Shalom! I just came from a meeting with Chicago board of Rabbis and Cardinal George, the cardinal of Chicago. He is a very impressive guy—two PhDs and they just loved listening to him talk. Ha tackled course about Catholicism, about Catholic-Jewish relations and I wanted to report on some of the things that he said.
First of all, in terms of one of the controversial things which is the…, he is now the newly elected President of the Council of Bishops of America. Evidently, they had a paper where they talked about how Catholics should take certain issues regard in voting. He said, voting is moral choice—when you make a decision, decision have consequences. And everybody has to decide on what basis they elect someone. As Catholics, we have an obligation, as catholic teachers, to teach what our tradition says. I do not know if anybody listens, I am sure even among the bishops, people vote differently but that is part of our obligation.
And the head of Chicago board of Rabbis said, it came in the context ably, brilliantly written, 44-page document is well worth reading. Then, he talked about the Catholic Bishops themselves in how they conduct dialogue, it is interesting he said that there is a basically two committees—one to deal with interfaith relations that has this dialogue with Muslims and Bahai and other groups. And there is the ecumenicism committee which deals with other Christian groups and the Jews. So that was very interesting.
He is going to Israel for the first time in years, coming up soon, and he is going to monitor carefully the statements that come out after that. He brought up the topic himself and then there was question about this new controversy about the Latin mass that being reintroduced in Good Friday. Evidently, there is a passes that close for the conversion of the Jews. He said he opposed to that. That it should be removed from the liturgy and he and the audience went to the Pope with the other Cardinals of this past weekend and he specifically asked the Pope to remove that from the liturgy. He did not get an answer yet but he definitely on that side.
Then, the issue of salvation, he said that is mostly a protestant issue. Catholics are not totally concerned with that, it is a way of life like the Judaism. He said then, what happened was Martin Luther was obsessed about his own salvation and he said he blew half a few verses from the New Testament which made that a much bigger issue that historically had been. He said he believes that Jesus is the savior for all humankind and so human being should know their savior, which of course Jews disagree with. But he said that he reaffirmed the Vatican too masses the Jews have an internal covenant with the Jewish which God has the internal covenant with the Jewish people and that he does not see Catholicism now a super-cessionistic, which means replaces Judaism but as a successor or as continuity he said, very interesting.
Then on the issue, one of the questions raised was that, there was evidently a sermon in front of the Pope by a high ranking priest at Easter time where he talked about the collective guilt of the Jews and complicity in the death of Jesus—raising that, it is 2,000-year old historic canard. Well, what the bishop, Cardinal George said to that was, that Jesus was a Jew, he lived them among Jews, he have some enemies as we all do, some of them are Jews, some were Roman, but you can not blame, there is no collective guilt, you can not everybody for a few people now liking him and that completely rejected the idea of Jews as complicity the death of Jesus, so should we.
It was overall a very positive session. I never seen such a big turnout from the Chicago board of Rabbis, everybody was there on time, clearly to hear a remarkable man who gave us this ‘toward the horizon’ of Jewish-Catholic relations.
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