John XXIII’s ‘Moon Speech’

kicks off the Second Vatican Council

John XXIII’s speech on the night of the opening of the 

Second Vatican Council, 11 October 1962

Dear children,

I hear your voices. Mine is only a single voice. But what resounds here is the voice of the whole world; here all the world is represented. One might even say that the moon rushed here this evening – Look at her high up there – to behold this spectacle. This is how we close a great day of peace ... of peace! “Glory to God and peace to men of good will”.

We repeat often this greeting. And when we can say that the ray, the sweetness of the peace of the Lord truly unites us and carries us, we say: here is a taste of what should be the life of all the centuries and of the life that awaits us in eternity. How about a little more. If I asked – if I could ask – each of you, “You, where do you come from?” The children of Rome who are especially represented here would respond, “Ah, we are your nearest children and you are the Bishop of Rome”. But you , Roman children, do you feel like you really represent ROMA CAPUT MUNDI (“Rome the head of the world”), for this is what in God’s Providence you have been called to be, for the spread of truth and of Christian peace?

In these words is the response to your homage. My own person counts for nothing – it is a brother who speaks to you, who has become a father by the will of the Lord ... but everyone together, in paternity and fraternity, and the grace of God, everything, everything ... Let us continue, therefore, to love each other, to love each other so, by looking at each other in our encounters with one another: taking up what unites us and setting aside anything that might keep us in a bit of difficulty ... This morning there was a spectacle that not even the Basilica of Saint Peter’s – which has four centuries of history – could ever have contemplated. We belong, therefore, a time in which we are sensitive to the voices that come from above: and we want to be faithful and to stand according to the directions which our Blessed Christ has given us. I end by giving you the Blessing.

I love to invite to be near me the Madonna, holy and blessed, whose great mystery we remember today; I have heard that one of you has remembered [the 431 AD Council of] Ephesus and the lamps lit around the basilica, that I saw with my own eyes (not in those ancient times, mind you, but recently), and that recalls the proclamation of the dogma of the Divine Maternity of Mary.

This evening the spectacle offered to me is one that will remain in my memory as it will in yours. Let us honour the images of this evening! That our feelings might always be just as they are now as we express them before heaven and before the earth. Faith, Hope, Charity, the love of God, the love of our brothers and sisters; and then everyone together helped by the holy peace of the Lord, in doing good works. When you go back home, you will find your children: and give them a hug and say,“This is a hug from the Pope. You will find some tears that need to be dried: speak a good word:“The Pope is with us, especially in times of sadness and bitterness.” And then all together let us encourage one another: singing, breathing, weeping, but always full of faith in Christ who helps us and who listens to us, let us continue on our journey.

source: Pepper & Darkness Media, Discorso della Luna

John XXIII invokes the ‘moon’ and ‘tenderness’

Hillary Clinton is a fan of Francis especially when he parrots ideas from Heschel & Lévinas

The Hildabeast pointing at her brain.

The TED talk Francis gave which Hillary Clinton glowingly writes of (see the excerpt below) can be watched here and is nothing more than Hasidic detritus.  It should come as no surprise to readers that Mrs. Clinton and Francis are big into Hasidic concepts.  Not surprisingly, Clinton still sees herself as the center of the world.  She has little “empathy” for the Christians she has worked her entire political career to legislate into serfdom if not out of existence because their beliefs are not “politically correct”.  In the next breathe she writes that Christians need to have “empathy and understanding” for “the other” (i.e. politically correct classes which have special rights denied to Christians).  Hillary’s solution to what ails society like Francis is Hasidism and its “No Religion Is an Island” not the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

source: What Happened? by Hillary Clinton, epub edition (2017), pp. 493-6.

Hillary stuck in the narcissistic loop of Hasidim.

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• Is Hillary Clinton possessed?

• While Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were busy meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, Francis on Monday was having the Vatican’s annual private audience with _________.

• Donald Trump roasts his friend Hillary Rodham Clinton

• Team Hillary members — Sandy Newman and John Podesta plot ‘Catholic Spring’

• The day John Podesta, ‘spiritual cooking’ aficionado and lover of ‘pizza’, met the future saint, John Paul II

• More Hasidic detritus from Francis’ mouth

• Synagogue and State — Bill Clinton & Susannah Heschel

More on Francis, Heschel, Levinas, and Hasidism:

• Francis' Hasidic concept of the god of surprises

• Reading Francis through Heschel

• Did Rabbi Heschel Influence Pope Francis?

• the hermeneutics of talmudic alchemical continuity — John Paul II, Levinas, and Francis

• Catholics don’t understand their faith so the Talmudic Jews explain it to them

• the latest anti-Catholic bilge spewing from Francis’ mouth in French interview

• Francis is onboard with the noahide program of The Elijah Interfaith Institute

• Francis tweets about the Talmudic concept of the “Other”

The day John Podesta, ‘spiritual cooking’ aficionado and lover of ‘pizza’, met the future saint, John Paul II

Above one can see the sick man, John Podesta, meeting the future saint, John Paul II at the Vatican City with serial rapist, Bill Clinton.

Reflections on the Canonization of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II

APRIL 28, 2014 AT 11:34 AM ET BY JOHN PODESTA

I am writing from Rome, where Congressman Xavier Becerra, the President’s Director of Legislative Affairs Katie Beirne Fallon, and I had the honor of serving as the Presidential Delegation to the Holy See. Yesterday, we, along with U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Kenneth Hackett and his wife Joan, attended the historic canonization Mass for Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.

In different ways, John XXIII and John Paul II defined what it meant to be Catholic in the 20th century. Their influence and their example as men of humility, compassion, service, and faith provide profound lessons to people around the world.

Pope John XXIII took leadership of the Church around the time I took my First Communion, at St. Edward’s Parish on the Northwest Side of Chicago. Seventy-six years old when he was elected, there were few who imagined the former Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli as a revolutionary. But the man we know today as il Papa buono, the Good Pope, was not content to let the Church go on as it always had.

By convening the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII built a radically more inclusive Catholic Church, and he himself became a symbol of change and of the power of faith. John spoke to the faithful in simple terms, and addressed his last encyclical, Pacem in Terris — Peace on Earth — to “all men of good will.” The Second Vatican Council drove profound changes in the practice of the Catholic faith. Because of Pope John XXIII, the Mass is celebrated in vernacular languages, rather than in inaccessible Latin. Because of Pope John XXIII, the priest faces his congregation during services. These aren’t cosmetic changes. They go to the heart of how millions of people practice their faith, and profoundly impact how they feel about their lives.

Where Pope John XXIII brought the laity deeper into the heart of the Church, Pope John Paul II helped bring the Church to the world. During his long papacy, John Paul visited 129 countries and touched the hearts of millions, and particularly inspired and deepened the faith of young people around the world. From his fight against Communism to his outspoken opposition to apartheid to condemning the Rwandan genocide, Pope John Paul II was a courageous and outspoken leader.

As a Catholic, and as an American, it has been a deeply humbling experience to be in Rome for the canonization Mass. It was an amazing, breathtaking moment to be 100 feet from Pope Francis as he embraced Pope Benedict at the beginning of the Mass. It seems appropriate, upon reflection, that it was Pope Francis who canonized both John and John Paul. As the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere, Pope Francis has inspired people around the world with his inclusiveness, his conviction, and his deep and profound care for the neediest among us. As the first Jesuit Pope, he is truly a man for others. I had the honor of being received by the Pope, shaking his hand, exchanging a few words and basking in his broad smile. It is a memory I will forever carry deep in my heart.

source: whitehouse.gov, Reflections on the Canonization of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II

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a spoon full of sugar helps the revolution go down in a most delightful way!

gatekeeper John L. Allen, Jr. says don’t get bent out of shape with the media and Vatican changing the words of Francis...they have been doing this since John XXIII

Time Magazine, 5 October 1962

John L. Allen writes,

“In the past, the problem with this sort of thing was that it wasn’t always clear it was really the pope making the changes. Famously, an anonymous editor at l’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, admitted in a 1962 interview with Time to taking the edge off the words of Pope John XXIII’s speeches about the Second Vatican Council whenever the pontiff said something the editor worried might stir controversy.”

source: CruxNow, Let’s not get bent out of shape over ‘Transcriptgate’

Call Me Jorge... doesn’t have a subscription to Time Magazine nor do we want one to an official rag of the establishment. We did the next best thing though, and searched google books to see if any authors had cited this article. We found one author, Peter Hebblethwaite, who cited it in two separate books on John XXIII.

source: page 433, Pope John XXIII: Shepherd of the Modern World by Peter Hebblethwaite

source: page 223, John XXIII: Pope of the Century by Peter Hebblethwaite

So there you have it!  John XXIII’s un-Catholic remarks were cleaned up and changed to make it appear as if he were a staunch upholder of Catholic tradition in some of the medias and Acta Apostolicae Sedis (Official Acts of the Holy See) when with the benefit of today’s hindsight we know he was anything but this.  This has been done since the pontificate of John XXIII by the media and the Vatican bureaucrats who also have been sanitizing the the words of Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and now Francis.  Why would they perform this disservice to the world?  Are they also members of a revolutionary club?   What has changed with the advent of the internet, is that now anyone can compare what was said by Francis on video to what was published in the medias and official Vatican documents.  Often times these match up perfectly, sometimes they don’t.  How different would the world be today if what was said by the Petrine office (since John XXIII) had been honestly reported on?

Francis' rabbi, Abraham Skorka, weighs in on the the ‘humble’ bishop of Rome's upcoming trip to the Great Synagogue of Rome

(Call Me Jorge...'s note: underlines in the interview are ours for emphasis.)

Two revolutionary buddies for life, Skorka and Bergoglio.

Skorka on Pope's visit to Synagogue of Rome and how he is fostering Jewish-Christian relations

Interview with the Argentinian rabbi, a friend of Francis '' Bergoglio had a very special bond with the Jewish community. His contribution is a call to build on dialogue through exegetical and theological studies, while at the same time reinforcing the commitment towards a common effort in making the world a fairer and more just place "

Andrea Tornielli for La Stampa, 15 January 2016, Vatican City

Pope Francis is the first Pope in the Roman Catholic Church to have published a book containing lengthy conversations with a rabbi, before His election. Abraham Skorka, the 65-year-old rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary, became a great friend of the then archbishop Bergoglio. On Sunday 17 January the Pope will visit the Synagogue of Rome, the great Jewish temple that stands beyond the Tiber, a short distance from the Vatican. This will be the third time a Bishop of Rome enters the Synagogue, following John Paul II's historic visit in 1986 and that of his successor Benedict XVI, in 2010. 

Rabbi Skórka, what was Archbishop Bergoglio's relationship with Argentina's Jewish community like? How did you come to write a book on your conversation together? 
“The former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio, had a very special bond with the Argentinian Jewish community, demonstrated in numerous gestures, with which he expressed in profound commitment to relations with it and through it with Judaism as a whole. He forged some very deep and fond relationships like the one between us. This friendship, which grew through various encounters, in the sense Buber usually attributed to this term, allowed us to speak freely, without euphemisms. And so we wrote a book of conversations together, offering a joint analysis of the issues that are of greatest concern to mankind today. We went on to produce 31 television programmes with Marcelo Figueroa.”

What was the distinguishing feature - if any - in Francis' approach to the dialogue with Jewish faithful? And what are the elements of continuity with his predecessors?
“On the one hand, Francis has continued the process of dialogue between Jews and Catholics begun by John XXIII and significantly furthered by John Paul II. At the same time, though, he left His own imprint on the development of this dialogue. If we take a close look at the Evangelii Gaudium chapter on relations with Judaism (247-249) , we see that, just as John Paul II and Benedict XVI viewed the Jewish people as their “elder brothers” in the faith and the eternal validity of the Alliance between Israel and God, described in the Jewish Bible, so the current Pope reserves a special place for them in his apostolic exhortation. Despite the fact the first articles in the aforementioned chapter emphasise only the teachings of his predecessors, the final paragraph mentions what Francis has to say on the subject. ‘God continues to act through the people of the Ancient Alliance and brings forth treasures of wisdom that derive from its encounter with the divine Word.  As such the Church too is enriched by the values ​​of Judaism... There is a rich complementarity that allows us to read the texts of the Jewish Bible and help each other to explore the Word’s riches’. In Buenos Aires we analysed verses from the Jewish Bible together on many occasions. It was a fundamental part of our dialogue. As Bergoglio was Grand Chancellor of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, the institution awarded me an honoris causa degree. The intention of this gesture was very clear: to honor and take into consideration the cultural and religious contribution of a rabbi in a majority Christian society. Francis’ contribution in his call to build on dialogue through exegetical and theological study while at the same time reinforcing the commitment towards a common effort in making the world a fairer and more just place. We are at the start of a journey that is taking us in this direction. This journey requires a great deal of reflection and intellectual and spiritual digging, as well as a compromise in the face of the big dramas affecting humanity at present.

How do you interpret the history of Catholic-Jewish relations over the past 60years? Which was the path chosen by John XXIII? And what contribution did John Paul II make?
“John XXIII could see very clearly that Europe and the world was entering a new phase after World War Two, which called for a response and a message from the religions. So he laid the foundations for the Second Vatican Council. Having witnessed the tragedy of the Holocaust first hand and having saved the lives of many Jews as an apostolic delegate in Constantinople, he strove to do something about the lack of dialogue - which frequently implies hatred - between Jews and Christians and reverse this situation . In the new world that was to be built, that stain of blood and death needed to be removed. The Nostra Aetate was the consequence of the great work he did in this field. This declaration acted as a catalyst for dialogue Jews and Christians engaged in on different levels. The process progressed through the subsequent declarations made ​​by the Vatican commission for dialogue with Judaism. John Paul II was the second great advocate of the process’s continuity and development. His request for forgiveness for the mistakes the Church had made in relation to the Jewish people in the past, His historic visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome, the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the State of Israel, the prayers he said at the (Western, Ed.) Wall are all signs that will shed his light on Jewish-Christian relations forevermore.”

John Paul II's visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome in 1986 was a historic event. What recollection do you have of it? What can you say about Benedict XVI and his very deep theological reflections on the special relationship between Judaism and Christianity?
“Both of the events you mentioned in your question were watershed moments in the history of the development of Jewish-Christian relations, for which the Nostra Aetate was a blueprint. John Paul II ended a painful chapter in the history of Rome because dialogue and respect had been lacking in relations between Rome’s Jews and the city’s bishop, the Pope. Walking at a normal peace, it takes about twenty minutes to get from the Vatican to the Great Temple of Rome. And yet it took centuries before a Pope made ​​that journey. The embrace between John Paul II and Rabbi Elio Toaff at the start of the visit will remain imprinted in people’s minds as an sign of understanding and dialogue for Jews and Catholics and an example for all humanity. In the same way, Benedict XVI’s theological reflection on the special bond between Judaism and Christianity, repairs a historic rift, laying the foundations for closer relations and mutual recognition, in order to allow Jews and Christians to dig deeper into their origins and genuinely reinforce their identity, each doing Their bit, together, to improve relations.”

A new Vatican document published last month states that “the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews”, because its relationshipwith them is different than with any other faith. What is your take on this?
“Ever since the approval of the conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate, dignitaries of the Church on a number of occasions demonstrated that the Church would not be carrying out any evangelical action or mission with the Jewish people as it had done on a dramatic scale in the past. But the document “The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable” made ​​this clear officially. It was thus that a very painful chapter in Jewish-Christian relations was closed. Just a stone’s throw away from the square where Rome’s Jewish ghetto was - the square reminds its inhabitants that this is where the journey to the Nazi concentration camps began - there is a church with a frontispiece that quotes verse 65, 2 of the Book of Isaiah, “I have spread out My hands all day long to a rebellious people”. During the Middle Ages they would compulsively Jews gather in this church - I have been told this by experts on Jewish history in Rome - all of them ghetto inhabitants, to make them listen to the missionary preaching of Christian clerics. The Church’s latest document puts a definitive end to these stories that are part of a sad past.”

Related:

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Skorka leads and Francis follows!

the American Jewish Committee (AJC) & Nostra Aetate

Skorka's speech at the unveiling of “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time”

(Skorka begins to speak at 20 min 50 seconds)

If the video above does not play try either this link or this alternative one.
The transcript of Skorka's speech is below.

"50 years of Nostra Aetate: Past and Future"

Rabbi Dr. Abraham Skorka

Rector of the Latin-American Rabbinical Seminary ‘M. T. Meyer,'

Rabbi of the Benei Tikva Congregation, Buenos Aires

Nostra Aetate is the declaration approved by the Second Vatican Council on October 28, 1965.  It discusses the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the non-Christian religions. It undoubtedly created a theological turning point for the Catholic Church that fostered a new vision of respect and dialogue with the Jewish people.

Two fundamental axioms are developed in chapter 4 of this declaration, which is dedicated to the relationship between Catholics and Jews.

On the one hand, it removed any reason to doubt that the covenant which God shares with the Jewish people, described in the Hebrew Bible, is still considered valid from a Christian perspective. Therefore the special relationship between Jews and God continues into the present.  On the other hand, Nostra Aetate affirms that, although in the days of Jesus there were some Jews implicated in actions that ended in his crucifixion, one cannot impute guilt to all the members of the Jewish population of that time, let alone accuse Jews of later generations. 

Once and for all, the ignominious vilification of a so-called deicide people, cursed by God, which was hung upon the Jews, and which justified their persecution, humiliation, and oppression, was abolished. 

Nostra Aetate was the Catholic answer to the Shoah.  Centuries of Christian theology in which Jews were denigrated contributed to European anti-Semitism. The Nazis tapped into this deep-seated prejudice to build the death camps in cooperation with the active and passive indifference of a great part of the European population.  One third of the Jewish people, six million souls, were exterminated in the most atrocious form that human history records. 

To recognize the Jewish People as fully loved by God after this abominable tragedy was an act of spiritual audacity which Saint John XXIII was able to introduce, something which had apparently  been  unattainable for Pius XII. 

At the same time, this challenged Catholicism to construct a new theological vision based upon the rediscovered truth that the old covenant between the Creator and the Jews was not abolished. Thus both covenants, the new and the old, complement each other in seeking to elevate human beings spiritually and to guide them in building a reality of Justice and Love, of the redemption of the human being. 

The Declaration Nostra Aetate, signed by Blessed Paul VI, served as a solid basis for a renewed encounter between Jews and Christians. On October 22, 1974, he created the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism, which redacted in 1974, 1985, and 1998 three very important and substantial documents developing the concepts that Nostra Aetate had referred to only in an embryonic way. 

These documents – "Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra aetate No. 4" (1974), "Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Teaching in the Roman Catholic Church" (1985) and "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" (1998) – helped to establish the habit of dialogue that Christians and Jews are able to enjoy today. 

Through symbolic acts of enormous significance, Saint John Paul II profoundly reshaped the Jewish-Catholic relationship. The Great Synagogue of Rome is very near the Vatican.  It takes only a half an hour walking at normal speed to traverse the two places.  Yet many centuries had to pass for a Pope to walk this short distance to greet his Jewish neighbors. John Paul did this in 1986, the first pope to do so in perhaps two millennia. 

He also established full diplomatic relations between the Vatican, the Holy See and the State of Israel. He asked for God's forgiveness for Christian sins of the past towards Jews, whom he called “elder brothers” and "the people of the Covenant." 

Beginning with Nostra Aetate, the official teaching of the Church considers the relationship with the Jews as unique and special. This fact is reflected in Pope Francis' 2014 Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. He writes: 

We hold the Jewish people in special regard because their covenant with God has never been revoked, for “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). ... Dialogue and friendship with the children of Israel are part of the life of Jesus’ disciples [§247-248]. 

I first came into contact with Jorge Bergoglio, today's Pope Francis, when he began serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Being elder than me and holding such a high Church office,  I initially left the initiative for interfaith activities between us in his hands. Over time, I came to understand that in the course of his spiritual journey he had developed deep theological respect for Jews, , and that we shared a common understanding of the importance of dialogue in general and the interfaith dialogue in particular.  These were the reasons that bound us to one another. Each of us had recognized in the other the partner for the enactment of the commitment to interreligious dialogue that we both took as a central priority in our lives. 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel´s “No religion is an island” was a guide and an imperative I incorporated into my soul. He was one of the most important Jewish contributors to the development of Nostra Aetate. Chapter 4 of the declaration echoes much of a statement the Rabbi sent to Cardinal Augustin Bea in the conversations they had while the Council was in preparation. 

The founder of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano, of which I am the rector today, Rabbi Marshall Meyer, was one of the beloved students of Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Meyer spread Heschel's  ideas in Latin America, especially by translating his works into Spanish. 

The spirit of Nostra Aetate and the ideas and challenges that developed in its aftermath impacted Cardinal Bergoglio and me and led us to write  a book together, to record 31 television programs, and to do so many other things together. 

Since Bergoglio became Pope Francis, his commitment to the Jewish Christian dialogue  has been revealed through many deeds and statements.             

The twentieth century witnessed, both before and after the Shoah, great Jewish thinkers and scholars who understood that the original dialogue between the first Christian community and its Jewish brothers needed to be started anew if Christians and Jews were to collaborate, each from their own perspective, in the construction of a better world. Mordechai Martin Buber, Joseph Klausner, and Abraham Joshua Heschel are some of the very many Jewish leaders who took it as a personal mission to renew this dialogue. Nostra Aetate, which was nurtured through the dialogue of Rabbi Heschel and Cardinal Augustin Bea, was the best answer to their dreams and ideals. 

In the old city of Prague, at Number 1 of the Nový Svět (New World) Street, we find the house where the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe lived. The astronomical measurements of Brahe were the data with which Johannes Kepler was able to formulate mathematically his three laws concerning the movement of the planets around the sun. 

A new world was discovered at that time.  The heliocentric description of the solar system, the existence of new continents to explore, the conquering of new navigation routes, as well as so many other advances allowed human beings to contemplate a New World. 

Today we have brought our perceptions to Pluto at the fringe of our solar system. We have taken pictures of its surface , and received much entirely new  information. Mankind has begun deeply studying characteristics of a world that is no longer foreign to us. 

The new challenge for humankind is not to discover a new world but to create a “new world”, a new reality with no more hunger or injustice, no hatred among peoples, no more wars. The world in which each individual enriches spiritually through the dialogue with neighbors in whom he or she sees a brother or a sister. The challenge facing us is to create a new world where each individual makes a place for God’s presence. 

The ultimate aim of Nostra Aetate was to create a new reality for Jews and Catholics, a new world. A world in which they are not opposed but can actively study and learn together, and so enrich each other and assist each other in walking their covenantal lives with God. We are no longer "foreigners" to each other. This idea is represented by the very significant sculpture we are about to dedicate, which will remind all who will see and contemplate it in the future about the achievements of the past and the challenges for the future. 

In the eighth century BCE, the prophet Isaiah (65, 17), said in the name of God, that God will create new heavens and a new world (earth), where no former tragedies will be recalled. 

Among the Jewish sages there is a discussion about this that has been going on for centuries. They asked: Is humanity in its present psychic and spiritual condition able to fashion a reality of peace and concord at all levels, or does God have to substantially modify the originally created world in order for peace to come? 

The masterly opinion of Maimonides is that the human being in his present condition is indeed able to construct a reality of dialogue and of peace.

Taking into account the human impulse and the individual struggle to pursue goodness in our lives, rejecting the wars and the cruel violence that afflict us daily, there are many who understand Isaiah’s hope for a new heaven and a new earth in covenantal terms: Humanity, the partner of God in the constant recreation of Creation, will co-create this hopeful New Cosmos -- a new Reality in which Nostra Aetate and those who were inspired by it, will have made a crucial contribution and helped pave the way. 

(from Left) Dr. Adam Gregerman, assistant director, Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations; Dr. Philip Cunningham, director, Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations; Rabbi Abraham Skorka, keynote speaker; Naomi Adler, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia; Saint Joseph's University President Mark Reed; and the statue's sculptor Joshua Koffman with his child.

Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate Friday #2

A quick update on everyone's favorite '62 Mass of John XXIII loving Friars.  Yes, they are still around and at least one member, Friar Gabriel is still skating!  It's amazing that Volpi hasn't taken away that privilege yet!  Turns out some time ago Friar Gabriel Cortes was ordered by his superior to go out and buy a skateboard in order that he could evangelize at the skateboarding park once a week.  Of course since he was a Friar of the Immaculate, Friar Gabriel obeyed and the rest is history.  Friar Gabriel sees a common ground between the skateboarding world and being a friar, both are counter-culture!  No word yet if Francis has asked Friar Gabriel to be on the Vatican's Demo Team.  Call Me Jorge... would like to suggest to Friar Gabriel that he sing a duet with Suor Cristina and possibly skate for some of her music videos.

A Skating Friar? Check it out!

Friar Gabriel's music video for the Blessed Virgin

Our previous entries on the skateboarding Friars:

• Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate

• Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate Friday

Moving beyond Catholicism through interfaith dialogue

Remembering Vatican II: The Religious Significance of the Catholic Church’s Relationship with the Jewish People
By FRANCIS CARDINAL GEORGE

The following speech was delivered by Archbishop Francis Cardinal George at the 114th Annual Meeting of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. You can watch this speech here.

Thank you, Lester, for your very kind introduction and for your friendship over the years. I am grateful to be here. In a sense, I don’t have to give much thought to what I’m going to say, because David Brown gave my talk! He said “relationship, relationship, relationship” and that’s all I’m basically going to say for, I hope, 15 minutes or so while I get the chance to talk to you. I want to truly thank from the deepest part of my heart, Steven Nasatir and the Board of the Jewish United Fund and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, for the invitation to address you here today.

It is very impressive to come together in such a large gathering, one dedicated to remembrance. It brings to my mind the first time that I talked with a rather large number of Jewish leaders here in Chicago 17 years ago. I was invited to a cocktail party in the home of a Jewish businessman, and there were perhaps 60 or 70 people there. At a certain moment, everyone sat down and they started to ask me questions. I was glad to be part of that dialogue. The questions were obviously designed to tell them who I was, and I was interested as well in what they were interested in because it told me who they were; but behind all the questions about who I was, I knew there was a deeper question that wasn’t spoken directly: “Can we trust you?” And, “How far can we trust you?” I thought of that after I left. It stayed in my heart and I thought to myself, “Well, that’s a fair question. Can they trust me?” What does that mean and who am I, really, as part of a community that lives with so many good people who were interrogating me for their own purposes but for mine as well. Whoever I am, it has to be in relationship to them and that has, I hope, developed in my own thinking and also in my experience here. I am very grateful for all those encounters and especially grateful for the chance to encounter you again today in this marvelous setting.

The Catholic Church is in the process of remembering a great event that redefined us, that helped us know who we are by refocusing us. The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, as it’s called, took place between 1962 and 1965. It shaped the direction of the Church at the end of the twentieth century and into the Third Millennium of Christianity. But it didn’t speak just about a particular time. It’s important for me to say that, because I’m going to make reference to a document that some of you have heard of and, perhaps, some have not. In Latin, its official title is Nostra Aetate. Sometimes people outside the Church don’t understand what is stable and what is policies. A document from an ecumenical council is not just a statement of policies, it’s not even midrash. It is perhaps closer to Torah. It is something that we have to make reference to not only when it is published but for generations to come. It is a constant part now of a rather small book that contains the decrees of ecumenical councils from the fourth century up to the present time. Those aren’t reformable - they can be interpreted - but they are always there as a constant point of reference. So it’s not a question of examining a policy statement that can be reversed. Nostra Aetate can’t change as a point of reference. I say that because sometimes people remain uneasy: “We’re fine right now. What happens in the future? Will the Catholic Church change back to its being a carrier of anti-Semitism as it has been in some places over many years?” Should that happen, then it will happen in some group that is no longer living within the terms of Catholic identity as it has been defined for us by Vatican II. While much of the work of the Council was aimed, therefore, at the renewal of the inner life of the Church: “Who are we?” - other aspects, equally important, involved turning the Church toward an engagement with the world in both mission and service. Who are we vis.-a-vis.others? We don’t know who we are as Catholics unless, in some fashion, we talk to everybody else. This intentional focus brought a new reflection on relationships. One of the most significant reflections had to do with our relationship with the Jewish people. That reflection eventually led to the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate.

Before I speak about that document, Nostra Aetate, which simply means, “in our times,” I want to share with you the vision of the world which the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council were using in their deliberations. Pope Paul VI, who guided the council to its conclusion after the death of Pope John XXIII, in his first encyclical letter described the human community in terms of relationships. He spoke of circles of dialogue between the Church and the whole of humankind. The first and largest circle was, in fact, all humanity. The Holy Father’s point was that there is no one outside of the widest circle of relationship whom we can simply count off or not pay some attention to. Recall, however, this was the 1960s - the Cold War was at its height, and the common thinking presupposed an ineradicable opposition between East and West. Most of the bishops of Vatican II had lived through the horrors of the twentieth century, which were caused, in part, by demonizing whole peoples and groups and declaring them outside of the circle of relationships, outside of humanity itself. So, at the outset, Paul VI excludes this possibility. The first circle includes everyone. He then turns to the second circle, those who believe in God. Belief, again in the days of state-sponsored atheism, moved a person closer to us and established a bond of commonality which allowed for a closer relationship. The third circle contained those who believe in Jesus Christ, our fellow Christians of the various churches and ecclesial communities. Finally, the fourth circle was the Catholic Church, in all her global diversity.

This way of seeing the world through these circles of dialogue provided a basis for the Fathers when they went on to express the religious significance of the Catholic Church’s relationship to the Jewish people. You have to understand that, from the beginning of the time of modernity and even a little before that, the stance of the Church vis.-a-vis. others was much more defensive. It wasn’t dialogical. It was a stance generated by fears from the French Revolution and other movements that were obviously anti-Catholic and had resulted in persecution. This defensive reaction to the development of atheistic modernity had to be broken down. It was broken down and broken through with the documents of Vatican II. The movement from defensiveness to dialogue was the purpose of the Council. Of particular importance was dialogue with the Jewish people, because that is a unique relationship. It always will be unique even though we ourselves haven’t totally determined it because we haven’t talked enough, even, perhaps, to one another.

One of the elements of Nostra Aetate is its intentional focus on remembering. When applied to the Jewish people, Catholics are called upon to remember the anti-Judaism which was often customary among Christians throughout history, to remember anti-Semitism as a racist philosophy, and, of course, most profoundly, to return to the Shoah itself, which must never be forgotten. This sensitivity grew out of the conversations that John XXIII had with the rabbis from France when they began to teach him the consequences of the teaching of contempt over many, many centuries; often, there was not outright persecution of Jews, but there was an attitude of deep-seated contempt. The rabbis showed Pope John XXIII what follows from that teaching, what horrors were prepared by that kind of attitude over the centuries. John XXIII became very sensitive to that attitude also because of his own work with Jewish and other refugees as a papal diplomat in Istanbul and in Sophia, Bulgaria, during the war, when he attempted, often successfully, to save people from the Nazi atrocities. But these conversations had still to be made explicit in his own mind, as they finally were.

Nostra Aetate also extends the notion of remembering in another direction, calling on Catholics to remember the spiritual bonds which unite Jews and Christians. That remains the basis of our ongoing conversation, ensuring that neither party co-opts the other. You can be yourselves without us; we can’t be ourselves without you. But who are you, and is our understanding of you your own understanding of yourselves? If it’s not, and in some areas of our lives and beliefs there cannot be a shared understanding, nonetheless, how can we respect that difference and even rejoice in it?

Three phases followed the Council in terms of relations with the Jewish people. The first phase was devoted to what Fr. John Pawlikowski here in Chicago said has been a cleansing phase. Father John has been an important participant in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue here and elsewhere, as you know. This cleansing phase involved re-writing texts, taking care to re-craft the language used in homilies and catechetical materials in a sustained effort to eradicate evidence of the sin of anti-Semitism from Christian texts. A second phase involved rethinking the relationship of Jews and Christians in the light of renewed biblical studies. Perhaps a little detail here will illustrate how significant that shift has been even though it isn’t often appreciated outside the circles of theologians and other scholars.

Biblical scholarship has helped us to understand more clearly that the first century of the Common Era was more complex than either Jewish or Christian writers of that age usually admit. Rather than the simplistic framework which saw Christianity replacing Judaism, the historical fact was that Rabbinic Judaism was already evolving, so that when the destruction of the Temple occurred in 70 C.E., Rabbinic Judaism became the form of Judaism for the new millennia and the form that we live with now and what we understand as Judaism. Christianity also developed its identity at that time as distinct from either biblical Judaism (meaning the Temple) or Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity during this period was developing more closely to Rabbinic Judaism and even to Temple Judaism, than Catholics themselves perhaps understand. In this historical sense, both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are off-springs of biblical religion. We might now employ the metaphor of Judaism as Christianity’s elder sibling. And we do use it, provided that everybody accepts it as a reality. It raises historical questions: What does it mean, since the elder sibling can be someone who welcomes a younger brother or sister or who doesn’t, and what are the reasons for that? The meaning of being joint heirs to biblical religion is obviously important in the contemporary period as well.

A third phase, according to Fr. Pawlikowski, involves imagining a new narrative about the relationship. This more nuanced notion about the relationship of Jews and Christians in the first centuries has allowed the Catholic Church to move beyond supersessionism, that is, replacement theory. Part of the genius of Nostra Aetate is that it allows the Church to affirm, that,

“. . . the Jewish history of salvation, the basis for the religion of Israel as we find it in what we call the Old Testament, is the historical foundation of the Christian history of salvation and revelation.”

That has always been the case, but our new understanding of it opens up intellectual possibilities for dialogue and opens us up personally to a different understanding of who are we, after all, as Catholics, not so much inheritors of your history as partners building on the same history up to the present day. This connection remains intact, although according to our faith something completely new, the new covenant centered on Jesus of Nazareth, has come to be. That rock of our belief always remains the difference that is a genuine difference, and yet it can remain also a point of dialogue that proposes and never imposes, rather than a point for defensiveness. In other words, to some extent, we have found a way to honor each other without any compromise to the identity and integrity of our dialogue partnership.

Father John Crossin, whom many of you heard in his fine talk earlier this year at the Bernardin Lecture, summarized some of the things I have said over the years here and used them to frame the next direction for the new narrative as together we engage another dialogue partner, secularism, the inheritor, unfortunately, of modernity in its most extreme form. I have suggested that a “trialogue” between the two pre-modern biblical religions, you and us, and secularism, could be a fruitful conversation. It would force secularists to recognize that they are espousing a philosophy of life that has religious overtones; it is not something that is neutral. Fr. Crossin summarized how this new narrative might develop, if together Jews and Catholics would first of all:

• Reflect together on what we have each learned from the Enlightenment. Enlightenment was born with modernity. But we have different attitudes toward the Enlightenment. It was liberating for Jewish communities in many parts of Europe, even as it was destructive of the Church in her then formal and governmental relationship to the world.

• Look together at consumer culture and how it influences us and our relationships to one another. We heard those marvelous testimonies of philanthropy a few minutes ago.It is important that we succeed, but success doesn’t mean accumulating a lot of money. It means most of all using money to help other people. We go beyond consumer culture if we touch the best bases of our different faiths.

• Thirdly, then, focus together on human interdependence, on the universalism that we just heard spoken about.We deal more explicitly then with “ecumenism” in the broad sense and how that might impact further the Jewish-Catholic dialogue. Then we can move on to work together towards a common and honest history that we can both acknowledge: “Yes, that’s how it is,” even though we feel it and think about it differently.

Father Crossin summarized finally by saying “What I am suggesting is that a new and coherent way of Catholic/Jewish self-understanding and acting is emerging in the post-modern period . . . the presupposition and foundation for this suggestion is that we will continue to walk and talk together as colleagues and as friends.”

That too is something I have often said, that we have come a great distance and it is good to celebrate that, but our very progress has now brought into relief ways in which we could go farther, particularly in our spiritual relationships, if in fact we understood the narrative adequately.

Here in Chicago, I believe that we are well along the way with this journey and conversation. It was well established before I came. I only had to build on what you were doing, what the Archdiocese of Chicago was doing when I came here. I want to thank the Jewish United Fund and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago for all that you have done to foster this closer relationship. I also want to mention the other Jewish partners of the Archdiocese of Chicago: the Chicago Board of Rabbis, the American Jewish Committee, Spertus Institute, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, Hillel and the Holocaust Museum for the various programs and partnerships that we have been privileged to share. I’d like to name several examples of what our dialogue efforts have produced.

As has been mentioned, the Fassouta Project brought together diverse concerns in a mutual project. Fassouta is a small village – it is populated by Greek Catholics, that is, its people are not Latin but Byzantine in their liturgical expression. It is Greek but Catholic, in communion with the Bishop of Rome. The village lies about four kilometers south of the Lebanon border. The Fassouta Project, in 2003, was a joint effort to raise awareness of the effects of emigration on the Christian community in Israel. The project established a computer literacy center in the Christian village of Fassouta so that the young people would find employment at home. We provided $100,000 over three years to outfit and staff a computer lab and offer classes to the local community. Both the State of Israel and their Christian citizens could then profit from the skills which would make it possible for young Christian men and women to find the work that would enable them to stay in Israel.

Another project worthy of note is the Social Studies Curriculum in our Catholic schools. Together with JCRC we developed the “Modern Israel: Holy Land and Jewish State” program. In addition to a curriculum, over 35 teachers in theology, history, English, art and science have traveled to Israel to be formed in this curriculum. Twenty different Catholic high schools now have participated. In a special way therefore, I want to acknowledge the work of Sister Mary Ellen Coombe, who has led our efforts to engage Catholic and Jewish schools for many years and contributes to the new narrative being developed. Sister Mary Ellen’s religious order, the Sisters of Sion, have as their charism Catholic/Jewish dialogue. She has brought that charism to life here and for over two decades has placed it at the service of the Archdiocese and of the Jewish community, and she continues to do so. I want to take this opportunity to thank the Sisters of Sion for their contribution to Catholic/Jewish relations in Chicago and particularly to express my gratitude for their work and their presence here through Sister Mary Ellen.

There is much more I could say to the way the Jewish community sends volunteers to work with Catholic Charities during the holidays, to the Catholic/Jewish Scholars’ Dialogue, to the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Jerusalem Lecture, to the work of Hillel with Catholic campus ministries and, of course the work of the Holoucast Museum. It’s interesting when I talk to Catholic campus ministers and ask, “Whom are you working most closely with?” I used to expect them to say, “Lutherans, Episcopalians” – and they say, “The Jews – Hillel. And we are doing very well.”

In one way or another, all of these developments are fruits of Nostra Aetate. Standing here, nearly fifty years after the Second Vatican Council, I lift up a prayer of gratitude to God for all that has been accomplished and for all that still might be. I know the office of the papacy has often been a mixed blessing or even a curse for the Jewish community. What I would like to point out is that no matter how individual popes have helped or hurt our dialogue over the centuries, in the last 50 years, starting with John XXIII who took to heart the consequences of the teaching of contempt when French rabbis pointed it out to him, and who, with the help of Cardinal Bea, a German Jesuit who, with the help of his scholarly background in Scripture, was able to bring to the Pope what we had to do if we were to be a genuinely biblical people, a new moment did arise. Pope Paul VI succeeded John XXIII and, while his actions too were sometimes problematic during his visit to Israel, nevertheless, the formal recognition of the State of Israel began with the work of Pope Paul VI.

Pope John Paul II, of course, was who he was, a truly monumental figure, one who brought history into a genuine alignment with the demands of dialogue by acknowledging and confessing publicly the sins of the Church but not stopping with that. He brought hope – hope for everyone. In that, he deserves to be remembered as a good friend of the Jewish people as well as a great pontiff of the Catholic Church.

In the years of Pope Benedict XVI there were some decisions that people interpreted badly. I think he saw himself as someone immersed in God’s Word, who knew and lived Scripture and who was convinced that we could also advance the dialogue through an emphasis on culture, for religions form cultures, as John Paul never tired of saying. A faith that does not become culture, that is, if the faith in your heart is not expressed in customs that are common and not just individual, if it does not shape an entire way of life, it is not truly faith. It hasn’t really permeated all the aspects of one’s existence. That conviction was taken a step farther in Pope Benedict’s request that we not talk to one another only as religions; rather, we should talk to others as cultures, because then we touch the whole dimension of our lives, and there can appear openings that perhaps we hadn’t noticed before.

And now we have Pope Francis. Based upon his own friendship and personal relationships with the rabbis of Buenos Aires, he is able to bring his own particular personality to the present dialogue and, I hope, to a more profound relationship in the years to come.

As I conclude, let me say that what I have personally learned from Vatican II and especially from my seventeen years as Archbishop of Chicago is that the new narrative of Catholic/Jewish relations will be written if we write it together. This will only happen if we deepen our relationships. For too much of our common history we spoke of each other without any relationship, or even as enemies, imagined or real. I have said many times, (the priests are tired of hearing me say it,) that if you get the relationships right, everything else will follow. After the death of Pope Saint John Paul II, Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, here with us today, shared what he was looking for in the new pope. He said simply, “Someone who knows us.” Relationships come first, don’t they?

I hope that the real legacy of Nostra Aetate and the Second Vatican Council will be that, at its one hundredth anniversary, our two communities will look back and say that, because of that Council and its very important and normative document on interfaith dialogue, we do know each other through the eyes and hearts that each of us has as members of our own faith community. For this afternoon and for your abiding together with me for so many years, from the bottom of my heart I again want to say thank you, Mazeltov.

Francis Cardinal George kissing Francis' hand

early interfaith relations

In the Beginning

How the work of Christian unity got started

by John Borelli

October 1st, 2012

America, The National Catholic Weekly

In mid-20th-century Oklahoma, when I was finishing high school and starting college as the Second Vatican Council unfolded (1962–65), Catholics represented only 2 percent of the population. There was a steady stream of televised Protestant services, and I remember vaguely a local Sunday broadcast that featured a panel of Protestant ministers. The panel became interesting when, unexpectedly, one of our few Catholic priests appeared on it wearing a Roman collar, when clergy of other denominations usually did not. The visual message was clear—though other Christians are similar to us, we Catholics are different.

All this changed with the council. We need not stand apart. We were actually closer to other Christians, the council explained, than we had imagined. Vatican II’s 1964 “Decree on Ecumenism” summarized it this way, “For those who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect.”

Despite a healthy preoccupation at Christ the King, my home parish, with liturgical participation and sermons on justice and civil rights in the decade before the council, ecumenism was not on the agenda. Our priests’ liberalism extended only so far. Annually they railed against parents who enrolled their children at the prestigious Episcopal Cassady Day School. Chapel was required at Cassady, and for Catholics that presented a problem. Our priests resisted our parishioners’ attending services regularly in other churches. The “Decree on Ecumenism” undid those reservations and even encouraged Catholics to join other Christians regularly in prayer, especially for unity.

In Oklahoma, most of our neighbors, acquaintances and business associates were not Catholic, and the few ecumenical initiatives took place among Protestants. Nationally, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America was organized in 1908, which in 1950 gave way to the National Council of Churches of Christ. While the religious freedom created by such Protestant diversity allowed Catholics to flourish, warnings would periodically arrive from the Vatican reminding us to hold discussions of faith and morals apart from Protestant ecumenical efforts.

These warnings began arriving as early as 1895, with an expression of displeasure to bishops over Catholic participation in the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago. In 1928, shortly after the ecumenically planned first Faith and Order assembly in Lausanne, Switzerland, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical warning the whole church about “pan-Christians who turn their minds to uniting the churches” but whose ecumenical effort “tends to injure faith.” Another warning arrived in 1948 anticipating the organizational assembly of the World Council of Churches that year in Geneva.

Early Interfaith Cooperation

Interaction between Catholics and Protestants and Jews, too, had to take place on the edges of formal church structures. Founded in New York in 1927, the National Conference of Christians and Jews (called the National Conference of Jews and Christians until 1938) was the world’s flagship interfaith organization. Yet Catholic priests had to justify any involvement in the conference. The Paulist John Elliot Ross, who served on the N.C.C.J. executive committee, was also the first priest to join a Protestant minister and a rabbi in cross-country speaking tours. Father Ross defended himself by distinguishing interfaith activities dedicated to eliminating prejudice and promoting the common good from discussions on Christian unity, faith and morals, which were banned.

With World War II the need for ecumenical and interfaith teamwork grew exponentially. The Jesuit John Courtney Murray, who later contributed substantially to the council’s “Declaration on Religious Liberty,” urged “intercredal co-operation” in 1942, appealing to the “Sword of the Spirit” initiative of Christian communions in besieged England. Military service also inspired greater mutual respect. In 1943 four U.S. military chaplains (two Protestant, one Catholic and one Jewish) went down arm-in-arm on the troop ship Dorchester after surrendering their life vests so that troops could survive. Later, stained glass chapel windows and a U.S. commemorative stamp honoring their shared heroism became symbols of a new era of what Father Murray called “Christian co-operation.”

By 1950 the Vatican gave qualified acceptance to the assignment by bishops of “trustworthy and sufficiently educated priests” to attend ecumenical meetings as observers. Even before that, in 1948, the bishops of Holland allowed Msgr. Johannes Willebrands to develop ecumenical relations there. In 1952 he and the Rev. Frans Thijssen formed the Catholic Conference for Ecumenical Questions, attracting Catholic ecumenists to follow the World Council of Churches agenda and other developments. Several of these theologians later served as officials or experts for commissions at the Second Vatican Council. One of these specialists was a young Paulist, Thomas F. Stransky, who had been sent by his superiors to Europe for graduate study in Protestant missiology. Attending liturgy at St. Peter’s Basilica on Pentecost Sunday in 1960, when Pope John XXIII announced the preparatory commissions for the upcoming council, he was surprised to hear that among them was a secretariat for Christian unity. He had no inkling that before summer’s end he would be among the four members of the secretariat’s initial staff.

First Steps

Pope John appointed the senior biblical scholar Cardinal Augustin Bea, a Jesuit, as the secretariat’s president, and Monsignor Willebrands as its secretary. Msgr. Jean-François Arrighi, a skilled veteran of the Roman Curia, and Father Stransky rounded out the original four. The Rev. Joseph Komonchak, a leading American historian of the council, has concluded that Vatican II represented the vision of this secretariat more than that of any other preparatory commission. Mauro Velati, the best informed historian of the secretariat’s early history, has identified its three documents on ecumenism, interreligious dialogue and religious freedom as “most central to the aggiornamento [updating] desired by John XXIII.” Only two years after the secretariat’s founding, as Vatican II was convening in 1962, Father Stransky described the secretariat as “an active symbol of Pope John’s loving concern to promote Christian unity.” Speaking in 2006 at Georgetown University, the Paulist recalled how the secretariat became “the trusted darling among the [council’s] bishops.”

The secretariat first gathered its bishop members, consultors and staff in November 1960. Only three of those who were present at that first meeting are alive today: Josette Kersters of the Grail Movement, whom Monsignor Willebrands had invited to help with secretarial work; Gregory Baum, then an Augustinian priest and now still active as a professor emeritus at McGill University; and Father Stransky. Father Baum was noticed because his doctoral thesis, published in 1956, scoured the works of the five popes before John XXIII for the slightest ecumenical inclinations. Father Stransky saw a copy of Father Baum’s book, marked prodigiously with reader’s notations, in Pope Paul VI’s private collection, which is now at the Instituto Paolo VI in Brescia. In November 2010 Professor Baum spoke at Georgetown University, marking the 50th anniversary of the secretariat’s first meeting. He reminisced that his thesis on “pre-ecumenical signs” would have been very different if he had written it only four years later, in 1960.

With regard to the eventual declaration on the Jews, or what became “Nostra Aetate,” Professor Baum remembered his impression after its first meeting that the secretariat was going to offer a post-Auschwitz reading of the New Testament, avoiding “any interpretation of a biblical text that could legitimate the humiliation of the Jews and justify their exclusion or marginalization.” The secretariat’s work reached fruition in three conciliar acts: on ecumenism in 1964, on the Jews and interreligious dialogue in 1965 and on religious liberty in 1965. In collaboration with the theological commission, the secretariat also contributed to the “Constitution on Divine Revelation” of 1965.

Three Key Interlocutors

Contact with outsiders in 1960 also directed the secretariat’s work and affected the outcome of the council. On June 2, 1960, Monsignor Willebrands, by then the official ecumenical representative of the Dutch bishops, the first such national officer, was in Rome with Father Thijssen to report on C.C.E.Q. activities and plans. He records in his diary how Cardinal Bea told them that the pope would soon announce the secretariat and that he, Cardinal Bea, would be its president. He asked the Dutch priests to convey this confidential information to Geneva to another Dutchman, Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft, the first general secretary of the World Council of Churches. They were also to tell Dr. Visser ’t Hooft that Cardinal Bea wanted to meet with him soon, even if unofficially. Monsignor Willebrands and Dr. Visser ’t Hooft, already friends for several years, could mend any problem, conversing in Dutch.

A private meeting between Dr. Visser ’t Hooft and Cardinal Bea took place on Sept. 22, 1960, at a convent in Milan. The local archbishop, Cardinal Giovanni Montini, was in on the plan too. As Pope Paul VI, Montini would guide the council to completion after the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963. In hindsight, the requirement that the meeting be secret seemed “ridiculous,” as Dr. Visser ’t Hooft later noted, but he agreed that the delicate process of establishing relationships could easily have been complicated by public discussion at that point. Dr. Visser ’t Hooft’s first recommendation to Cardinal Bea was that the council must address religious freedom to ensure that future Catholic statements promoting Christian unity would be taken seriously.

More out in the open was the visit to Rome of Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, on Dec. 2, 1960. Monsignor Willebrands again served as an intermediary, conveying to Cardinal Bea Archbishop Fisher’s desire to stop for a meeting with Pope John after visits to Jerusalem and Istanbul. Anglicans and Catholics alike criticized Archbishop Fisher for wanting the meeting. Cardinal Domenico Tardini, the Vatican Secretary of State, toned down the visit—not allowing press coverage, photos or any official visit with Cardinal Bea. Again, good will prevailed over the awkwardness in establishing church relations. Archbishop Fisher reported that Pope John at one point read from an address, in which he referred enthusiastically to that time when other Christians could return home to Mother Church. The archbishop courteously corrected him: “Not return.... None of us can go backwards.” He then explained, “We are looking forward until, in God’s good time, when our two courses approximate and meet.” After a moment’s pause, Pope John replied, “You are right.” When the archbishop thanked him for establishing the secretariat, Pope John replied, “Yes, and this afternoon you shall see Cardinal Bea.” The reception was offsite at the college where Cardinal Bea lived.

Even more significant for the outcome of the council was the visit to Rome of Jules Isaac, a week and a day after Pope John had announced the secretariat. An official of the pre-war French government and a Holocaust survivor, Professor Isaac had lost his wife, daughter and son-in-law in the death camps. He had dedicated his remaining years to dissolving Christian anti-Semitism and the pervasive anti-Jewish theology that supported it. There were interfaith meetings at Oxford in 1946, in Switzerland in 1947, the establishment of his own French association of Christians and Jews in 1948—all with Catholic participation—and a less-than-satisfactory meeting with Pope Pius XII in 1949. Unsure but encouraged by his Catholic friends, Professor Isaac had an audience with Pope John XXIII on June 13, 1960, and with Cardinal Bea two days later. The professor proposed that the pope form a commission to look at the problem, and the pope confirmed he was thinking the same thing. Pope John’s assurances gave Professor Isaac more than he had hoped for.

In 1960 it came down to three 80-year-old men—a Holocaust survivor, a pope who had called a surprise council and a Jesuit cardinal and biblical scholar who headed the council’s most unanticipated commission. In September 1960, Pope John approved Cardinal Bea’s suggestion that a statement on religious relations with Jews could be written. By 1963, when the second session of the council got underway and the statement on the Jews was at last on its agenda, two of the three were dead. Cardinal Bea lived until 1968. Perhaps the greatest of his many achievements was guiding such a controversial statement as the “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” to completion.

The involvement of the Catholic Church in ecumenical and interreligious relations in the 50 years since Vatican II has been an enormously important factor affecting renewal of Christian life, ecumenical advances and greater interfaith mutuality. In his 1995 encyclical on ecumenism, “That They May Be One” (No. 78 and 84), Pope John Paul II acknowledged, perhaps more plainly than the bishops at Vatican II could have done in 1965, that the experience of ecumenism has enabled us to understand better how the Spirit is often able to pour out grace in extraordinary ways and how sublime is the mutual help Christians receive from one another in their search for the truth.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the place where Catholics represented only 2 percent of the population in the mid-20th century. It was in Oklahoma, not the entire United States.

John Borelli, special assistant to the president for interreligious initiatives at Georgetown University, is working with Thomas Stransky, C.S.P., as he prepares a full account of the genesis and development of the Second Vatican Council’s “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions.”