Ecumenism: What Catholics Think About Jews

A broad spectrum of Roman Catholic opinion holds that the Vatican Council must make a pronouncement on its relationship to Judaism. German bishops, aware that Catholic references to “perfidious Jews” encouraged Nazi antiSemitism, strongly support the proposal. So do U.S. bishops, who are eager for their church to speak out on matters that concern harmony in a pluralistic society. Last fall’s session of the council received a draft proposal that Jews found pleasing, but never got around to debating it. Since then the proposal has been rewritten—and weakened so much that when Jewish leaders read it last week they were appalled.

Guilty of Deicide? The original draft was composed by Augustin Cardinal Bea of Rome’s Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, and declared that guilt for the death of Jesus was borne by all mankind. Therefore, it said, sermons and catechism lessons should not misuse the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion to imply that the Jews were guilty of deicide. This declaration was bitterly opposed by Catholic bishops from the Middle East, who share the anti-Israel feelings of their Moslem neighbors, and by many European conservatives, who argued that Bea’s text ran counter to what the New Testament plainly says.

The revised statement on anti-Semitism still warns that Jews should not be regarded as “an accursed people” and acknowledges Christianity’s roots in the faith of the Old Testament. But instead of clearing the Jews of deicide, it says that sermons and catechisms should “refrain from accusing the Jews of our times of what was perpetrated during the Passion of Christ.” The declaration also prays for the conversion of the Jews to Christianity, and has been expanded to include a word of good will for other non-Christian faiths, notably Islam.

Distrust & Resentment. U.S. Jews were dismayed by the tone and spirit of the revision. Particularly offensive to them was the reference to conversion, which was not matched by any call for Moslems to become Christians. Perhaps the most telling criticism came from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of Manhattan’s Jewish Theological Seminary, a good friend of Cardinal Bea’s, who has worked long and hard for better Christian-Jewish relations. “A message that regards the Jew as a candidate for conversion and proclaims that the destiny of Judaism is to disappear is bound to foster reciprocal distrust as well as bitterness and resentment,” he said. “As I have repeatedly stated to leading personalities of the Vatican, I am ready to go to Auschwitz any time, if faced with the alternative of conversion or death.”

A number of influential U.S. Catholic prelates, including Richard Cardinal Gushing of Boston, have indicated that they will fight for a strong declaration at the third session. The odds were that a better draft would be voted; even so, some felt that no statement at all might have been better than the spectacle of Christendom’s largest church backing and filling over how it should condemn antiSemitism.