the American Jewish Committee (AJC) & Nostra Aetate

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.”

John XXIII & John Paul II are saintly to who?

(One wonders what they are patron saints of?)

 

Celebrating the newest Roman Catholic Saints
by Michael Berenbaum
(click here to read original article)

Ordinarily, Jews have little interest in whom the Roman Catholic Church canonizes as saints. Yet, on the Sunday after Easter, the day that coincides with Yom Ha-Shoah, the 27th of Nisan, two men, Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II, will be elevated to sainthood, and both of them bear notice.

There is a paradox relating to the Holocaust that was first observed by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg: The innocent feel guilty, and the guilty feel innocent.

The greatest strides in Catholic-Jewish relations in the entire two millennia of that relationship were made at the initiative of these two popes, who were innocent during the Shoah and yet who felt responsibility for the Holocaust.

A word about Pope John XXIII: While serving as papal nuncio, a diplomatic post, in Istanbul, and known at the time as Archbishop Roncalli, he worked with the delegates of the Yishuv, the Jewish leadership in Palestine — pre-state Israel — to warn Hungarian Jews and to rescue those who could be rescued. He established direct communication with the Yishuv’s formal leaders in Turkey and even met with clandestine operatives. He did not, as was widely rumored, offer false baptismal certificates, but rather did something a bit more clever — he wrote letters indicating that the holder of the letter was a “co-religionist and fellow countryman of Jesus” and “should be entitled to Vatican protection.” Notice the language — “co-religionist and fellow countryman” is a reference to Jews. “Should be entitled to Vatican protection” does not mean that the holder is entitled to Vatican protection. It suggests a tone of aspiration rather than actual fact. He wrote to leaders in Bulgaria, where he had previously served, urging them to protect their Jews and directly to King Boris III, asking him not to deport Bulgarian Jews.

Elected as an interim, caretaker pope after the long pontificate of Pope Pius XII, Pope John XXIII met with the French historian Jules Isaac and studied the history of anti-Semitism. He then took the bold initiative of calling the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 (commonly known as Vatican II), bringing about, among its important initiatives, Nostra Aetate, which used the tools of Catholicism to revamp the Church’s teaching on the Jews. The Church then institutionalized that transformation by changing the Good Friday liturgy, as well as its scriptural reading.

In essence, Vatican II taught what critical historical scholarship had established long ago — that Jews were not responsible for the Crucifixion of Christ, but, rather, the human propensity to sin was. If, as Christians believe, Christ died for our sins, if his death was a sacrificial atonement, then without human sin, there would be no need for such atonement. Furthermore, Good Friday liturgy eliminated the reference to perfidious Jews and the reading of Matthew 27, in which Jews are depicted as having accepted responsibility on themselves and their children for the Crucifixion.

Teaching was combined with gesture, doctrine with human contact. Pope John XXIII stopped at the Great Synagogue of Rome and greeted its worshipers leaving Sabbath prayers, wishing them a “good Shabbat.” It was an unprecedented step for the bishop of Rome, the heir of St. Peter, to visit the Jews of Rome. It had simply never been done before. 

Thus, Pope John XXIII came to terms with 1,878 years of Jewish life — following the destruction of the Second Temple until the birth of Israel.

Enter Pope John Paul II, who took the transformations initiated by Pope John XXIII, and sustained by Paul VI, another series of steps further.

A word of biography is in order. John Paul II is probably the first pope who could truthfully say, “Some of my best friends are Jewish,” and mean it literally. Prior to becoming a priest, he was in direct contact with Jews; he knew them from the soccer fields, where he often played on the Jewish side when they were short a player, as well as while a university student and from the theater; one local Jew was among his closest friends and remained a friend throughout the pontiff’s long life. His friend even took an apartment in Rome to be near the pope, once he was elected.

Yaffa Eliach documented in legendary form that while still a parish priest, Karol Józef Wojtyła refused to baptize Jewish children who had been saved by Roman Catholic Polish families when their parents were deported, unless the children were informed that their biological parents had been Jews. This was an act of singular integrity and, in fact, it was not quite in keeping with the instructions of the postwar Church that was interested in saving the souls of all people — including, perhaps even especially, Jewish children. It was also an act of courage, as his parishioners must have felt the conversation burdensome.

Allow me to explain.

If you trusted a neighbor and your child had a certain type of appearance, meaning that they did not look “too Jewish” and they were preverbal, Jewish parents about to be deported might ask a Polish family to take care of their child. The child could not be told that they were Jewish at the time, as the information, if repeated, would be lethal to the child and also to the family that was sheltering him. When and if the parents returned, the child might not remember them or even recognize them. Often the child had been treated with love, and responded in kind, embracing his or her adoptive parents, the only parents he or she had known, and feeling the biological parents to be strangers who had abandoned him or her. So even when the parents survived, the child often wanted to stay put. If the parents or a parent did not return after the war, it became dangerous to reveal to a child that they were Jewish, as this could lead to the surrogate parents being labeled as “Jew lovers” and to their ostracism. So such information was not easily revealed to a child, but Wojtyła insisted.

As pope, John Paul II visited the Roman synagogue and worshipped with the Jewish community. He treated the synagogue as a house of God, with all the respect due to such standing, and he treated the chief rabbi of Rome as a fellow religious leader. He established diplomatic relations with Israel and traveled there in 2000, visiting both Yad Vashem and the Western Wall. At Yad Vashem, he apologized for the anti-Semitism of Christians — not of Christianity — and made the all-important statement that anti-Semitism is anti-Christian. A man of the theater, he understood well that the media is the message, and that his words would echo throughout the Christian world.

Although he did not say everything I would have liked him to have, what he did say was all-important, and the place from which he uttered these statements was even more symbolic. By visiting the Western Wall, the holiest site of Judaism, Pope John Paul II recognized the form that Judaism took after the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E. He placed a prayer into the Wall, as is the custom of the devout. His visit to the office of the chief rabbinate, certainly not the most ecumenical of religious offices in the world, was also compelling. Prepared by Jewish history and memory, the rabbis expected polemics, great medieval disputations. Instead he greeted them as one religious leader to another. The rabbis were shocked at how moved they were by the pope’s visit.

Not all problems were solved, not all issues were settled, but the result was tremendous progress and unprecedented warmth in Jewish-Roman Catholic relations.

It is worth noting, as well, who was not elevated to sainthood this Yom HaShoah: Pope Pius XII, the wartime pontiff whose record during the Holocaust is, to say the least, controversial. Pope Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict, admired Pius XII for his piety and asceticism, and prior to stepping down had been moving along his candidacy for sainthood.

There is another reason to celebrate Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II. I believe that the most urgent issue in interreligious life today is whether we can find within our religious traditions a way to accept the other, rather than to demonize the other. Can we use the tools of our own tradition to move beyond the notion of tolerance into acceptance of an underlying religious embrace of the other? Or must we resort to those parts of our tradition — each of our traditions, Jewish, Christian and Muslim — that demonize the other, that deny the other, that cannot recognize in the other one of God’s creation. I know of no issue more central to the world today, no other issue that could so likely determine our collective future, and I know of no religious leaders who have done more to show us the way than the two men who will be canonized as saints in the Roman Catholic tradition, Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II.

We should note, as well, that Pope Francis has made yet another profound gesture by elevating these men. To me, their deeds were saintly.

(Both John XXIII & John Paul II were lauded by the secular world.)

(Now that they have Vatican stamps, it must be official right?)

(John XXIII with Shinto priest at the Vatican.)

(John Paul II in the Great Synagogue of Rome.)