Anti-semitism is the beginning of the end of Europe...

Watch/listen to the delusional rabbi Jonathan Sachs

project his Talmudic Jewish psychosis onto the goyim

The Mutating Virus: Understanding

Antisemitism - Jonathan Sachs

The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. That is what I want us to understand today. It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Hitler. It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Stalin. It isn’t Jews alone who suffer under ISIS or Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad. We make a great mistake if we think antisemitism is a threat only to Jews. It is a threat, first and foremost, to Europe and to the freedoms it took centuries to achieve.

Antisemitism is not about Jews. It is about anti-Semites. It is about people who cannot accept responsibility for their own failures and have instead to blame someone else. Historically, if you were a Christian at the time of the Crusades, or a German after the First World War, and saw that the world hadn’t turned out the way you believed it would, you blamed the Jews. That is what is happening today. And I cannot begin to say how dangerous it is. Not just to Jews but to everyone who values freedom, compassion and humanity.

The appearance of antisemitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown. If Europe allows antisemitism to flourish, that will be the beginning of the end of Europe. And what I want to do in these brief remarks is simply to analyze a phenomenon full of vagueness and ambiguity, because we need precision and understanding to know what antisemitism is, why it happens, why antisemites are convinced that they are not antisemitic.

First let me define antisemitism. Not liking Jews is not antisemitism. We all have people we don’t like. That’s OK; that’s human; it isn’t dangerous. Second, criticizing Israel is not antisemitism. I was recently talking to some schoolchildren and they asked me: is criticizing Israel antisemitism? I said No and I explained the difference. I asked them: Do you believe you have a right to criticize the British government? They all put up their hands. Then I asked, Which of you believes that Britain has no right to exist? No one put up their hands. Now you know the difference, I said, and they all did.

Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else. It takes different forms in different ages. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, the state of Israel. It takes different forms but it remains the same thing: the view that Jews have no right to exist as free and equal human beings.

If there is one thing I and my contemporaries did not expect, it was that antisemitism would reappear in Europe within living memory of the Holocaust. The reason we did not expect it was that Europe had undertaken the greatest collective effort in all of history to ensure that the virus of antisemitism would never again infect the body politic. It was a magnificent effort of antiracist legislation, Holocaust education and interfaith dialogue. Yet antisemitism has returned despite everything.

On 27 January 2000, representatives of 46 governments from around the world gathered in Stockholm to issue a collective declaration of Holocaust remembrance and the continuing fight against antisemitism, racism and prejudice. Then came 9/11, and within days conspiracy theories were flooding the internet claiming it was the work of Israel and its secret service, the Mossad. In April 2002, on Passover, I was in Florence with a Jewish couple from Paris when they received a phone call from their son, saying, “Mum, Dad, it’s time to leave France. It’s not safe for us here anymore.”

In May 2007, in a private meeting here in Brussels, I told the three leaders of Europe at the time, Angela Merkel, President of the European Council, Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, and Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the European Parliament, that the Jews of Europe were beginning to ask whether there was a future for Jews in Europe.

That was more than nine years ago. Since then, things have become worse. Already in 2013, before some of the worst incidents, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that almost a third of Europe’s Jews were considering emigrating because of anti-Semitism. In France the figure was 46 percent; in Hungary 48 percent.

Let me ask you this. Whether you are Jewish or Christian, Muslim: would you stay in a country where you need armed police to guard you while you prayed? Where your children need armed guards to protect them at school? Where, if you wear a sign of your faith in public, you risk being abused or attacked? Where, when your children go to university, they are insulted and intimidated because of what is happening in some other part of the world? Where, when they present their own view of the situation they are howled down and silenced?

This is happening to Jews throughout Europe. In every single country of Europe, without exception, Jews are fearful for their or their children’s future. If this continues, Jews will continue to leave Europe, until, barring the frail and the elderly, Europe will finally have become Judenrein.

How did this happen? It happened the way viruses always defeat the human immune system, namely, by mutating. The new antisemitism is different from the old antisemitism, in three ways. I’ve already mentioned one. Once Jews were hated because of their religion. Then they were hated because of their race. Now they are hated because of their nation state. The second difference is that the epicenter of the old antisemitism was Europe. Today it’s the Middle East and it is communicated globally by the new electronic media.

The third is particularly disturbing. Let me explain. It is easy to hate, but difficult publicly to justify hate. Throughout history, when people have sought to justify anti-Semitism, they have done so by recourse to the highest source of authority available within the culture. In the Middle Ages, it was religion. So we had religious anti-Judaism. In post-Enlightenment Europe it was science. So we had the twin foundations of Nazi ideology, Social Darwinism and the so-called Scientific Study of Race. Today the highest source of authority worldwide is human rights. That is why Israel—the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East with a free press and independent judiciary—is regularly accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide.

The new antisemitism has mutated so that any practitioner of it can deny that he or she is an antisemite. After all, they’ll say, I’m not a racist. I have no problem with Jews or Judaism. I only have a problem with the State of Israel. But in a world of 56 Muslim nations and 103 Christian ones, there is only one Jewish state, Israel, which constitutes one-quarter of one per cent of the land mass of the Middle East. Israel is the only one of the 193 member nations of the United Nations that has its right to exist regularly challenged, with one state, Iran, and many, many other groups, committed to its destruction.

Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist as Jews with the same rights as everyone else. The form this takes today is anti-Zionism. Of course, there is a difference between Zionism and Judaism, and between Jews and Israelis, but this difference does not exist for the new antisemites themselves. It was Jews not Israelis who were murdered in terrorist attacks in Toulouse, Paris, Brussels and Copenhagen. Anti-Zionism is the antisemitism of our time.

In the Middle Ages Jews were accused of poisoning wells, spreading the plague, and killing Christian children to use their blood. In Nazi Germany they were accused of controlling both capitalist America and communist Russia. Today they are accused of running ISIS as well as America. All the old myths have been recycled, from the Blood Libel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The cartoons that flood the Middle East are clones of those published in Der Sturmer one of the primary vehicles of Nazi propaganda between 1923 and 1945.

The ultimate weapon of the new antisemitism is dazzling in its simplicity. It goes like this. The Holocaust must never happen again. But Israelis are the new Nazis; the Palestinians are the new Jews; all Jews are Zionists. Therefore the real antisemites of our time are none other than the Jews themselves. And these are not marginal views. They are widespread throughout the Muslim world, including communities in Europe, and they are slowly infecting the far left, the far right, academic circles, unions, and even some churches. Having cured itself of the virus of antisemitism, Europe is being reinfected by parts of the world that never went through the self-reckoning that Europe undertook once the facts of the Holocaust became known.

How do such absurdities come to be believed? This is a vast and complex subject, and I have written a book about it, but the simplest explanation is this. When bad things happen to a group, its members can ask one of two questions: “What did we do wrong?” or “Who did this to us?” The entire fate of the group will depend on which it chooses.

If it asks, “What did we do wrong?” it has begun the self-criticism essential to a free society. If it asks, “Who did this to us?” it has defined itself as a victim. It will then seek a scapegoat to blame for all its problems. Classically this has been the Jews.

Anti-Semitism is a form of cognitive failure, and it happens when groups feel that their world is spinning out of control. It began in the Middle Ages, when Christians saw that Islam had defeated them in places they regarded as their own, especially Jerusalem. That was when, in 1096, on their way to the Holy Land, the Crusaders stopped first to massacre Jewish communities in Northern Europe. It was born in the Middle East in the 1920s with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Antisemitism re-emerged in Europe in the 1870s during a period of economic recession and resurgent nationalism. And it is re-appearing in Europe now for the same reasons: recession, nationalism, and a backlash against immigrants and other minorities. Antisemitism happens when the politics of hope gives way to the politics of fear, which quickly becomes the politics of hate.

This then reduces complex problems to simplicities. It divides the world into black and white, seeing all the fault on one side and all the victimhood on the other. It singles out one group among a hundred offenders for the blame. The argument is always the same. We are innocent; they are guilty. It follows that if we are to be free, they, the Jews or the state of Israel, must be destroyed. That is how the great crimes begin.

Jews were hated because they were different. They were the most conspicuous non-Christian minority in a Christian Europe. Today they are the most conspicuous non-Muslim presence in an Islamic Middle East. Anti-Semitism has always been about the inability of a group to make space for difference. No group that adopts it will ever, can ever, create a free society.

So I end where I began. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. Antisemitism is only secondarily about Jews. Primarily it is about the failure of groups to accept responsibility for their own failures, and to build their own future by their own endeavours. No society that has fostered antisemitism has ever sustained liberty or human rights or religious freedom. Every society driven by hate begins by seeking to destroy its enemies, but ends by destroying itself.

Europe today is not fundamentally antisemitic. But it has allowed antisemitism to enter via the new electronic media. It has failed to recognize that the new antisemitism is different from the old. We are not today back in the 1930s. But we are coming close to 1879, when Wilhelm Marr founded the League of Anti-Semites in Germany; to 1886 when Édouard Drumont published La France Juive; and 1897 when Karl Lueger became Mayor of Vienna. These were key moments in the spread of antisemitism, and all we have to do today is to remember that what was said then about Jews is being said today about the Jewish state.

The history of Jews in Europe has not always been a happy one. Europe’s treatment of the Jews added certain words to the human vocabulary: disputation, forced conversion, inquisition, expulsion, auto da fe, ghetto, pogrom and Holocaust, words written in Jewish tears and Jewish blood. Yet for all that, Jews loved Europe and contributed to it some of its greatest scientists, writers, academics, musicians, shapers of the modern mind.

If Europe lets itself be dragged down that road again, this will be the story told in times to come. First they came for the Jews. Then for the Christians. Then for the gays. Then for the atheists. Until there was nothing left of Europe’s soul but a distant, fading memory.

Today I have tried to give voice to those who have no voice. I have spoken on behalf of the murdered Roma, Sinti, gays, dissidents, the mentally and physically handicapped, and a million and a half Jewish children murdered because of their grandparents’ religion. In their name, I say to you: You know where the road ends. Don’t go down there again.

You are the leaders of Europe. Its future is in your hands. If you do nothing, Jews will leave, European liberty will die, and there will be a moral stain on Europe’s name that all eternity will not erase.

Stop it now while there is still time.

Pharisee Timothy Dolan celebrates 50 years of the Noahide church!

The blabbermouth Pharisee Dolan (aka Cardinal Dolan) has been at it again.  In February, he gave an address at a Shabbat service in a New York synagogue (see, Pharisee Dolan's address to his fellow pharisees at the synagogue), followed in March by leading the NYC St. Pat's Day Parade with sodomites in tow (see, Nothing says happy Feast of St. Patrick in New York City, like a Pharisee leading a parade with at least one sodomite group in it), and recently gave a speech at the Jewish Theological Seminary but don't worry he did hide his pectoral cross so not as to offend his brother Pharisees (see, Timothy Dolan celebrates Nostra Aetate and 50 years of Catholic sensitivity and submission to Deicide Judaism's hatred of Christ).  Now he is here to indoctrinate those under his pastoral care into his Noahide church.  Read on and see Dolan quote several rabbis as if they were Church Fathers, give a shout out to the 'Talmudic Jewish periti' who helped write Nostra Aetate at the Second Vatican Council and invoke the 'sacred' name of Abraham Heschel and his heretical beliefs. 

Nostra Aetate and the Church’s Dialogue with Jews – – Fifty Years and Forward in the United States!

“What’s the big deal?”  sincerely asked a young priest when I told him how much I was looking forward to this golden jubilee of Nostra Aetate.

He inquired about the significance of this day not sarcastically or cynically, but genuinely.  Simply put, he so took Catholic-Jewish amity for granted that he wondered why it was necessary to celebrate this half-century old document.

For this fine young priest, that anyone would have ever considered the Jews guilty of Deicide, thus meriting scorn, harassment, isolation, or tragically worse, was utterly illogical and stupid.  He had been raised in a Catholic grade and high school where textbooks treated Jews with dignity and respect, and the full horror of the Shoah had been carefully examined; he had grown up in a parish where Catholics and Jews alternated years coming together in prayer on the eve of Thanksgiving, one year in the synagogue, the next in the parish church; as a seminarian, he had taken a course in Judaism taught by a Rabbi; and, now as a parish priest, is in a weekly scripture study with an interfaith group of local clergy that included a Rabbi.

He had no idea that it was not always so . . . which is only another argument for the case we make today:  that the implementation of Nostra Aetate, especially here in the United States, has been remarkably successful, that the invitation to respect and dialogue offered by the council fathers has been enthusiastically accepted, and has borne much fruit.

His “ho-humm” about today’s celebration, though, is not only a cause for gratitude, in that Jewish Catholic friendship is now so-taken-for-granted, but also a cause for some concern, since, well, Jewish-Catholic friendship is now so-taken-for-granted!  For, as my grandpa used to say, “What you take for granted can easily be ungranted!”

To be here with cardinals, bishops, priests, scholars, rabbis, and leaders in interfaith dialogue is an honor.  To work on behalf of my brother bishops as co-chair with Rabbi David Strauss of the official dialogue with the National Council of Synagogues, following the towering achievements of Cardinal William Keeler and a generation of devoted Catholic and Jewish leaders, is a privilege.

Veterans in this sacred task note that Jewish-Catholic friendship and cooperation has never been stronger, and I would concur.

The recent passing of the former Chief-Rabbi of the Eternal City, Elio Toaff, reminds us of his deep companionship with Pope St. John Paul II, as we realize that the late pontiff expressed explicit gratitude to only two people in his last testament:  his loyal priest secretary and spiritual son, Stanislaus Dziwicz, and Rabbi Toaff.

Here in the United States we note the perseverance of the official Jewish Catholic dialogue, both in the previously mentioned meetings between bishops and the representatives of Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Judaism in the National Council of Synagogues, in our consultations with the Rabbinic Council of America, and with the Orthodox Union.

Nor can we forget the nearly four dozen centers of joint study between Christians and Jews, such as the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, or the thousands of local and neighborhood partnership between parishes and synagogues in prayer, theological discourse, and community service.

Catholic clergy and people regularly benefit from ongoing education sponsored by the AJC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Hartman Institute, the Karski Institute and Yahad-in-Unum in Paris.

I could go on and on, but I’m preaching to the choir, as I think we are all in concert observing that the brave fathers of the council, aided by Jewish periti, could never have foreseen such progress.

Besides the organizational and educational progress referred to above, two other areas  this last half-century deserve special mention.

One is the fruitfulness of mutual theological study.  It was Pope John Paul II’s dream that Christians and Jews could return to the theological conversations between Jews and Christians so rudely interrupted 1,945 years ago when the Roman army leveled Jerusalem.  Beliefs cherished by each of us – – creation, election, covenant, promise, redemption, the law, grace, revelation, to name a few – – were kitchen table talk, or arguments, between Jews and Christians in the decades right after Jesus, but faded in 70 A.D. when another priority – – survival! – – took over.

Thanks to the green light of Nostra Aetate, such topics are back on the agenda.  Alleluia!

The second area of progress has been the candor with which we have confronted the testy controversies which have arisen.  Raised voices over such issues as the Good Friday prayer, the cross and convent at Auschwitz, the visit of Kurt Waldheim to Pope John Paul, the lifting of the excommunication of a holocaust – denying priest, the neuralgia over Dominus Jesus, the role of the Holy See during World War II, the reputation of Pius XII, necessary revision in the Oberammergau Passion Play, diplomatic exchanges between Israel and the Vatican, and even last week’s nod to Palestine by Pope Francis – – just to name a few – – have caused spats and arguments.  That we have not dodged them and have actually persevered through them is a test of our mettle!

I remember my first meeting as a bishop-member of the Jewish-Catholic dialogues, being amazed at the blunt bickering over Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ.

“I could have stayed home and had dinner with my family if I wanted this kind of arguing,” I whispered to an older bishop during the break.

“But that’s the point,” he came back.  “We are family, so we argue because we get scared and mad when something threatens to tear us apart.”  Not bad . . .

As we look back over the last five decades of progress since Nostra Aetate, I wonder what other successors will observe in May, 2065, when they gather to savor, please God, the advances made since today.

I do see five areas where we have indeed begun to “cast out to the deep,” challenges that could bring us into an even more durable and beneficial alliance.  See if you agree . . .

One would be an intensification of the most obvious imperative for any enterprise by any group of believers: to reclaim the primacy of the God in a world that prefers not to take Him seriously, to ignore Him, or even to deny Him.

Here we face together the impact of that loaded word secularism.  This is a point I spent a whole lecture on two weeks ago at the Jewish Theological Seminary back home in New York, proposing that this effort at the core of both Jewish and Catholic belief was the essence of Pope Saint John Paul II’s post- Nostra Aetate agenda.  I was glad that the respondents, Rabbi Burton Visotzky and Chancellor Arnold Eisen, agreed.

Simply put, I pointed out that John Paul II was convinced that the most insidious toxin infecting humanity was the denial of God’s sovereignty, even existence, and that the Church’s most natural ally in restoring faith in a world gone skeptical were the Jews.  Humanity’s fateful preference, lurking since the Enlightenment, lurching now, was, to use Rabbi Jonathan Sax’s definition of secularism, “to get along just fine without God.” 

The pope was convinced that the Jewish community would share his urgency that such a cultural sidelining of faith must be reversed.  He died, while not without hope, certainly with an impatience that neither Jews nor Catholics seemed to be making much progress in inviting the world to believe that, in the words of the psalmist, “Only in God is my soul at rest.”

I recounted the story of John Paul’s heroic and tumultuous 1979 return to Poland in what historians now call “nine days that changed the world,” and how, inspired by his presence and words, a two-million strong throng in Warsaw on his last day chanted at the top of their voices, to the grimaces of the KGB and Polish communist officials, “We want God!”

“We want God!”  The primitive cry of faith, humanity’s innate longing for the Divine, a thirst denied, ignored, ridiculed, outlawed, and rationalized away for too long by the oppression of a regime that had vainly sought purpose in systems that forgot God!  It was as if the Polish Pope had put on the lips of his people the pining of the Hebrew psalmist, “Like a deer that thirsts for living water, so my soul longs for you, my God.”

And, it was his aspiration that what most naturally bound Jews and Catholics together would be the common effort to help humanity articulate once again the desire what for too long had been suppressed, “We want God!”

Both Jews and Christians look out their windows daily to behold, in the prescient observation of Blessed John Henry Newman a century-and-a-half ago, “a world that is simply irreligious.”          

Two, the friendship inspired by Nostra Aetate coaxes us to explore together the pastoral issues that befuddle both of us.

Not long after my arrival in New York, Rabbi Peter Rubenstein kindly invited me to meet a group of his congregants at Central Synagogue.  They thoughtfully spoke to me about their concerns, not surprisingly concentrating on those familiar two categories that have characterized post- Nostra Aetate dialogue; namely, theological issues such as covenant, election, Israel, and neuralgic points such as the hoped-for opening of the Vatican archives, and their apprehension at the time that the Church’s commitment to Nostra Aetate was slackening.

Then they kindly asked me what I thought should concern us Catholics and Jews.  I stayed away from the theological and neuralgic, and went for the pastoral.

“I have a hunch,” I began, “that you committed Jews at this Synagogue have the same concerns that my parishioners at Saint Patrick’s have:  how to pass on the faith to our kids and grandkids who are growing-up in a culture that hardly has room for religion; how the reality of intermarriage affects us; how to preserve the Sabbath in a society where soccer and shopping reign; how to make sure our kids have some tether to the faith when they leave for college; how to entice back the crowds of our spiritual kin who have drifted away.”

It was a light bulb moment, as my new Jewish neighbors sat-up and exclaimed, “Oh, my, you Catholics worry about all that, too?”

You bet we do!  And putting our shoulders and Yarmulkes together to talk about them could be one of the more rewarding results of our celebrated Nostra Aetate friendship – – comparing notes on common pastoral challenges!

A couple months ago, I was invited to preach a Sabbath service at a local synagogue.  During the prayer, a young boy celebrated his Bar Mitzvah.  After the ceremony I commented to the Rabbi how powerful such a ritual was.  He looked at me and commented, “Odds are, we won’t see that young man again for thirty years, until he brings his son here for Bar Mitzvah!  “Oh,” I replied, “We Catholics call that the Sacrament of Confirmation!”

That’s what I mean by common pastoral challenges!

And point three is a common front on the most pressing pastoral burr in the saddle of all:  the unavoidable fact that what sociologists call “inherited religions” – – read:  Jews and Catholics – – are losing their members.

Both Jews and Catholics now approach the findings that Pew Research Center as we do the obituary page, but we can hardly ignore their challenge.  Yes, both of us can rejoice in the data that the majority of Catholics and Jews remain steadfast in their allegiance; yes, there’s a bit of evidence that the rate of defection may be leveling off . . . but, it’s “alarm-clock time” for both of us, because the statistics present unavoidable conclusions: belief may be high, belonging is not; and no longer can we presume that being born Jewish or Catholic is a guarantee that one will freely choose to live and die in that faith.

As Pope John Paul soberly commented, no longer can we count on birth, family tradition, or culture to automatically pass on the faith.

We Jews and Catholics – – and, lest we forget, Islam (which brings up yet another challenge!) – – believe we are born into the faith, we inherit it.  We did not choose our faith – – God chose us!  We have no more business choosing our supernatural family than we do our natural family!  We’re stuck with it.  Rabbi Joshua Heschel entitled his masterpiece, not “Man’s Search for God,” but God’s Search for Man!

When the teenage girl asked the “Whisky Priest” in Graham Greens’ classic, The Power and the Glory, the priest fleeing Mexican troops persecuting the Church, why he didn’t just leave the Church and save his life, he replied, “But I can’t just leave it.  It’s part of me.”

“Oh, like the birthmark on my arm,” the girl asked.

“That’s it . . . like a birthmark.”

In Jewish and Catholic chemistry, our belonging, our religious identity, is “like a birthmark.”

No more for a growing swath of our people!  And therein is the most towering pastoral problem we face together: to recover the sense of belonging   we believe essential to our relationship with God.

We Jews and Catholics face two obstacles in our mutual insistence on belonging:
The first is the sociological phenomenon noted above, that people today prefer belief over belonging:  They want God as their Father as long as they’re the only child; they want the Lord as their shepherd as long as the flock consists of one lamb – – themselves; they want God as their general as long as it’s an army of one.  None of this sits well with Jews who believe God chose a people, or Catholics who believe we are only a part of a body with many members.

The second obstacle we face is America itself, which stresses personal choice in everything from coffee to religion.  In fact, our highly Puritan, Calvinist religious climate puts the premium on my personal choice of God, not His choice of me.  Cardinal Francis George used to worry that Catholics in America were becoming “Calvinists with incense.”  His fear was well-grounded.

So, what’s happening is that religion is now listed under “hobby” or “personal interests,” if at all, instead of “family background and history” – – and that, my friends, is a juicy challenge for both of us.  For us to tackle it together could be a good time!

Four, the gruesome reality of religious persecution is yet another worry that unites us.  Somewhere right this moment a Jew or a Catholic is in the crosshairs of the rifle scope of an extremist.  All believers – – Jews, Christians, and, yes, genuine moderate Muslims – – which means most of them – – are at risk in vast regions of the world.  Christians fear ISIS and Boko Haram in the Mideast and Africa, and Islamic and Hindu extremists in the far East, while Jews fear Islamic terrorists in Israel and anti-Semitic thugs in Europe.
Our God, we both believe, can bring good out of evil, leading to what Pope Benedict, Cardinal Koch, and Pope Francis have called an “Ecumenism of Martyrdom,” as Jews and Christians huddle more closely together to protect, advocate for, and care for each other as mobs with torches and swords threaten our churches and synagogues in other parts of the globe.

Five, and finally, Nostra Aetate has given us an infrastructure of friendship these past fifty years allowing us to reclaim and preach again the Biblical reality that popular soothing spirituality would rather us forget: sin and redemption

Why in the world we Jews and Catholics have lost our voice in preaching sin and redemption is beyond me.  If our people believe they are without sin, that they need no salvation, why would they sense a need for church, synagogue, religion, belonging?  Affirmation and fellowship they can find much easier over a latte at Starbucks or at the gym … and they are!

Here I will defer to an eloquent author, David Brooks, whose new bestseller, The Road to Character, should be gift wrapped for every graduate these days.

Monday I interviewed him on the radio, and got red with embarrassment when he asked why the Church, why the Synagogue had stopped preaching sin and redemption, without which culture is doomed to pledge continued allegiance to the central fallacy of modern life, that “The Big Me,” the culture of achievement, our total focus on what he terms “resumé virtues” as opposed to “eulogy virtues,” can lead to true fulfillment.

No, David Brooks insists, we must preach that I am flawed; I am imperfect; I have a dark side; I am incomplete; I am a sinner; I need redemption, and I can’t give it to myself!
That’s our forte, folks! That’s the Jewish and Christian vocabulary!  That’s what the prophets and saints claimed!

Earlier I suggested that we Jews and Catholics are losing our people.  Where are they going?  I can only answer for Catholics: most go to no other religion, but became a “none.”  But those who do join another church sure aren’t registering with the Unitarians!  They’re more than likely signing–up at a Bible waving mega-church that bellows sin and salvation in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, because all they’re hearing at Sunday Mass is a version of the discredited “I’m ok – you’re ok” therapy of thirty years ago.

It’s time to reclaim our specialty as Jews and Christians: sin, grace, mercy, redemption!
Enough from me . . . By now it’s obvious that I am far from a theologian, and still a rookie in Jewish-Catholic dialogue compared to distinguished veterans here with us.  I was only fifteen when Nostra Aetate was promulgated by Blessed Paul VI.

But I am a pastor, and, as such, both rejoice in the progress that has been made, and relish the goals we realistically admit loom before us.

And, for the record, I told that young priest, “Listen, Buddy, this is a big deal!”

Source: May 22, 2015 entry on Timothy Cardinal Dolan's blog

Dolan & Francis, two ger toshavs.