Guéranger: the Church reminds us of the apostasy of the Jewish nation - Part II

Continuing from last week our examination of supercessionism in Volume 5 of Dom Prosper Guéranger's The Liturgical Year,the Gospel reading for Friday of the second week of Lent is from Mt 21, where we find the Parable of the Vineyard whose husbandmen eventually kill the owner's heir, that is, his very own son who was sent to them.

Here we have more than the mere figures of the old Law, which show us our Redeemer in the far distant future; we have the great reality. Yet a little while, and the thrice holy Victim will have fallen beneath the blows of His persecutors. How awful and solemn are the words of Jesus, as His last hour approaches! His enemies feel the full weight of what He says; but, in their pride, they are determined to keep up their opposition to Him, who is the Wisdom of the Father. They have made up their minds not to acknowledge Him to be what they well know He is -- the stone, on which he that falls shall be broken, and which shall grind to powder him on whom it shall fall. But what is the vineyard, of which our Lord here speaks? It is revealed truth; it is the rule of faith and morals; it is the universal expectation of the promised Redeemer; and, lastly, it is the family of the children of God, His inheritance, His Church. God had chosen the Synagogue as the depository of such a treasure; He willed that His vineyard should be carefully kept, that it should yield fruit under their keeping, and that they should always look upon it as His possession, and one that was most dear to Him. But, in its hard-heartedness and avarice, the Synagogue appropriated the Lord's vineyard to itself. In vain did He, at various times, send His prophets to reclaim His rights; the faithless husbandmen put them to death. The Son of God, the Heir, comes in Person. Surely, they will receive Him with due respect, and pay Him the homage due to His divine character! But no; they have formed a plot against Him; they intend to cast Him forth out of the vineyard, and kill Him. Come, then, ye Gentiles, and avenge this God! Leave not a stone on a stone of the guilty city that has uttered this terrible curse: 'May His Blood be upon us and upon our children!' [Mt 17:25] But you shall be more than the ministers of the divine justice; you yourselves are now the favored people of God. The apostasy of these ungrateful Jews is the beginning of your salvation. You are to be the keepers of the vineyard to the end of time; you are to feed on its fruits, for they now belong to you. From east and west, from north and south, come the great Pasch, that is being prepared! Come to the font of salvation, O ye new people, who are gathered unto God from all nations under the sun! Your mother the Church will fill up from you, if you be faithful, the number of the elect; and when her work is dome, her Spouse will return, as the dread Judge, to condemn those who would not know the time of their visitation. [Lk 19:44]

Guéranger: the Church reminds us of the apostasy of the Jewish nation - Part I

One of the uncomfortable facts we immediately run into when delving into traditional pre-1960 commentary on biblical texts is the bluntness with which it treats the Church's supersession of the Jewish nation as the 'new Israel.' While this is particularly uncomfortable for Protestants from those evangelical backgrounds accustomed to referring to contemporary Jews and the citizens of the modern state of Israel as 'God's chosen people," the same is true of Catholics influenced by such sentiments via the neoconservative and originally Jewish wing of the contemporary American politics or sensitized to accusations of anti-Semitism.

Nevertheless the fact remains that supersessionism (not anti-Semitism) is a firmly embedded, normative part of Catholic tradition; and in what follows I wish to offer some examples that surface in Volume 5 of Guéranger's The Liturgical Year,devoted to the liturgical season of Lent. [Note: I have changed the spelling of 'Chanaan' and 'Messias' to the more familiar 'Canaan' and 'Messiah'.]

For Friday of the second week of Lent, the first reading is from Genesis 37 on Joseph's elder brothers were all offended by his dream of their sheaves bowing to his, and his dream of their stars bowing to his moon. Guéranger writes:

Today the Church reminds us of the apostasy of the Jewish nation, and the consequent vocation of the Gentiles. This instruction was intended for the catechumens; let us, also, profit by it. The history here related from the old Testament is a figure of what we read in today's Gospel. Joseph is exceedingly beloved by his father Jacob, not only because he is the child of his favorite spouse Rachel, but also because of his innocence. Prophetic dreams have announced the future glory of this child: but he has brothers; and these brothers, urged on by jealousy, are determined to destroy him. Their wicked purpose is not carried out to the full; but it succeeds at least this far, that Joseph will never more see his native country. He is sold to some merchants. Shortly afterwards, he is cast into prison; but he is soon set free, and is made the ruler, not of the land of Canaan that had exiled him, but of a pagan country, Egypt. He saves these poor Gentiles from starvation, during a most terrible famine, nay, he gives them abundance of food, and they are happy under his government. His very brothers, who persecuted him, are obliged to come down into Egypt, and ask food and pardon from their victim. We easily recognize in this wonderful history our divine Redeemer, Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary. He was the victim of His own people's jealousy, who refused to acknowledge in Him the Messiah foretold by the prophets, although their prophecies were so evidently fulfilled in Him. Like Joseph, Jesus is the object of a deadly conspiracy; like Joseph, He is sold. He traverses the shadow of death, but only to rise again, full of glory and power. But it is no longer on Israel that He lavishes the proofs of His predilection; He turns to the Gentiles, and with them He henceforth dwells. It is to the Gentiles that the remnant of Israel will come seeking Him, when, pressed by hunger after the truth, they are willing to acknowledge as the true Messiah, this Jesus of Nazareth, their King, whom they crucified.

A Jewish Catholic convert publishes shocking open letter to Pope Francis

Pinchus Feinstein, "An Open Letter to Pope Francis" (On the Contrary, January 20, 2016):

His Holiness, Pope Francis

Vatican City

January, 2016

Dear Holy Father

I am a Jew. I have the assurance, as did Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, of direct descent from King David on my father’s side (my mother, I was assured was descended of Hillel).

I am 74-years-old. I converted to the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 17 in the last year of the pontificate of Pope Pius XII. I did so because I was under the conviction that I had to accept and have faith that Jesus Christ was my savior, and I believed it. And I believed that I had to be a baptized member of his Church to have a chance of salvation. So I converted and was baptized in the Catholic Church, and then I was confirmed.

Over the years I have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to both Peters’ Pence (the pope’s own treasury about which you of course must be very familiar), and my local parish and diocese.

During that time I attended thousands of Masses, hundreds of holy hours and novenas, said thousands of rosaries, and made hundreds of trips to the Confessional.

Now in 2015 and 2016 I have read your words and those of your “Pontifical Commission.” You now teach that because I am a racial Jew, God’s covenant with me was never broken, and cannot be broken. You don’t qualify that teaching by specifying anything I might do that would threaten the Covenant, which you say God has with me because I am a Jew. You teach that it’s an unbreakable Covenant. You don’t even say that it depends on me being a good person. Logically speaking, if God’s Covenant with me is unbreakable, then a racial Jew such as I am can do anything he wants and God will still maintain a Covenant with me and I will go to heaven.

Your Pontifical Commission wrote last December, “The Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews…it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God.” 

You are the Pontiff. I believe what your Commission teaches under your banner and in your name, and what you declared during your visit to the synagogue in January. As a result, I no longer see any point in getting up every Sunday morning to go to Mass, say rosaries, or attend the Rite of Reconciliation on Saturday afternoon. All of those acts are superfluous for me. Predicated on your teaching, I now know that due to my special racial superiority in God’s eyes, I don’t need any of it.

I don’t see any reason now as to why I was baptized in 1958. There was no need for me to be baptized. I no longer see why there was a need for Jesus to come to earth either, or preach to the Jewish children of Abraham of his day. As you state, they were already saved as a result of their racial descent from the Biblical patriarchs. What would they need him for?

In light of what you and your Pontifical Commission have taught me, it appears that the New Testament is a fraud, at least as it applies to Jews. All of those preachings and disputations to the Jews were for no purpose. Jesus had to know this, yet he persisted in causing a lot of trouble for the Jews by insisting they had to be born again, they had to believe he was their Messiah, they had to stop following their traditions of men, and that they couldn’t get to heaven unless they believed that he was the Son of God.

Your holiness, you and your Commission have instructed me in the true path to my salvation: my race. It’s all I need and all I have ever needed.God has a covenant with my genes. It’s my genes that save me. My eyes are open now.

Consequently, you will be hearing from my lawyer. I am filing suit against the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church. I want my money back, with interest, and I am seeking compensatory and punitive damages for the psychological harm your Church caused me, by making me think I needed something besides my own exalted racial identity, in order to go to heaven after I die. 

I am litigating as well over the time that I wasted that I could have spent working in my business, instead of squandering it worshipping a Jesus that your Church now says I don’t need to believe in for my salvation. Your prelates and clerics told me something very different in 1958. I’ve been robbed!

Sincerely,

Pinchus Feinstein

2617646 Ocean View Ave.

Miami Beach, Florida 33239

P.S. I'm transmitting this letter to Hoffman, an ex-AP reporter from New York, in the expectation that he will bring it to the attention of those who should know about it. I am transmitting it to him in the form of a dream, but nevertheless, it represents the feelings of many victims of your robber Church.—Pinch 

Copyright ©2016 by Michael Hoffman. All Rights Reserved

www.revisionisthistory.org  

[Hat tip to L.S.]

One covenant or two? (Update)

For those interested, my colleague has just updated his remarks in the last half of my post, "One covenant or two? The Jewish-Catholic question briefly revisited" (Musings, January 5, 2016).

A blessed feast of the Epiphany to all our readers: "20 + C + M + B + 16" (for those who understand the tradition)!

One covenant or two? The Jewish-Catholic question briefly revisited

After reading Canonist Ed Peter's post on the recent Vatican document on Catholic-Jewish relations, as well as the exchange between Peters (in his above-linked post) and Jimmy Akin; and after a discussion with one of my colleagues who actually thought the Vatican document was a helpful theological advancement, I was provoked to do a little investigating of my own.

Following up on my earlier posts on said document (in "New Vatican Document on Judaism Provokes Controversy," Musings, December 18, 2015; and "A Non-Magisterial Magisterial Statement," Musings, January 3, 2016), I decided to examine the points controverted by John Vennari by putting them to the test in an examination of the original document. Here is a brief summary of my conclusions (headings are adapted from Vennari; excerpts from the Vatican document beneath them include my own as well as those he referenced in footnotes; bracketed numbers refer to numbered paragraphs of the Vatican document; and added emphasis is mine):

• The New Covenant does not supersede the Old Covenant:

  [17] A replacement or supersession theology which sets against one another two separate entities, a Church of the Gentiles and the rejected Synagogue whose place it takes, is deprived of its foundations. 
  
  [23] The Church does not replace the people of God of Israel, since as the community founded on Christ it represents in him the fulfilment of the promises made to Israel. This does not mean that Israel, not having achieved such a fulfilment, can no longer be considered to be the people of God.

• The Catholic Church, in principle, should have no mission to convert Jews:

  [40] The Church is therefore obliged to view evangelisation to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views. In concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews. While there is a principled rejection of an institutional Jewish mission, Christians are nonetheless called to bear witness to their faith in Jesus Christ also to Jews, although they should do so in a humble and sensitive manner, acknowledging that Jews are bearers of God’s Word ...

• The Word of God is regarded as present to modern Jews by means of the Torah in a sense that equates this to the Word of God being present to Christians through Jesus Christ:

  [24] For Jews [the Word of God] can be learned through the Torah and the traditions based on it. The Torah is the instruction for a successful life in right relationship with God. Whoever observes the Torah has life in its fullness (cf. Pirqe Avot II, 7). By observing the Torah the Jew receives a share in communion with God. In this regard, Pope Francis has stated: "The Christian confessions find their unity in Christ; Judaism finds its unity in the Torah. Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh in the world; for Jews the Word of God is present above all in the Torah. Both faith traditions find their foundation in the One God, the God of the Covenant, who reveals himself through his Word. In seeking a right attitude towards God, Christians turn to Christ as the fount of new life, and Jews to the teaching of the Torah." (Address to members of the International Council of Christians and Jews, 30 June 2015).

• Modern Jews are treated as being in an acceptable position before God regarding salvation:

  [36]  From the Christian confession that there can be only one path to salvation ... it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God. ... That the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery.

• “The term covenant, therefore, means a relationship with God that takes effect in different ways for Jews and Christians”:

  [25] Judaism and the Christian faith as seen in the New Testament are two ways by which God’s people can make the Sacred Scriptures of Israel their own. The Scriptures which Christians call the Old Testament is open therefore to both ways. A response to God’s word of salvation that accords with one or the other tradition can thus open up access to God, even if it is left up to his counsel of salvation to determine in what way he may intend to save mankind in each instance. That his will for salvation is universally directed is testified by the Scriptures (cf. eg. Gen 12:1-3; Is 2:2-5; 1 Tim 2:4). Therefore there are not two paths to salvation according to the expression "Jews hold to the Torah, Christians hold to Christ". Christian faith proclaims that Christ’s work of salvation is universal and involves all mankind. God’s word is one single and undivided reality which takes concrete form in each respective historical context.
  
  [27] The covenant that God has offered Israel is irrevocable. "God is not man, that he should lie" (Num 23:19; cf. 2 Tim 2:13). The permanent elective fidelity of God expressed in earlier covenants is never repudiated (cf. Rom 9:4; 11:1–2). The New Covenant does not revoke the earlier covenants, but it brings them to fulfilment. ... The term covenant, therefore, means a relationship with God that takes effect in different ways for Jews and Christians. 

• “It does not follow that Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah and the Son of God”:

  [36] From the Christian confession that there can be only one path to salvation, however, it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God. Such a claim would find no support in the soteriological understanding of Saint Paul, who in the Letter to the Romans not only gives expression to his conviction that there can be no breach in the history of salvation, but that salvation comes from the Jews (cf. also Jn 4:22). ... That the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery.

New Vatican document on Judaism provokes controversy

Under the signatures of Cardinal Kurt Koch, Rev. Brial Farrell, and Rev. Norbert Hofmann, SDB, respectively the President, Vice-President and Secretary of the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews, the new document has been just released on December 10, 2015), entitled: "The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable" (Rom 11:29) - A Reflection on the Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of "Nostra Aetate" (NO.4)

The New York Times immediately ran a headline: "Vatican Says Catholics Should Not Try to Convert Jews" (December 10, 2015), reporting: "Catholics should not try to convert Jews, but should work together with them to fight anti-Semitism, the Vatican said on Thursday in a far-reaching document meant to solidify its increasingly positive relations with Jews. John L. Allen Jr. posted an article on Crux the same day, entitled: "Vatican document on Jews proves that revolution is the new routine." Catholic News Service, like most other mainstream Catholic outlets, tiptoed around the issues without shedding much light (See New Vatican document reflects on relations between Catholics, Jews") -- um, yawn .... Not much help.

If you want to see what things look like in the klieg lights, turn from the "Everything is Awesome" cheerleaders to the "Everything is Damned to Hell" doomsayers, and you just might get a clear fix: According to John Vennari, "Blind Guides: Conciliar Vatican Announces 'No Mission' to Convert Jews" (Catholic Family News, December 12, 2015), the document claims:

• The New Covenant does not supersede the Old Covenant;[2]
• The Catholic Church, in principle, should have no mission to convert Jews;[3]
• The Word of God is present to todays Jews by means of the Torah (and equates this to the Word of God being present to Christians through Jesus Christ);[4]
• Modern Jews are in an acceptable position before God regarding salvation;[5]
• “The term covenant, therefore, means a relationship with God that takes effect in different ways for Jews and Christians”;[6]
• “It does not follow that Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah and the Son of God.”[7]

... and that's just the beginning of his long, long article.

No less interesting is conservative Protestant Peter Helland, on his talk show "Israel," interviewing E. Michael Jones on the recent document:


Why do I think here of the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times"??? Seems to me that pretty soon those most guilty of being Messias-deniers may not be the Jews, but certain spokesmen for the contemporary Catholic Church.

Peace in our time: Munich (1938) - Iran (2015)

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana

True Israel and the Jews

The question of the Church's relationship to the Jews, the Mosaic covenant, and the New Covenant (New Testament) with Christ at its foundation, is an ongoing one among Catholics and other Christians. I remember hearing a very bright Lutheran student of mine, who went on to work for First Things and then to become a woman pastor of a Protestant denomination, once say in class that Jews ought to be excepted from those whom we as Christians seek to evangelize. The assumption seemed to be that they were already "God's people," already, in effect, "saved." Something like this also seems to be assumed by some Protestants of a more evangelical stripe, who see the nation of Israel as "God's chosen people" today, even if they should be evangelized and come to know Jesus. This raises all sorts of questions about supersessionism, about what covenants obtain today, etc., which I don't plan to go into here.

A recent combox debate in this blog raised the issue again, however; and so I simply post for your consideration this piece by our pugnacious and irascible friend, once known as "Amateur Brain Surgeon" (my favorite appellation), and now known as "Raider Fan," "Raider Fan won't shut up but he will put up (1)" (The Nesciencent Nepenthene, June 27, 2015), which begins with this provocative declaration:

It is possible for a country, France, to suffer a revolution and commit Regicide and yet still be able to recover much of its tradition at some point in its future but a country, Israel, which commits Deicide has committed national suicide and can never recover even the tiniest portion of its tradition; it's only hope is to corporately confess that Jesus is the Messias and convert to Catholicism, the new Israel.

There is, of course, this beautiful promise of Scripture: "And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son" (Zechariah 12:10), which is cited by the Apostle John (19:37). Nearly one third of Pascal's Pensees is devoted to prophecies of the Messiah of this sort.

Mullarkey - a voice of SANITY on RFRA

Maureen Mullarkey, "RFRA & My Wedding Ring" (First Things, April 7, 2015):

She and her soon-to-be husband, two Gentiles, were shopping for wedding rings and wanted those well-known words from the Book of Ruth inscribed on her ring. But the old jeweler, his forearm tattooed with his identification number from a concentration camp, said he was sorry but couldn't given them that particular inscription. How did they respond, and what does it tell us, not only about them, but about us today?

[Hat tip to JM]

One serious Jew 4 Jesus

This one, again, from underground correspondent, Guy Noir - Private Eye, our researcher, culture analyst, and news critic on retainer:

Comments Mr. Noir:... FASCINATING.

I discovered Karl Stern while researching Frank Sheed. This piece in The Tablet is remarkable for its candid observation of how totally fogotten he now is, just like so much of preconciliar Catholicism. And it is also telling for its indication of how necessary the author feels it is to attempt a Ratzingerian-like rapprochement between old and new eras. Stern can be praised for many things, but he can't be allowed to get away with having had a complex about his own Jewishness? Is that actually so problematic? If he was conflicted, he was conflicted. Why does that have to mean the tarnishing of his testimony, or become such a point of focus? If he felt like he was the best person to tell and interpret his own journey, who are we not to take it at its word?

The Pillar of Fireis remarkable reading: it does need rediscovering. Service rendered and appreciated.

What it doesn't need is defending. Exception taken.

Deborah Ostrovsky, "The Freudian Became a Catholic" (The Tablet, August 25, 2014): "Karl Stern, Canadian psychiatrist and writer, was in his day a famous Catholic convert. Why has he been forgotten?"

Excerpt:

Who was Stern? Internet searches had turned up little. My plan was, during a European holiday, to donate The Pillar of Fire to Munich’s Jewish museum. It only seemed right: to give it to a place dedicated to a people many of whom scattered to Montreal, London, and Washington Heights, but only if they didn’t perish in Bergen-Belsen or Dachau. I had skimmed the first section and knew that Stern had adored Munich, where he had studied medicine. “With the exception of Paris,” he writes with an ardor usually reserved for descriptions of lovers or great works of art, “there has never been a town which had so much individual expression, so little of the artifact and so much natural growth.”

Later I would discover that Stern’s memoir, his novel, and assorted essays on music, medicine, and religion had made him a quasi-celebrity. Back in 1939, his young family settled in a jerry-built row house near the mental hospital where he worked on Montreal’s outskirts. A decade later, he would become one of Canada’s founding fathers of psychiatry. He would write best-sellers like The Pillar of Fire, reprinted 17 times in paperback and translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and German. His 1961 study on psychology and religion, The Third Revolution, would spark correspondence with Carl Jung. The Flight From Woman (1965), a philosophical treatise on modern society’s polarization of the sexes and its de-feminization, would make him a common name in women’s magazines. He corresponded with leading rabbis, poets, and writers—Robert Lowell, Ivan Illich, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton—and other religious luminaries of his day. Along with Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori, he would join UNESCO’s Committee of Experts on German Questions. Graham Greene was his houseguest. American Catholic activist Dorothy Day was a close friend. He would be profiled in Time and write for the New York Times.

The Munich museum expressed gratitude for my donation, although they’d never heard of him.

***

How did Karl Stern become so forgettable? Little has been written about him since the decades following his death in 1975....

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