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Posted on 01/23/2003 5:46:40 AM PST by SJackson
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI--The Church: Friend or foe?
Sergio Minerbi's critique of my article "Catholicism is our friend," (December 27) which was based on several years of intensive encounters with Catholic communities, is a combination of legitimate concern, exaggerated fears and outright distortions.
Minerbi offers one important insight. The Catholic Church of the Holy Land, represented by the Patriarch, Michel Sabbah, is indeed infused with hostility to Israel and a religious triumphalism that belongs to the pre-Vatican II era. As patriarch of the Holy Land, Sabbah has a substantial platform within the Church, and Minerbi is right to be concerned.
Typically, though, he omits the positive side of the story. Just last week, The Jerusalem Post reported that a delegation of bishops from the US and Europe meeting in Israel refused to issue a political statement taking sides on the conflict. In other words, the bishops rejected the patriarch's position.
Unlike the Protestant World Council of Churches, whose positions on Israel border on questioning the legitimacy of a Jewish state, the Catholic Church has repeatedly affirmed the Jewish right to return here and establish sovereignty in part of the land. The ongoing debate within the Catholic Church over the Middle East is precisely why it is imperative for Jews to stop fighting with Catholics over the Holocaust and concentrate on winning allies in the current war for Israel's legitimacy.
Minerbi's interpretation of the meaning of Edith Stein is precisely that: Minerbi's interpretation. Many Catholics I know understand Stein's canonization in a very different way - as a message aimed at Christians that an attack on Jews is an attack on the Church itself. I have no way of measuring how far-reaching that understanding goes in the Church. But neither does Minerbi.
Minerbi is right to note the problems inherent in the Church's official pronouncements on the Holocaust. But he is wrong in insisting that there is a conspiracy to "Christianize" the Holocaust.
The pope's frequent pronouncements about the Holocaust - he uses the Hebrew term "Shoah" - make clear that the victims were Jews and that they were killed for being Jews. So too, the Vatican's 1998 document on the Holocaust, "We Remember." That document has been rightly criticized for its defensiveness over Christian anti-Semitism. But even while obscuring Christian guilt, it clarifies Jewish victimization: "The Church approaches with deep respect and great compassion the experience of extermination, the Shoah suffered by the Jewish people during World War II The spoiled seeds of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism must never again be allowed to take root."
Rather than aggressively trying to Christianize the Holocaust, the Church is defending itself against accusations of complicity in it. As I noted in my article, dealing with those accusations should be an internal Christian debate. That debate is intensifying.
Minerbi's convoluted interpretation about the pope's note in the Western Wall is typical of his approach. He probes for hidden meanings and insinuations while ignoring the most obvious meaning. Yet what matters isn't how Minerbi understands the pope's supposedly hidden intentions, but that the Catholic world clearly understood the pope's language and gesture as undoing the Church's claim to exclusive possession of the covenant.
Minerbi mentions the "Dominus Jesus" document of October 2001 that insists the only way to salvation is through the Church. He doesn't tell us, though, that Cardinal Cassidy, until recently president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry, stated that "Dominus Jesus" didn't refer to the Jewish people and its covenantal relationship with God.
In my article, I wrote that the Church's transformation will take generations to complete. There have been setbacks - Minerbi accurately quotes the pope's statement that the new covenant has replaced the old. But that one-time lapse was never repeated and the weight of the pope's pronouncements on the subject form an overwhelmingly positive legacy.
Minerbi's position would be more compelling if he had offered caution rather than contempt, and if he had the graciousness to acknowledge any changes in the Church's position. Indeed, Minerbi could have been a useful voice in an essential Jewish debate over how to respond to Catholic overtures. But by dismissing four decades of Catholic self-confrontation - from theologians to Sunday school teachers - Minerbi reduces his position to a caricature.
Finally, Minerbi ends by attacking me for supposedly equating Jewish hostility toward Christianity and Christian hostility toward Jews. In fact, my article noted that there is no symmetry in intent or consequence between the two. Minerbi has every right to disagree with my position, but not to distort it.
The writer, Israel correspondent for the New Republic, is author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.
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SERGIO MINERBI--The Church: Friend or foe?
The exaggerated praise paid to the Catholic Church by Yossi Klein Halevi on December 27 derives to my mind from wishful thinking unfortunately unwarranted by facts. Theological problems are slightly more complex than a superficial impression received from a single visit and whoever writes about such matters has the duty to study the issue. This was not the case for Halevi.
First of all may I suggest not using the word "reconciliation" if one means appeasement, or pacification, in the relations with Christianity, since this word has a different meaning for Christians. St. Paul wrote (Ephesians, 2:14) that Jews and pagans should become "one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross." I raised this point at the meeting of International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations in New York in May 2001, and at least one of the Catholic priests agreed that it would be better to use the word "cooperation."
The "deliberate attempt to 'Christianize'" the Shoah can be detected in a series of deeds by the Catholic Church of today.
Edith Stein was canonized and the presumed day of her death in Auschwitz (August 9) has become the "Shoah day" for the Catholic Church, thus giving a person who converted to Catholicism as an example to follow.
On the day of her beatification in 1987, John Paul II said in a homily that Edith Stein was like "Esther who with the sacrifice of her own life contributed in a decisive way to the salvation of her people," the Jewish people. How could she save anybody while she and her sister were killed in Auschwitz?
It is evident that the only salvation he could possibly refer to was a spiritual one, that of showing the way to conversion. The pope added that "she died as a daughter of Israel 'for the glorification of the holy name of God' and at the same time as Sister Teresa Benedetta of the Cross." This adds insult to injury: the formula "for the glorification " is in Hebrew that of kiddush hashem, which for centuries was pronounced by Jews as their last living words when they preferred to die rather than abjure their Jewish faith.
Will the Church teach Catholics in future generations that the Shoah was mainly a Catholic tragedy? Or is this a very clever way to avoid any responsibility for the Shoah since the Church itself is defined a victim of the Nazis?
In 1984 a Carmelite monastery was established in Auschwitz in the so-called "theater," a place which had been used by the Nazis to store the poisonous gas Zyklon-B. Only after years of discussions with Jewish organizations was the monastery at last relocated a few hundred meters away from its original place.
MORE RECENTLY, in 1999, hundreds of crosses were planted by Kazimierz Switon, a Polish nationalist, near the previous site of the monastery; again there were lengthy discussions and in May 1999 the president of Poland, Alexander Kwasniewski, signed a bill into law establishing protective zones around Auschwitz. Thus in the end the small crosses were removed, but a big cross of seven and a half meters high remains on the spot.
The will of the pope and the Polish church to stress the Christian character of Auschwitz is clear. In every former death camp there is today a chapel, or a church, or a cross, even if all the inmates were Jews. Moreover the Polish Communist governments had a constant policy of dejudaization of the death camps, as Gerhart M. Riegner rightly stressed in his book Ne Jamais Desesperer.
This is also in contrast with Poland's obligations towards UNESCO, an organization of the United Nations which should guarantee that the status quo is preserved in Auschwitz. To add a convent to Auschwitz is a major modification of the status quo, and not "a natural expression of [Catholics'] faith," which could be done elsewhere, and to protest against it is a legitimate Jewish action and not "an infringement on their [Polish] sovereignty," as Halevi cites the Polish perspective.
So too, when Pope John Paul II visited Auschwitz on June 7, 1979, he defined the place as "the Golgotha of the modern world" hinting perhaps at the Golgotha in Jerusalem where a Jew was crucified in order to give birth to Christianity.
The connections of Halevi with Christian communities in Israel were probably only with one trend within those communities. Had he met the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Msgr. Michel Sabbah, or had he read his writings, such as the Pastoral Letter "In pulchritudine Pacis" of 1993, Halevi would realize that there is another trend preaching the theology of substitution and denying the Jews any historical links or rights to the Land of Israel.
This Palestinian trend is defined by the Jesuit priest Rossi de Gasperis of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem as "a cultural and spiritual Shoah" against the Jews.
Moreover this violently anti-Israel Palestinian trend overcomes the differences between the Christian religious communities, uniting the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Abu El-Assal, Episcopal Father Naim Ateek, and the Greek Orthodox priest Father Hanna Attala. The latter stated in July 2002 that "martyrdom" (suicide attacks) cannot be separated from the "liberation movement."
Many Palestinian Christians exploit religious Christian motives to foster their nationalistic ideology, not for peace and definitely not to "deepen the Christian world's relationship with the Jewish people" as Halevi writes.
Halevi enthusiastically claims that when the pope made his pilgrimage to the Western Wall in March 2000, his reference to the Jews as "the people of the Covenant" repudiated two millennia of supersessionism. He writes: "Now the church was reversing one of its seminal doctrines and insisting that two parallel covenants could coexist."
This is not the case. The text put by the pope into the Wall reads: "God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant."
The descendants of Abraham are the Jews, as well as the Christians and the Muslims, so in this text each of them may be chosen to bring the name of God to the nations. Moreover, the Jews are not expressly mentioned and "these children of yours" could be also the Christians or the Muslims. Nor are expressly named "those who [ ] have caused [ ] to suffer."
Finally "the people of the Covenant" are not necessarily the Jews. But even accepting that the pope is speaking about the Jews, the pope is committed to "genuine brotherhood" (indeed not much) "with the people of the Covenant." The last few words sound positive, although on another occasion Pope John Paul II said that the new Covenant has replaced the old Covenant since the Jews had not been faithful to it.
Not a word was written about the doctrine of the Church, which induced the persecutions, and the only reaction of the pope - as in Yad Vashem - is to be "deeply saddened." According to the pope, God should forgive "the behavior of those" unnamed people, "that have caused these children of yours (also unnamed) to suffer." Reading the document "Dominus Jesus" of October 2001, we learn that the only way to salvation is that of the Catholic Church, not even that of other Christian denominations.
We certainly need allies "to counter the growing delegitimization of Israel." Perhaps in the future the Catholic Church at large can become such an ally, but this is not yet the case. In April 2002 when armed Palestinians took over the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Israeli forces stayed outside, the Catholic Church directed all its accusations against Israel. Not a word of criticism was uttered against the armed Palestinians who had forced their entrance into the basilica. Aid organizations like Caritas Internationalis and Pax Christi have developed a one-sided political activity against Israel.
When he writes about the politics of the Vatican, Halevi shows an abysmal lack of understanding. To hope that "the Vatican should be telling us that it sees the attack on Jewish legitimacy as an attack on itself" seems to me a dream. The Vatican, like many Europeans, still hopes to contain the Muslim lust for world power with smiles and good manners.
The pope, for example, visited Damascus and did not react to President Bashar Assad referring to the Jews as killers of Jesus. In Bethlehem, the pope himself gave a gift to Yasser Arafat noting "the passion" of the Palestinians, a very similar concept.
As Jews, we certainly should respect any other religious faith insofar as it does not deal with politics, but to the best of my knowledge there is no official statement by a qualified rabbi showing contempt for Catholics. This idea of such symmetry was boosted by the pope while in Israel, when he spoke three times in two days about "anti-Christian sentiment among Jews."
But there is no symmetry and no possible comparison between the persecutions of the Jews by the Christians during previous centuries, and the so-called "anti-Christian sentiment." A Jew should know it.
The writer, a former Israeli ambassador, is the author of The Vatican and Zionism.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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I'm sure that's an issue.
Yeah, every so often a Christian Arab gets lynched by his Pallie brethren. Guess they have to keep them "in line".
Pretty interesting read. Mentions the Greek Orthodox archimandrite in the second letter....
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