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In 1884 Pope Leo XIII experienced a terrifying vision. Consulting with several cardinals after the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in his private Vatican chapel, the Pope paused at the foot of the altar. Suddenly he became pale and catatonic. After a short interval, however, he resumed normal behavior and said, “Oh, what a horrible picture I was permitted to see!” The Pope told his cardinals that he had seen demons and heard Satan’s guttural voice boasting to God that he could destroy the Church and drag the world to hell if he were given sufficient time and power. Satan had asked God for a century of enhanced influence and it was granted. The Pope further understood that if Satan didn’t destroy the Church during the twentieth century he would suffer a crushing defeat. The Pope hurried to his office, wrote the St. Michael prayer, and asked that every Catholic say it every day.
Satan announced his challenge through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), in The Gay Science, depicting a madman crying out, “Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I.” Nietzsche’s satanic madman smashed the lamp he brought to shed light on this revelation and say in disgust, “I have come too early, my time is not yet, an allegory for smashing Jesus, Jn 8:12 the light of the world, who told His mother Mary at Cana, Jn 2:4 “My hour has not yet come.” The madman continued, “This tremendous evil is still on its way, still wandering, it has not yet reached the ears of men.” Nietzsche saw the human condition as gravely ill, made especially so by Christianity with its emphasis on good and evil. His solution was the reconstitution of the human race through the development of a master race and the elimination of inferior races which would overcome the Christian paradigm of good and evil, and Christianity itself. The Nazis based their effort to destroy the Jews on Nietzsche’s model.
Our Lord answered by sending His Blessed Mother on May 13, 1917 to make the first of her six appearances to the three children at Fátima, Portugal. “If what I say is done,” she told them, “Many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father.” On the night of January 25-26, 1938, the sky over most of the earth was aglow with crimson light. In March 1938, during the pontificate of Pius XI, Nazi soldiers marched into Austria to begin the Anschluss.
Both Nietzsche and the Blessed Virgin pointed straight toward the Shoah, Satan’s attempt to destroy the Jews and thereby prevent Christ’s final victory at the Second Coming. It has been widely observed that in a mysterious way, Jews across the centuries have reflected the image of Jesus. They have walked a long via crucis, beaten, mocked and derided. Mystically speaking, the Jews were crucified at Auschwitz and three years later rose from the dead in the nation Israel. The great Jewish artist Marc Chagall painted images of a very Jewish Christ crucified in White Crucifixion, Exodus, and other works. Christ used the Shoah to prepare the Jewish people for the fulfillment of their election.
The Shoah martyred six million Jews. More Christians were martyred during the twentieth century than in all the previous nineteen centuries combined. Jews and Christians participated together in Christ’s redemptive crucifixion.
Jesus said, Jn 3:5 “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” He was speaking to Nicodemus, a devout Jew and member of the Sanhedrin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1257, says, “The Lord himself affirms that Baptism is necessary for salvation. He also commands his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to all nations and to baptize them. Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament. The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude; this is why she takes care not to neglect the mission she has received from the Lord to see that all who can be baptized are ‘reborn of water and the Spirit.’
It adds, at 1260, “Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.”
Dietrich von Hildebrand, in Trojan Horse, wrote,
As for the Jews, it should be apparent that an ecumenical spirit can only lead to communion with the Orthodox or possibly with the Conservative Jews—that is, with those who still believe in the Old Testament. Notwithstanding the deep dogmatic differences that separate Jews from Christians, their belief in the revelation of the Old Testament, their profound faith in God, their reverence, and their sense of the sacred constitute a powerful common basis.
There is an ongoing discussion whether Jews who do not read the Torah, do not daven in the synagogues, do not in some cases even believe in God, participate in the election. Jews themselves argue incessantly over who is a Jew. The National Council of Synagogues, (NCS) realizing that it needed to answer the question, “Who do you say that I am,” offered a theological definition defining the Jewish people as, “a physical people called upon to live in a special relationship with God.” The NCS explains: “partners with God in a sometimes stormy and sometimes idyllic romance, in a loving marriage that binds God and the People of Israel together forever and which gives the deepest possible meaning to Jewish existence.”
It is striking that the Catholic Church, the new and true Israel, fits that definition perfectly.
Rabbi Jacob Neusner believes that much of what passes for dialogue is a sham, what he calls “juxtaposed monologues” and that a true encounter has not yet begun. He says it is not enough merely to find beliefs in common, but that we must look for resources within our own faith tradition that form a point of entry into the other.
He offers the example of a Jewish attempt to enter into the Roman Catholic devotion to Mary and her special role as an intercessor before God. He looks at a story in the Lamentations Rabbah, a midrash, rabbinic treatise, on the Lamentations of Jeremiah. This story concerns God during the Babylonian Exile. Abraham pleads with God to return them to Israel, so do Isaac, Jacob and Moses, all to no avail. Then “Rachel, our mother, leapt to the fray” and pointed out to God that she had waited for Jacob for seven years and that after those seven years when the time came for her wedding, her sister took her place in bed. But having compassion for her sister, Rachel crawled under the bed on which Jacob was lying with her sister and “I made all the replies so that he would not discern the voice of my sister. I paid my sister only kindness, and I was not jealous of her, and I did not allow her to be ashamed, and I am a mere mortal, dust and ashes... But you are the King, living and enduring and merciful. How come then that you are jealous of idolatry which is nothing, and so have sent my children into exile”... Forthwith the mercy of the Holy One, blessed be he, welled up, and he said: “For Rachel I am going to bring the Israelites back to their land.” This story enables him to grasp something of the Blessed Virgin.
We have to look for the bridge upon which we can cross into one another’s reality.
The great Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, in The Star of Redemption, looked closely at the Star of David as a model for the basic unity of the universe. Separating it into two triangles, he saw in the upper triangle the three-point relationship between God, the world, and man. In the lower he saw creation, revelation and redemption. The complete star is the symbol of Israel. Rosenzweig saw in the Star of David a two-covenant theory of redemption. He saw the Jews in their own saving covenant anchored in Sinai, and he saw Christians in a saving covenant anchored in Christ.
During the 1960s, after Jewish leaders had uniformly praised Pope Pius XII for doing all he could to save Jews, liberal Jews suddenly turned against him. The charge was inherently dishonest because it was framed as what formal logic calls an “unfalsifiable proposition.” No matter how often Pius XII publicly spoke out against the Shoah, it could always be argued that he should have done more. Satan thought he was attacking the Catholic Church. As always, Christ was thinking farther ahead. The Jews, in their intense focus on the Shoah, the “final solution,” were becoming ever more like Catholics who are intensely focused on Christ’s Final Sacrifice.
In the distance we can see the faint outline of a bridge.
Pope John Paul II has described the survival of the Jewish people until the present day as a “supernatural fact.” The evidence is visible. All the ancient tribes from their part of the world, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, and Philistines, are gone. Today’s Egyptians and Greeks are nothing like their ancient counterparts. Yet, even most Jews would not go that far. Liberal Jews, the great majority, say Jewish survival depends more on culture and ethnicity than on God and Torah. The Pope has more faith in the Covenant than most Jews.
Holy Mother Church is starting to see Rabbi Yeshua as the most Jewish Jew of all. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 578 tells us, “Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and therefore the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, was to fulfill the Law by keeping it in its all-embracing detail ... He is in fact the only one who could keep it perfectly.” Of the 613 Torah mitzvot, 102, more than on any other subject, address Sacrifices and Offerings. That does not count the 30 mitzvot on Priests and Levites or the 33 on Temple, Sanctuary and Sacred Offerings. Sacrifice was the highest form of Jewish worship, the only one for which a priest was required, the only one for which the priest entered the Holy of Holies. Rabbi Yeshua fulfilled the Torah mitzvot on sacrifices through His Final Sacrifice, after which the Temple sacrifices ceased forever. His followers, through the Church that He instituted, have re-presented His Final Sacrifice ever since, and will until the end of time.
Fr. Elias Friedman, OCD, the spiritual father of the AHC, wrote in Jewish Identity, “C.A. Rijk expressed the opinion ‘that we suffer from a total absence in the Church of a real theology of Israel, one which would be faithful to the Biblical vision of things.’ He went on, ‘The manuals of theology deal with the Old Testament, but never with Judaism after the coming of Christ.’” For example, the traditional explanation for the ingathering of Jews into the Catholic Church has been to open the way to the Second Coming. “The glorious Messiah’s coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition of all Israel, for a hardening has come upon part of Israel.” But I believe there is more to it. We have needed the Jews as living witnesses of Jesus’ extremely pure Jewishness. Post-Christic Judaism, by driving the Jewish Christians out of the synagogues, separated us from a vital part of who He is, the most Jewish Jew of all. The Catholic Church has all the teachings, all that we need for salvation. To become the bride of Christ, Holy Mother Church has to become Jewish in its stories, in its sense of self.
The outline of a bridge becomes discernible.
After Vatican II, Holy Mother Church began to lead her flock toward the rapprochement with the Jewish people.
Pope Paul VI’s Nostra Aetate, 4, 1965, states: “Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ – Abraham’s sons according to faith – are included in the same Patriarch’s call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church is mysteriously foreshadowed by the chosen people’s exodus from the land of bondage.” In short, the Jews were the first to receive the revelation that God’s Messiah completed.
Nostra Aetate continues, “Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues.” To work toward this mutual understanding and respect, Nostra Aetate continues, “Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.”
The then-new Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued a statement, Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration “Nostra aetate” n. 4 in 1974. It contains much ordinary guidance on how to treat Jewish teaching with dignity, but a few paragraphs particularly warrant attention.
One was, “In virtue of her divine mission and her very nature the Church must preach Jesus Christ to the world (Ad gentes 2). Lest the witness of Catholics for Jesus Christ should give offence 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). They will likewise strive 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.” In this the Church acknowledged that Jewish spirituality reflects an innate longing for the transcendent God. The 1974 guidelines add, “When commenting on biblical tests, emphasis will be laid on the continuity of our faith with that of the earlier Covenant, in the perspective of the promises, without minimizing those elements of Christianity which are original. We believe that those promises were fulfilled with the first coming of Christ. But it is none the less true that we still await their perfect fulfillment in his glorious return at the end of time.”
The 1974 Guidelines add: “The history of Judaism did not end with the destruction of Jerusalem, but rather went on to develop a religious tradition. And, although we believe that the importance and meaning of that tradition was deeply affected by the coming of Christ, it is still nonetheless rich in religious values.” This paragraph needs the most careful analysis. Post-Christian Judaism changed in two very important ways. First, Jews no longer carried on the mitzvot to sacrifice. Jesus fulfilled and completed the sacrifice mitzvot in His own Final Sacrifice, which Catholics, completed Jews, will re-present until the end of time. Second, while pre-Christic Judaism pointed toward Christ, post-Christic Judaism pointed away from Christ, taking on a distinctly anti-Christian tone. Its continuing richness in religious values comes from its ongoing interest in the Torah, and from its continued possession of the divine election.
Finally, the 1974 Guidelines say, “There is also an ecumenical aspect to the question: the very return of Christians to the sources and origins of their faith, grafted on to the earlier Covenant, helps the search for unity in Christ, the cornerstone.” The Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews sees the rapprochement as a key to Christian unity, that we may be “one flock, one shepherd.” (John 10:16)
Let us now turn to Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church, 1985, also published by the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.
The Preliminary Considerations, say, “… the Holy Father plainly drew inspiration from the Council Declaration Nostra Aetate, 4, which says: ‘All should take pains, then, lest in catechetical instruction and in the preaching of God’s Word they teach anything out of harmony with the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ; as also from these words: Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred Synod wishes to foster and recommend mutual understanding and respect.’” But it does not appear anywhere in Nostra Aetate! Vatican scholarship is simply too good to let something like that slip by unnoticed. This is sabotage, a sign that someone in the Vatican does not understand the large dimension of salvation history in which Notes participates. Both sides have their naysayers; this is a reminder to remain vigilant.
Notes reached out as Rabbi Neusner had suggested, to the personal touch that provides entry into the other. At § 2, “The aim is, moreover, to present the events of the Old Testament not as concerning only the Jews but also as touching us personally. Abraham is truly the father of our faith (Rm. 4:11-12; Roman Canon: patriarchae nostri Abrahae). And it is said (1 Co. 10:1): “Our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea.” The patriarchs, prophets and other personalities of the Old Testament have been venerated and always will be venerated as saints in the liturgical tradition of the Oriental Church as also of the Latin Church.”
Notes said, at § 3, “This concern for Judaism in Catholic teaching has not merely a historical or archeological foundation. As the Holy Father said in the speech already quoted, after he had again mentioned the ‘common patrimony’ of the Church and Judaism as ‘considerable:’ ‘To assess it carefully in itself and with due awareness of the faith and religious life of the Jewish people as they are professed and practiced still today, can greatly help us to understand better certain aspects of the life pastoral of the Church’ (italics added). It is a question then of pastoral concern for a still living reality closely related to the Church. The Holy Father has stated this permanent reality of the Jewish people in a remarkable theological formula, in his allocution to the Jewish community of West Germany at Mainz, on November 17th, 1980: ‘The people of God of the Old Covenant, which has never been revoked.’” Here the Notes goes beyond relationship, all the way to theology. Post-Christic Judaism has value today, not merely as the echo of a distant past but as a living covenant.
Notes having entered the realm of theology, is careful. At § 7 “Jesus affirms that there shall be ‘one flock and one shepherd’ (Jn. 10:16). The Church and Judaism cannot, then, be seen as two parallel ways of salvation and the Church must witness to Christ as the Redeemer for all.”
Then came a key passage. At § 10, “We shall reach a greater awareness that the people of God of the Old and the New Testament are tending towards a like end in the future: the coming or return of the Messiah – even if they start from two different points of view. It is more clearly understood that the person of the Messiah is not only a point of division for the people of God but also a point of convergence.” Finally, we see a reaching forward to the end. Having participated together in the Messiah’s crucifixion, Jews and Catholics are ready to participate in His resurrection. “The glorious Messiah’s coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition of all Israel.”
That is the high point, but there is more. Notes observes, for instance, that Jesus was not always critical of Pharisees. At § 16 it points out that Lk 13:31 Pharisees warn Jesus of the risks He is running, that Mk 12:34 Jesus praised some Pharisees, and that Lk 7:36, 14:1 Jesus ate with Pharisees. It adds that Pharisees are not mentioned in the accounts of the Passion, and that Acts 5:34 Rabbi Gamaliel defended the Apostles in a meeting of the Sanhedrin.
Then, at § 21a, Notes says, “The Gospels are the outcome of long and complicated editorial work. The dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum, following the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s Instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia, distinguished three stages: “The sacred authors wrote the four Gospels, selecting some things from the many which had been handed on by word of mouth or in writing, reducing some of them to a synthesis, explicating some things in view of the situation of their Churches, and preserving the form of proclamation, but always in such fashion that they told us the honest truth about Jesus” (no. 19). Hence, it cannot be ruled out that some references hostile or less than favorable to the Jews have their historical context in conflicts between the nascent Church and the Jewish community.” Notes here quotes Dei Verbum 19 out of context to suggest that some references unfavorable to Jews were the result of long and complicated editorial work in an atmosphere of conflict. Scripture scholars love to speculate on what really happened, as opposed to what the Gospels say happened. But Dei Verbum, in the same passage, said: “Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held, and continues to hold, that the four Gospels just named, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day He was taken up into heaven.”
In a joint communiqué, signed on June 29, 1995, Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Bartholomew expressed their acceptance of the Balamand principles. Their communiqué includes the following statement: “The Joint Commission [which met at Balamand] was able to proclaim that our Churches are recognized mutually as Sister Churches, responsible together for the preservation of the One Church of God.”
The Balamand Agreement states, at § 21, “The first step to take is to put and end to everything that can foment division, contempt, and hatred between the Churches. For this the authorities of the Catholic Church will assist the Eastern Catholic Churches and their communities so that they themselves may prepare full communion between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The authorities of the Orthodox Church will act in a similar way towards their faithful.”
It continues, at § 22, “Pastoral activity in the Catholic Church, Latin as well as Eastern, no longer aims at having the faithful of one Church pass over to the other; that is to say, it no longer aims at proselytizing among the Orthodox. It aims at answering the spiritual needs of its own faithful and it has no desire for expansion at the expense of the Orthodox Church.”
Pope John Paul II is very much aware that we have just emerged from the martyr century. He has read the signs of the times and knows that time may be short. He is putting a great deal of effort into restoring Christian unity. He has agreed to a cessation of evangelization by individuals because he is trying to evangelize an entire schismatic religious community of some 200 million souls to cross the Tiber and return to Rome.
He is also trying to evangelize the entire Jewish people.
Let us remember the words of St. Peter, 1 Pet 3:15 “Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.”
Copyright © 1999-2006 Martin K Barrack. All rights reserved.