholics to validate the religion of the Jews are not at all what they seem to be to those who utter them. The faith in Christ our Lord which the prophets and the patriarchs possessed is not that which the leaders of the Jewish nation possessed, nor is it what modern Jews avow. According to the eminent Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, "In the time of our Lord, the Talmud was not yet written, but its spirit already animated the doctors of Israel."71
On the socio-political front, do those leading the Church realize that to preach against anti-Semitism-on Jewish terms–is not to condemn irrational hatred based on race or creed? Do they realize Jews see rather in a condemnation of anti-Semitism both a complete vindication of their efforts throughout history to secularize the world and also a corresponding renunciation of past Christian attempts to defend themselves and their Faith from those efforts? Let us also be clear on this point.
David Kertzer, in his book The Popes Against the Jews, intends to remind modern readers that
The church played an important role in promulgating every one of [the] ideas that are central to modern anti-Semitism....Every one of them had the support of the highest church authorities, including the popes.72
Among these central ideas Kertzer enumerates
the beliefs that the Jews plotted to control the world, that they were evil conspirators against the public good, that they maliciously controlled the banks and the press and that they were behind political movements like Bolshevism.73
An apology from the Church for anti-Semitism, therefore, is bound to appear as–and may even be–an apology for all that was done throughout the history of Christendom to combat these unfortunate Jewish tendencies, which Kertzer accurately–if unwittingly–identifies.
As recently as 1912 the Catholic Encyclopedia had explained and even justified, as appropriate defensive measures, some of the social and legal disabilities which European Jews suffered until these various proscriptions, described by the Encyclopedia below, were eliminated throughout the 18th and 19th centuries:
Church legislation against Jewish holding of Christian slaves can be easily understood: as members of Christ, the children of the Church should evidently not be subjected to the power of His enemies, and thereby incur a special danger for their faith....
The obligation of wearing a distinguishing badge was of course obnoxious to the Jews. At the same time, Church authorities deemed its injunction necessary to prevent effectively moral offences between Jews and Christian women. The decrees forbidding the Jews from appearing in public at Eastertide may be justified on the ground that some of them mocked at the Christian processions at that time; those against baptized Jews retaining distinctly Jewish customs find their ready explanation in the necessity for the Church to maintain the purity of the Faith in its members, while those forbidding the Jews from molesting converts to Christianity are no less naturally explained by the desire of doing away with a manifest obstacle to future conversions.
It was for the laudable reason of protecting social morality and securing the maintenance of the Christian Faith, that canonical decrees were framed and repeatedly enforced against free and constant intercourse between Christians and Jews, against, for instance, bathing, living, etc., with Jews. To some extent, likewise, these were the reasons for the institution of the ghetto [i.e., a neighborhood–Ed.] or confinement of the Jews to a special quarter, for the prohibition of the Jews from exercising medicine, or other professions. The inhibition of intermarriage between Jews and Christians, which is yet in vigor, is clearly justified by reason of the obvious danger for the faith of the Christian party and for the spiritual welfare of the children born of such alliances. With regard to the special legislation against printing, circulating, etc., the Talmud, there was the particular grievance that the Talmud contained at the time scurrilous attacks upon Jesus and the Christians (cf. Pick, "The Personality of Jesus in the Talmud" in the Monist, Jan., 1910), and the permanent reason that "that extraordinary compilation, with much that is grave and noble, contains also so many puerilities, immoral precepts, and anti-social maxims, that Christian courts may well have deemed it right to resort to stringent measures to prevent Christians from being seduced into adhesion to a system so preposterous" (Catholic Dictionary, p. 484).74
Condemning anti-Semitism on Jewish terms is to condemn all of these measures which the Catholic Encyclopedia calls at least "more or less justified," and to condemn along with them stalwarts of the Faith like Frs. Denis Fahey, Ernest Jouin, and the crusading Jesuits of the Civilta Cattolica, all of whom Goldhagen would no doubt number among 20th-century anti-Semites, and with whom he says the Church made "common cause."75 A condemnation of anti-Judaism along these lines, and as it is defined in We Remember, is in both the theological and practical sense a departure from long-standing tradition.76
Furthermore, the ideas to which Kertzer refers as "central to modern anti-Semitism" are, in many cases, founded on historical fact and even admitted by Jewish writers. The Jewish mentality was and remains opposed to all that Christendom fundamentally was.
Writing in 1958, Joshua Jehouda would identify "the Renaissance, and Reformation, and the Revolution" as "three attempts to rectify Christian mentality by bringing it into tune with the progressive development of reason and science." Most revealing are his suggestions that 1) had the Renaissance been allowed to run its creative course, the world would have been unified by the "doctrine of the Cabala"; 2) the Reformation was a revolt against the Church, "which is already a revolt in itself against the religion of Israel"; and 3) the anti-religious Revolution continues, "through the influence of Russian Communism, to make a powerful contribution to the de-Christianization of the Christian world."77
Alfred Nossig admitted that "it is universal socialism which represents this highest development of humanity towards which Israel must guide us."78 An 1883 article in The Jewish World confessed unabashedly anti-pluralist sentiments, despite modern protestations to the contrary: "The great ideal of Judaism is...that the whole world should be imbued with Jewish teachings, and that in a universal Brotherhood of nations–a greater Judaism in fact–all the separate races and religions shall disappear."79 Zionist Bernard Lazare, writing in 1894, would identify the Jewish revolutionary tendency as an essential part of the Jewish character and founded upon Jewish theology:
Having no hope of future reward the Jew could not resign to the misfortunes of life; it was only at a very late date that he could console himself in his misfortunes by dreaming of celestial happiness. To the scourges befalling him he replied neither with the Mohammedan's fatalism, nor with the Christian's resignation, but with revolt. As he possessed a concrete ideal, he wanted to realize it, and whatever retarded its advent aroused his wrath.80
The Russian author Fydor Dostoevsky identified the consequences of unchecked Jewish social activity as long ago as 1877:
Judaism and the banks now reign over all, as much over Europe as over education, the whole of civilization and socialism, especially over socialism, for with its help Judaism will root out Christianity and destroy Christian culture.81
A modern, Russian-born Israeli journalist, Israel Shamir, wrote very recently that even the early 20th-century leaders of Zionism were themselves harshly critical of some of the less palatable characteristics of some secular Jews of the West:
...[T]he first Zionists were very strict with the Jews they knew. For them, a plethora of Jewish lawyers, porn dealers, currency traders, lobby activists, bankers, media lords, real estate moguls, [and] liberal journalists were "an undesirable, demoralizing phenomenon," in the words of [Chaim] Weizmann [the leading Zionist and first president of Israel]....
However...Diaspora Jewishness turned out to be a winning strategy in the Mammon-worshipping West. The named lawyers and media lords captivated America's mind and became the model for many Americans, Jewish and Gentile. Still, it does not mean that [the] "anti-Semitic" diatribes of the early Zionists were all wrong....82
Good PR
It is a masterstroke of propaganda to claim that "anti-Semitism" does not mean what common sense would have it to mean, i.e., hatred of a man for his Jewish race or religion, and to claim rather that "anti-Semitism" refers generally to any ideological, social, or legal attempt by Catholic societies to prevent their own destruction and secularization. In order to accomplish this feat of re-definition, it was and is necessary to substitute one focal point of the discussion for another.
For Catholics the focal point is the Truth, and its historical Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection during the years A.D. 1-33. Once men grasp that Truth, and become prepared to live it integrally, Christian social institutions and a whole Catholic social order follow as a natural consequence. This is more or less the history of Western civilization. A precondition for the development of the West was an opposition to pluralism and a commitment to the absolute and objective nature of the Faith, revealed by Almighty God through His Church, and incarnated in Christian society. Public, legal, economic, and social structures that express that Truth cannot spring from a culture which skeptically concedes that one truth is as valid as its opposite, particularly when more often than not the numerous "truths" that are sanctioned are radically opposed to the True Law of God.
Now insofar as the Jews reject the Divine Sonship of our Lord, they naturally remain unable to recognize as a positive development the culture which flowed from an uncompromising recognition of, and attachment to, Him. They are opponents of Christian civilization insofar as they are unable to confess adherence to an Objective Truth, and to an Objective Moral Law, which was incarnated in that civilization. They are, however, "a tenacious race,"83 and their own commitment to pluralism does not countenance the socio-political supremacy of an essentially anti-pluralist creed founded upon a Man whom their theologians consider to be a common blasphemer or worse. Hence their unwavering commitment to revolutionary "progress" and the various phases of its triumph.
Today, however, the majority of the program of "liberation" for which the Jews have struggled for centuries is accomplished. There is no need to make a ruckus about the right to vote, the value of democracy, the freeing of women and minorities from social oppression, the "right" of the citizen to be free from both government insistence that the press tell the truth and the guild's regulation of the economic order on behalf of just wages and fair prices. What remains to be done, however, in the push for the complete secularization of society and the ultimate triumph of indifferentism–what remains to get worked up about–is the source of that ancient Catholic civilization which, though battered and beleaguered, is not quite extinguished: the Church and her Christ. Our Lord and His Church remain "unto the Jews indeed a stumbling block" (I Cor. 1:3) and to skeptics in the tradition of Pilate a mystery. Since pluralism is logically incapable of persuasion in the face of the religion that Evelyn Waugh described as "a coherent philosophical system with intransigent historical claims," there remains only one option: slander.
The "H" word
Everything that Catholic society did to the Jews in the name of defending the Faith and its citizens, regardless of how "unpleasant," "mean," or "insensitive" it sounds to modern ears, does not sound quite bad enough to ensure with any degree of certainty that the Church will remain humiliated and politics remain forever free of religion. Not unless it can be demonstrated that all of those things led to the breathtaking, shocking, and gut-wrenching extermination of European Jewry in the 1940's. That event, dubbed the "Holocaust," is the focal point for the Jews insofar as it can be used to ensure that Catholic civilization will never rise again...because of the unacceptable and allegedly unavoidable consequences of its previous existence.
Never mind that a furious debate rages within the Jewish community over the uniqueness of Jewish suffering during that period. Never mind that it is not at all a forgone conclusion that Hitler's attempt to rid Europe of the Jews was necessarily a fruit of those historical measures against them that the Catholic Encyclopedia defends and explains. The sheer magnitude of suffering is sufficient to stop all rational discussion, and, most importantly, to shift the focus from the question of allegiance to Christ and the civilization which faith in Him produced, to one of ensuring that pluralism triumphs indefinitely as the only means of guaranteeing that the "Holocaust" happens "never again."
Just a few illustrations will suffice. On the political front, the Church will never be able to apologize enough for its numerous "crimes" against pluralism. It is an historical fact–one to the credit of Catholics–that the Church did not willingly surrender in the war to preserve the union of Church and State. But it is also a fact which will never cease to be a source of resentment for those whose ultimate goal is the exclusion from public life of all influence of the True Religion. A Jewish columnist for The New Republic wrote, in response to the papal apologies of March, 2000, that
the outrages to which the pope refers were the direct consequence of the Church's holy alliance with the state; and it is worth recalling that it was modern politics, liberal politics, secular politics, and not anything that the Church said or did, that dissolved this unholy association of religion and power.84
Daniel Goldhagen finds the Church's apologies and conciliatory efforts "tepid and deeply flawed," and filled with "half-heartedness and historical fabrications."85 Commenting on the ultimate relevance of his book, which claims to demonstrate that the Church's anti-Jewish stance paved the way for the "Holocaust," Kertzer said in a recent interview that
the theme of his book...is still relevant and embraces far more than the tragic relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jews. It is about the importance of religious plurality: of respect for others' beliefs. "I think the book shows that religions always become dangerous when people start to think they have unique access to God's message, and possess the power to enforce it."86
The ultimate relevance of the "Holocaust" as a means of forcing the reconciliation between the Jews and the Church (in order to ensure that the ideological roots of Christendom are never again available for its historical reconstruction) is just as apparent on the religious front. The essence of Carroll's project in Constantine's Sword is to examine "the core tragedy of Western Civilization, which is, after all, what became apparent at Auschwitz."87 And for him, as for his fellow ideologues, the singular institution responsible for the sins of Western Civilization is its Faith: "An inquiry into the origins of the Holocaust in the tortured past of Western civilization is necessarily an inquiry into the history of Catholicism." The key factor in ensuring that the West will never again be the same is ensuring that the old Faith will never be the same, which is why he calls for a Vatican III which will condemn the anti-Judaism of the New Testament, bless democracy and pluralism, and repeal the dogmatic definition of infallibility as an obvious mistake (in light of the "Holocaust"). Carroll can afford to hope that this ultimate liquidation of the old Faith will take place precisely because the pressure for it to occur springs directly from the use that the twin pillars of academia and the media make of the "Holocaust." "The reforming impulse [of Vatican II] refuses to die," Carroll says, "because the event that set it moving has only continued to grow in force in the conscience of the West."88
Regardless of Carroll's rather candid admission of his intentions, modern Churchmen seem to be fairly responsive to pressure from him and his colleagues. The Biblical Commission's new text "hopes to foster love toward the Jews in the Church of Christ," following the "abominable crimes" of which they were the object during World War II.89 It begins by recognizing "in the wake of [the] enormous tragedy [of the "Holocaust"] the need to reassess...relations with the Jewish people," and Cardinal Ratzinger asks that Catholics respect the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament "in the light of what has happened." Hardly novelties, these hopes merely follow upon what was expressed in the official Catholic commemoration of the "Shoah." The document reads:
We pray that our sorrow for the tragedy which the Jewish people has suffered in our century will lead to a new relationship with the Jewish people. We wish to turn awareness of past sins into a firm resolve to build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Judaism among Christians or anti-Christian sentiment among Jews, but rather a shared mutual respect, as befits those who adore the one Creator and Lord and have a common father in faith, Abraham.90
This chronicle of the modern Church's attempt to satisfy Jewish demands that she once and for all renounce her Messias and commit irrevocably to a pluralism which will enshrine the divorce of religion and politics, and ensure the permanent disappearance of Catholic civilization, is a sad story indeed. But all is not lost. There is ultimately the Faith, and no matter how much spin Navarro-Valls places on Cardinal Ratzinger's latest attempt to placate those demanding that the final nail be driven into the coffin of the West and its Religion, there can be no undoing of history. Christ was here, and He spoke. He spoke personally, assuring us that "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (Lk. 21:33). And He spoke through his Church, which teaches us definitively, on the subject of His exclusive role in the history of our redemption, that
when the fullness of time came in God's Divine Providence, the only-begotten Son of God became man, and in behalf of mankind made most abundant satisfaction in His Blood to the outraged majesty of His Father and by this infinite price He redeemed man for His own.91
And the same Church teaches us no less definitively that
the Kingdom of God as described and founded by Jesus has an historical name. It is the Christian Church, which was able silently to leaven the Roman Empire, which has outlived the ruin of the Jewish Temple and its worship, and which, in the course of centuries, has extended to the confines of the world the knowledge and the worship of the God of Abraham, while Judaism has remained the barren fig tree which Jesus condemned during His mortal life.92
There is to console us the sense and awareness of doing our duty during this unprecedented time in history. Part of that duty consists in holding on to what we have had the grace to receive, a gesture that is, strangely enough, one of true ecumenism with the Fathers and the Prophets of the Old Testament who longed so desperately for the arrival of our Lord. "Our faith in Christ is the same as that of the fathers of old," St. Thomas tells us. But he further reminds us that we stand on the opposite historical side of the Incarnation; a fact which dictates that an act of religious solidarity with them will necessarily be a vigorous practice of our own Catholic Faith.
...[S]ince they came before Christ, whereas we come after Him, the same faith is expressed in different words, by us and by them. For by them was it said: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son," where the verbs are in the future tense: whereas we express the same by means of verbs in the past tense, and say that she "conceived and bore." In like manner the ceremonies of the Old Law betokened Christ as having yet to be born and to suffer: whereas our sacraments signify Him as already born and having suffered. Consequently, just as it would be a mortal sin now for anyone, in making a profession of faith, to say that Christ is yet to be born, which the fathers of old said devoutly and truthfully; so too it would be a mortal sin now to observe those ceremonies which the fathers of old fulfilled with devotion and fidelity.93
The confidence of the enemies of the Catholic West demands our attention. Of the tendencies toward reform in the Church, Carroll remarks smugly: "There are forces at work here that transcend the power of any party in the Church to stop them."94 There is also, therefore, our social duty, insofar as God gives us the means and the opportunity to carry it out:
By his very nature, man is destined to live in society, and social organization wields an enormous influence on the individual persons composing it. Therefore, all the confirmed members of the Mystical Body, as soldiers of Christ the King, must be prepared to strive for the organization of society demanded by the very institution of the Mystical Body, with its Life of infinite dignity. In other words, they must strive for the acceptance in the political and economic life of States, of the order demanded by the dignity of membership of Christ, and resist as a united body all attempts to eliminate that order from the world.95
Finally, let us not fear the epithet "anti-Semite" as it is used by the enemies of the Faith and of the West. For Lazare himself admits that the term ultimately refers to the Catholic camp in "the struggle between the feudal state, based upon unity of belief, and the opposite notion of a neutral and secular state, upon which the greater number of political entities are at present based."96 He asserts that the Christian anti-Semite has for his ambition the restoration of the State which "had its foundations in theological principles."97 If such is the case–as both history and logic demonstrate to this day–may we all then have the courage to respond with the words of Fr. Fahey: "In that sense, every sane thinker must be an anti-Semite."98
The author is a Catholic living in Norfolk, VA, with his wife Randa and two daughters, Veronica Anne Marie and Natalie Josephine Marie. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1993, and is a student of 19th- and 20th-century Social Catholicism.
1. Summa Theologica (ST), II, I, Q. 103, Art. 3, ad 2,
2. The Catholic Encyclopedia (CE) (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907-12; On-line Edition Copyright 1999 by Kevin Knight), s.v., "Judaism."
3. James Carroll, Constantine's Sword (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2001), p. 50.
4. Melinda Henneberger, "Vatican Says Jews' Wait for Messias Is Validated by the Old Testament," The New York Times (NYT), Jan. 18, 2002, on-line (originally published on p. A8).
5. "The Biblical Commission, presided over by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is composed of 20 leading biblicists. The members were appointed by John Paul II at the cardinal's suggestion," according to the January 17, 2002, release from Zenit News Service, "Jewish Scripture Is a Key to Understanding Jesus, Document Says."
6. Zenit News Service, on-line.
7. Zenit News Service, on-line.
8. Zenit News Service, on-line.
9. The original reads, "Ma si e sbagliato, nel passato, a insistere unilateralmente su di essa, al punto da non tenere piu conto della fondamentale continuita (But it was wrong, in times past, to unilaterally insist on [the discontinuity] to the extent of taking no account of the fundamental continuity.)"
10. Zenit News Service, on-line. The actual statement can be found in §85 and is, not surprisingly, quite vague. In the sense of the original Italian, it seems to say not that the rupture between the Church and the Jews was a mistake, but that any conception that a rupture had occurred, which may have been held by Christians in the past, would have been a mistake, in light of the alleged scriptural connections between Christians and Jews. At any rate, either sense of the passage implies that there was no so-called rupture between Christians and Jews.
11. Henneberger, on-line.
12. Henneberger, on-line.
13. CE, s.v., "The Bible."
14. CE, s.v., "The Bible."
15. ST, III, Q. 49, art. 5, ad 1.
16. ST, II, I, Q. 107, art. 1, ad 1.
17. Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, quoted by Henneberger, on-line.
18. Henneberger characterizes Sant'Egidio as "a left-leaning Catholic group with a history of mediating international conflicts and promoting religious dialogue."
19. Quoted by Henneberger, on-line.
20. Quoted by Henneberger, on-line.
21. Zenit News Service, on-line.
22. We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Mar. 12, 1998, III.
23. We Remember, IV.
24. Carroll, p. 550. It may be useful to note in assessing Carroll's credibility as a critic of the Church that he was ordained a priest in 1969 and currently lives in Boston with his wife and two children.
25. Charles R. Morris, Atlantic Monthly, at www.amazon.com.
26. Boston Magazine, at www.amazon.com.
27. Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College, at www.amazon.com.
28. NYT, Jan. 14, 2001, at www.andrewsullivan.com.
29. Richard Morrison, "Vatican's Shameful Secret," The Times of London, Jan.18, 2002, on-line.
30. Published Sept. 1999 (New York: Viking Press), the book asserts, according to an amazon.com excerpt of a Washington Post review, that "the pro-Germany and 'anti-Judaic' Pacelli–who had spent 13 years in Munich and Berlin as papal nuncio–bears, according to this most important book, awesome personal responsibility for the evil of Hitler...and the Holocaust."
31. Quoted by Morrison, on-line.
32. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
33. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
34. Despite claims by reviewers that the book's "documentation [would] make refutation nearly impossible," Goldhagen's thesis provoked a firestorm of controversy and a devastating critique from Jewish author Norman Finkelstein entitled A Nation on Trial (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), in which Finkelstein accuses Goldhagen of practicing propaganda and not history. Similarly his latest thesis has been hotly contested even by Jews sympathetic to his position; most illustrative is the firestorm of criticism provoked by an article in the Jan. 21, 2002, New Republic, "What Would Jesus Have Done?" which served as a run-up to his book; the January 18, 2002, issue of Forward, the prominent Jewish weekly, severely criticized him for the one-sidedness of his article, without, however, seriously disputing his basic thesis.
35. Paul Gottfried, "Goldhagenizing the Catholic Church," lewrockwell.com, Jan. 18, 2002.
36. Nostra Aetate, 1965.
37. Quoted on p. 18 of de Poncins's work.
38. Count Leon de Poncins, Judaism and the Vatican (Hawthorne, CA: Omni/Christian Book Club), 1967, p. 140.
39. The substance of the article, "How the Jews Changed Catholic Thinking," is reprinted in de Poncins's book on pp. 167-73.
40. Carroll, p. 550.
41. "Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, No. 4," Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Dec. 1, 1974. It is worth noting that the instruction places the work of reforming Jewish-Catholic relations squarely in the context of the Vatican II reform on other fronts: "Lest the witness of Catholics to Jesus Christ should give offense to Jews, they must take care to live and spread their Christian faith while maintaining the strictest respect for religious liberty in line with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (Declaration Dignitatis Humanae)."
42. "Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church," Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, 1985. The preoccupation with religious liberty is apparent also in this document, which calls it "one of the bases–proclaimed by the Council–on which Judeo-Christian dialogue rests" (§2Iff).
43. We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Mar. 16, 1998.
44. Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, International Theological Commission, Dec.1999. The passage quotes We Remember sections IV and V. The accompanying prayer (IV) at the Universal Prayer Service of Mar.12, 2000, cordially referred to the adherents of Judaism as the "People of the Covenant."
45."Discourse to the New Israeli Ambassador," Zenit News Service, Sept.18, 2000, on-line.
46. "Dominus Jesus," delivered at the 17th meeting of the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, New York, May 1, 2001.
47. Carroll, p. 566.
48. Carroll, p. 567.
49. Henneberger, on-line.
50. "Founded in 1976, by Rabbi David Hartman, the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI) in Jerusalem is a leading innovator in the field of Jewish pluralistic thought and education. The Institute trains educators, scholars, rabbis and community leaders to re-examine the tradition in light of Jewish sovereign power in Israel, and unprecedented Jewish achievement in the Diaspora." See http://www.drgnyc.com/ current_searches/searchmaster.cfm?jobID=48.
51. See http://www.houghtonmifflmbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/carroll.
52. Biography of James Carroll, Members of the International Advisory Board, International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University (see http: //www.brandeis.edu/ethics/about/board_bios.html).
53. Zenit News Service, on-line.
54. Quoted by Henneberger, on-line. Rabbi Alberto Piattelli is a professor and leader of the Jewish community in Rome, according to the ATT article.
55. Candice Hughes, "Praise for Vatican Paper on Jews," The Associated Press, January 18, 2002.
56. "The Messiah Document," ATT, Jan. 23, 2002, on-line.
57. The New Encounter Between Christians and Jews, New York: Philosophical Library, 1986.
58. From the introduction to Aunt Edith: The Jewish Heritage of a Catholic Saint, by Susanne M. Batzdorff (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1998), as posted at http://www.neuron.net/~ mugwump/jcbib.html.
59. Kevin O'Sullivan, "Mel's Religious Venture Sparks Row," Daily Mirror (UK), April 29, 2003, on-line.
60. Christopher Noxon, "Is the Pope Catholic...Enough?" on-line (originally published at p. 50).
61. de Poncins, p. 163.
62. Henneberger is quoting Tullia Zevi, a longtime Jewish community leader and commentator in Rome.
63. The NYT calls Vittorio Messori "a Catholic writer and commentator."
64. Quoted by Henneberger, on-line.
65. CE, s.v., "Judaism."
66. CE, s.v., "Messiah."
67. Joshua Jehouda, L'Antisemitisme, Mirroir du Monde, p. 136, quoted by de Poncins, p. 37.
68. L'Harmonie entre l'Eglise et la Synagogue, p. 9 and a note on p. 98, quoted by Fr. Denis Fahey in The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation (Palmdale, CA: Christian Book Club of America), 1953, p. 100.
69. CE, s.v. "Pharisees."
70. CE, s.v. "Messiah."
71. L'Evangile de Jesus-Christ, p. 463, quoted by Fr. Fahey in The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation, p. 84.
72. From an interview with International Herald Tribune (IHT) book reviewer Richard Bernstein, Oct. 3, 2001, IHT, on-line.
73. Bernstein, on-line.
74. CE, s.v. "Judaism." The quote from the Catholic Dictionary is italicized for clarity.
75. Quoted in Marc Perelman, "Catholics, Jews, Unite to attack Scholar's Latest," Forward, Jan. 18, 2002, on-line.
76. Cf. Pope Benedict XIV, A Quo Primum, Encyclical on Judaism in Poland, June 14, 1751.
77. Joshua Jehouda, L'Antisemitisme, Mirroir du Monde, pp. 168-172, quoted by de Poncins, p. 36.
78. Integrates Judentum, Berlin, quoted by de Poncins in The Secret Powers Behind Revolution (Hawthorne, CA: Omni/Christian Book Club of America), p. 224.
79. The Jewish World, Feb. 9, 1883, quoted by Fr. Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganization of Society (Palmdale: Omni, 1988), pp. 277-78. It is worth noting that this work contains an Imprimatur from the Bishop of Cork dated 1943.
80. Antisemitism, Its History and Its Causes (London: Britons Publishing Company, 1967), p. 142.
81. Fedor Dostoievsky, Journal d'un Ecrivain, 1873-1876 (Editions Bossard, 1877), quoted by de Poncins in The Secret Powers Behind Revolution.
82. Israel Shamir, "Apocalypse Now," writing for MediaMonitors.net, on January 31, 2002. According to the website biography, Shamir was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war. His career as a journalist included employment with Israel Radio, the BBC, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, and Al Hamishmar newspaper. He also served in the Knesset as the spokesman for the Israeli Socialist Party and has translated selected chapters of Joyce's Ulysses, which were well received by publishers in Moscow, Tel Aviv, New York and Austin, Texas. Another of his translations, The Israeli-Arab Wars, by former Israeli President Chaim Herzog, was published in London. He has since converted to Orthodox Christianity.
83. CE, s.v. "Pharisees."
84. Leon Wieseltier, "Sorry," The New Republic, March 27, 2000, on-line.
85. Quoted in Perelman, on-line.
86. Bernstein, IHT on-line.
87. "A Conversation with James Carroll," Houghton Mifflin Trade & Reference Division, on-line (see http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/carroll).
88. Carroll, p. 555.
89. Quoted in the Zenit News Service wire, on-line.
90. We Remember, V.
91. Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus (1900), §3.
92. CE, s.v. "Judaism."
93. ST, II, I, Q. 103, art. 4.
94. David Allan Dodson, "Author Foresees Better, Stronger Catholic Church," CNN.com, Mar. 7, 2001.
95. Fr. Denis Fahey, The Church and Farming (Hawthorne, CA: Omni/Christian Book Club of America, n.d.), p. 190.
96. Lazare, p. 162.
97. Lazare, p. 162.
98. Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganization of Society, pp. 277-78.
Current Issue
