Newspaper Page Text
Reconciliation - Ecumenical
Vatican Guidelines
< >
PAGE 5—June 19,1975
Renewal: Jews
“THE NEW VATICAN GUIDELINES for Catholic-Jewish from all walks of life to Toras being held aloft for public prayer
dialogue . . . recognize Judaism as a faith rich in spiritual in a square beside Jerusalem’s Western Wall. (NC Staff Photo)
vitality.” Sabbath prayers during Passover season attract Jews
Shape Of Things To Come
BY MARC H. TANENBAUM
The Vatican Guidelines on Catholic-Jewish
Relations issued in January 1975 declared:
“Christians must strive to acquire a better
knowledge of the basic components of the
religious tradition of Judaism; they must strive
to learn by what essential traits the Jews define
themselves in the light of their own religious
experience.”
What are some of these basic components of
Judaism?
The most important fact that needs to be
understood is: Judaism is NOT just another one
of the world’s great religions.
Judaism constitutes a Divine “breakthrough”
fin the consciousness of mankind. The Exodus
from Egypt was a turning point in human
history which decisively altered our
conceptions of God, man, and society. The Lord
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob intervened
in the events of history and brought about a
mighty redemption of the children of Israel
from slavery. Their liberation was two-fold:
They were liberated from the spiritual bondage
of idolatry and paganism in Egypt. They were
also liberated physically from persecution and
oppression. From that moment of the Exodus
and thereafter, the God of Israel was
experienced as a redeeming God who identified
Himself with His suffering slave people.
So transforming was the power of that
experience of God as liberator, that the
children of Israel and their Jewish descendants
have reenacted the Exodus event each year for
3,500 years by means of the Passover seder
service. Jewish families, in unbroken continuity
with the Biblical past, recall the Exodus not
simply as a memoriam of a past event, but as a
living encounter with the Divine Presence in
their midst, which commits them to struggle
against idolatry, injustice, and oppression in
every generation.
The Exodus, however, was not an end in
itself, but was rather a prelude to Mount Sinai
where God, out of His boundless grace and
love, entered into a Covenant with Israel.
Before Sinai, the Israelites were slaves,
“untouchables” in Egypt’s caste system,
without any human dignity, disposable work-
commodities whom Pharaoh could dispose of
with the flick of his royal finger. At Sinai, upon
entering into the “B’rit” (the Covenant) with
the Lord of Israel and accepting to become the
BY REV. EDWARD H. FLANNERY
The relations between Christians and Jews do
not enjoy the highest priority on the
ecumenical agenda of the churches. And yet in
a real sense these relations constitute the
ultimate ecumenism, the ultimate dialogue,*for
Christianity.
That we began as a Jewish sect is something
long forgotten. A long de-Judaization process
has all but obliterated the memory of our first
days. A few simple facts may revive these
memories.
Jesus was bom, lived, and died under the
Law. There is no evidence He intended to leave
the Synagogue. Historically, He should be seen
as a Rabbi of the Pharisaic tradition, probably
of the school of Hillel. Peter and Paul remained
in the Synagogue, as did no doubt the other
Apostles, who considered themselves expelled
from the Synagogue rather than willingly
leaving it. The Jewishness of the early Church is
best brought out perhaps by the first crisis in
the Church when at the so-called Council of
Jerusalem in 45 A. D. visions accorded to Peter
and Cornelius were required to show that pagan
converts to the Church would not have to
maintain the Jewish dietary laws to become
Christians (Acts: ch. 10). Before long the
de-Judaization process had thoroughly
Gentilized the Church and in the course of the
centuries reached the point of complete
forgetfulness of our Jewish roots. The present
confusion of identity in the Church can in large
part be attributed to this uprootedness from
the Jewish soil in which the Church grew.
Jewish-Christian understanding is necessary
for Christian purification. The anti-Judaic
theology elaborated by the early apologists and
Fathers had by the fourth century led to the
BY MONIKA HELLWIG
If you have Jewish friends, you have
probably noticed certain characteristics
common among them. They are in the top
brackets of the professions, the arts and
business in disproportionate numbers. Their
children tend to do very well in school. Even if
a particular family is not wealthy to begin with,
that family will probably become quite wealthy
during the time you know them. Some
non-Jews get discouraged and angry at this kind
of competition, and feel that the Jews must be
doing something unfair.
If you remain friends and find out more
about your Jewish acquaintances, you may also
discover that Jews are very seldom in court for
criminal offenses, that their names usually head
the lists for charitable contribution of all kinds,
that they are deeply committed to helping
fellow Jews in a variety of ways, that they are
likely to be supporting not only a local
bearers of the Ten Commandments among the
human family, these brick-making slaves were
transfigured into a state of holiness. The entire
people were to become “a kingdom of priests
and a holy nation.” Each human life, no matter
what his or her former status or indignity,
became irreversibly the bearer of the Divine
image. To the believer, nothing could thereafter
change that appreciation of the infinite
preciousness of ,human life - individual or
corporate.
Sinai stamped upon Israel their indelible
character as a “messianic people.” The
Covenant obligated them to carry out a task of
redemption in society. Israel was to create a
“model society” that did justice, loved mercy,
and walked humbly with God.
And that is where the “land of Israel” comes
into the picture. Just as God freely elected the
People of Israel for a Divinely-appointed task,
so God also elected through His Covenant with
Abraham to choose the Land of Israel as the
site for building the messianic society. “Now
the Lord said unto Abram,” the Bible records
in Genesis 12:4 through 13:15, “for all the land
which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to
thy seed for ever.”
From that time forward, across nearly 4,000
years, the Promised Land - Israel - became the
center of orientation of the Jewish people, the
scene of their Biblical origins and the setting for
the Messianic future. Only with that historic
background in mind can one make sense of the
powerful hold that Israel continues to exert on
Jews everywhere today.
There is another central theme in Judaism:
God’s election of the Jewish people is
permanent and is subject neither to
cancellation nor replacement. As proclaimed in
Deutoronomy 7 (and Psalm 89 and elsewhere in
the Bible and in post-Biblical Rabbinic
Judaism), “Know that the Lord thy God, he is
God, the faithful God, which keepeth the
covenant and mercy with them that love him
and keep his commandments to a thousand
generations.”
That certain knowledge of the constancy and
faithfulness of God who keeps His promises
with His people “for a thousand generations” is
the ultimate key to understanding how the
Jewish people have endured anti-Semitic
pogroms, inquisitions, discriminations, ghettos,
yellow badges of shame, even Auschwitz, and
have prevailed to this day.
charge of deicide against the Jewish people and
their repudiation and reprobation by God. It
has aptly been described as a “teaching of
contempt.” Imperceptibly this theological
attack turned into anti-Semitism, First affecting
the Christian state then the Christian people,
and becoming what has been described as a
“system of degradation.”
The long history of anti-Semitic oppression
in which Jews were ostracized, exiled,
ghettoized, forced into Baptism, charged with
ritual crimes, and murdered in great numbers
constitutes the greatest stain on the history of
Christendom. The purification of the Christian
conscience can never be complete until this
Christian pathology is faced, both in history
and in ourselves, confessed, and eliminated - a
task as yet only feebly begun. The fact that
Christian anti-Semitism has gone underground,
festering in our unconscious selves, makes the
matter of its cure a difficult one. Its elimination
from the depths of the Christian soul is an
urgent task confronting the Christian
conscience.
Only when this purification is accomplished
will we be able to broach the fundamental task
of revising and reconstructing our Christian
theology of Judaism. Upon the success or
failure w r e shall have here will depend the final
renewal of Christianity.
The task comprises a negative and a positive
phase. The first, the negative, has already been
seriously begun with the explicit repudiation of
the deicide charge in the II Vatican Council
Statement on the Jewish people (Nostra
Aetate,” 4) and the Vatican Guidelines
Implementing “Nostra Aetate” of 1975. But
this is only a beginning.
If Judaism is not deicidal, is it not rejected
and replaced by the Church in the plan of God?
synagogue but also some project or other in the
State of Israel, and that they have jokes, music,
customs, vocabulary, gestures which identify
them to one another and which only Jews
could enjoy and really understand.
Sometimes Christians resent these things and
wonder why Jews cannot keep their religious
convictions without being so clannish. Part of
the reason, of course, is that most of the Jews
we know were driven to this country by
persecution, from Russia, from Eastern Europe,
from Germany and elsewhere, and that they
could not have survived without being clannish,
any more than early groups of Irish immigrants
could have done. But there is another, deeper
reason, and that is that “being clannish” really
is a key element of the Jewish religious
tradition.
When Jews are deeply committed to the
Jewish community, they are living in loyalty to
God’s covenant and election. Their way of life
BY REV. JOHN B. SHEERIN, C.S.P.
The ecumenical movement is by no means
old or arthritic and may be just at the beginning
of its long-range influence, according to a
comment in “The Journal of Ecumenical
Studies” (Fall, 1974: p. 738). “An unchartered
The traditional answer has been yes. But it is
not that of St. Paul. Here the Apostle is
explicit. Jews have not been rejected because
God’s promises are irrevocable (Rom 11:29).
Even after Christ they still retain the covenants
and promises as well as the law (Rom 9:4:
written c. 60 AD). Indeed because of their
fathers, they are “beloved of God” (Rom
11:28). Paul reminds us that they are the
original olive branch unto which we have been
grafted, warning us “not to boast against the
natural branches” (Rom 11:17-21).
The foregoing teachings of Paul do not
include his whole theology of Judaism, but
they are an integral part of Christian teachings
which have over the centuries been ignored.
( '
KNOW
YOUR
FAITH
(All Articles On This Page
Copyrighted 1975 by N.C. News Service)
l /
rests on the conviction that there is one only,
all-powerful and all-caring God, who is
concerned for all mankind and for each human
person and who brings all mankind into an
alliance with Himself. Jews see themselves as
having been chosen, through no merit of their
own, to play a special role within that alliance
of all mankind with God.
A traditional way of expressing that role is
that they are to be a witness-people, a people
invited to an intimate sharing in the wisdom of
God’s law for mankind. The two stories that
best express the Jewish sense of destiny as a
people, the sense of special vocation, are the
stories of the Exodus from Egypt to become a
free and responsible people, and the story of
the assembly at Mount Sinai where God
revealed His Law to them as the special gift that
was to make them His people.
All pervasive in the Jewish way of life is the
confidence that God loves us in spite of the
injustices, wars, oppression and other evils that
are rampant in the world, and that He has
revealed to us the Law by which we can so live
as to build a better world and finally be
area of the ecumenical movement, now
beginning to be taken seriously, is the relation
between Christianity and Judaism.”
This is certainly true of Catholic-Jewish
relations in dialogue. The publication of the
new Vatican “Guidelines” for Catholic-Jewish
dialogue (January 1, 1975) has given a new
impetus to this dialogue and has accelerated its
pace. This is quite evident in the increased
workload of our Catholic-Jewish Secretariat at
Washington.
One of the reasons for the spurt of activity is
that Cardinal Willebrands’ Committee, in
presenting the new document, advocates a new
perspective on the Jewish people. No longer is
Judaism represented as a mere preparatory
stage on the way to Christianity or as a religion
that became obsolete with the founding of the
Christian Church: The “Guidelines” recognize
Judaism as a faith rich in spiritual vitality, “a
living community in the service of God, and in
the service of men for the love of God.” The
“Guidelines” therefore urge Christians to see
the Jews, not through Christian eyes, but to see
and define them in the light of the Jews’ own
religious experience.
This document is the blueprint, the shape of
things to come. A tone of compassionate
sympathy for the Jewish people is suggested by
the second sentence in the document. It recalls
“the memory of the persecution and massacre
of Jews which took place in Europe just before
and during the Second World War.” It goes on
to deplore the fact that even as late as the time
of Vatican II, the gap between Christian and
Jew had widened to such an extent “Christian
and Jew hardly knew each other.”
This lack of knowledge, from the Catholic
side, has been due not so much to benign
ignorance but to a tragic misunderstanding of
and misinformation about Judaism. In the
section dealing with Teaching and Education,
the document calls attention to a number of
areas in which Catholic teaching and
scholarship have clarified murky notions about
Jews such as the notion that the Jewish people
are collectively responsible for the death of
Jesus or the false impression that Old
Testament Judaism constituted a religion of
redeemed from the consequences of evil deeds.
The most characteristic prayer of Jews is the
“Shema,” the recollection that there is but one
God and that life is only worthwhile if one
loves God passionately and loves one’s neighbor
who is just like oneself.
Jesus was certainly taught as a child to make
that prayer the core of His life (as Jews were in
His time and have been ever since), and when
He was asked as a preacher what was the most
important thing to do in life, He referred
immediately to that prayer (Mt. 22: 34-40; Mk.
12: 28-34; and Lk. 10: 25-28). Looking back
on everything that had happened after His
death and resurrection, His followers realized
that that was the core of His own teaching and
that He had really added nothing to it, except
the way He Himself had carried it out, making
an utterly new beginning of human possibilities.
Of course, not everyone saw it that way.
Those who saw it that way were those whose
own lives had been touched and deeply affected
by Jesus or by the transformed lives of His
followers. Many devout Jews through history
fear, wrath and legalism in contrast to the New
Testament’s message of love of neighbor. Since
Vatican II, Catholic scholars have made
exhaustive studies of Catholic textbooks and
teaching materials and have published their
findings - a great mass of ugly stereotypes of
Jews, nasty fables about Jewish ritual murder
of Christian infants and numerous other items
that must be purged from Catholic teaching
materials.
The “Guidelines” go further than this. They
warn preachers of homilies against falsifying the
message of Scripture “especially when it is a
question of passages which seem to show the
Jewish people as such in an impossible light.”
The Vatican document also admonishes
members of translation commissions to take
special care in making translations of passages
to be used at Mass which parishioners might
misunderstand because of prejudice. The
document cites as examples, the word
“Pharisee” and the term “the Jews” as this
term is used in the Gospel of St. John. The New
Testament references to the Pharisees are
usually allusions to a certain type of Pharisee
already being discredited by the Jews generally:
they are not blanket condemnations of all
Pharisees.
This Vatican document also shows a graceful
sensitivity to Jewish sensibilities in warning
Christians in dialogue that they must have a
sympathetic understanding of Jewish
difficulties regarding the Incarnation. They are
urged “to understand the difficulties which
arise for the Jewish soul - rightly imbued with
an extremely high, pure notion of the divine
transcendence - when faced with the mystery of
the Incarnate Word.”
Cardinal Willebrands’ Committee has given
those working in the area of Catholic-Jewish
Relations an immensely helpful series of
suggestions, not an abstract theological treatise
but a simple, brief, clear and practical set of
recommendations based on actual experience in
the dialogue these last 10 years, and addressed
to Catholics anxious to get started in the
dialogue on a local level. It will undoubtedly
help immeasurably to dispel the miasma that
has so often clouded Catholic-Jewish relations.
could not possibly have seen it that way
because they did not meet Jesus in person and
the followers they met were not transformed
people at all. Today most of the Western world
is Christian, but it shows little concern for
peace, for the poor, the oppressed, the lonely,
the disabled, the elderly, the handicapped.
What a faithful Jew must do in a world like
that, is to be loyal to his traditions, to live at
least within the Jewish community that kind of
love of God and love of neighbor that will
establish a witness community within which
there is social concern. If Jews tend to become
wealthy that is largely because other Jews help
them. If they do well in studies it is because
they are brought up to have a sense of social
responsibility and personal vocation. If they do
not go to court for criminal offenses it is
because they are committed as a community to
a far more comprehensive law promoting a
decent and constructive way of life.
Surely what Christians should do in relation
to the Jews is at least to respect them for their
committed and integrated way of life, and to
learn from them to see whether we can arrive at
a better understanding of what it should mean
to be a follower of the Jewish Jesus.
Your Jewish Friends