Martin E. Marty: Pope Benedict and the Jews
On January 22, responding to a post-speech questioner at St. Scholastica College in Duluth, which is (roughly) twenty-four percent Catholic and sixteen percent Lutheran, I observed that American Catholic criticisms of Pope Benedict XVI have often been muted, and that Lutherans held their fire and even admired some Benedict-ine actions. For example, he had guided a Lutheran-Catholic entente document through obstructions in 1999. On 'interfaith' in general, recalling the nightmare his quotation about Muhammad had caused in the Islamic world and his reasonable efforts to repair the damage, I speculated that he would be more cautious in ecumenical and interfaith lectures "tomorrow."
The day after that tomorrow, on January 24, he incautiously set out to abort a schism in Roman Catholicism by welcoming back four excommunicated bishops, among them Richard Williamson, who is a very public and recent Holocaust-denier. While we are at it, Vatican officials had to know the bishop's very public corollary views, that the forgery "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is authentic, that the United States "did" the 9/11 attacks, that women should not be allowed to attend universities, and that everything about Vatican II reforms, including support of religious liberty, was heretical. Leadership of his Pius X Society also calls Jews "the artisans for the coming of the Antichrist" and argues that Jews' "grave defects rendered them odious to all nations among which they were established." Wounded and grieving, Jewish leaders planning for a papal visit to the Holy Land this time expressed resolve to continue Jewish-Catholic relations.
We'll let good Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's point man on Catholic ecumenism and relations to Jews, begin to repair the damage, along with German bishops, who know that what Williamson said publicly in Germany subjects him to criminal prosecution. Intra-Catholic affairs are less the concern of the non-Catholic press than are offensive public actions which add potential for tumult to a tumult-torn world. Jews less formally involved in hosting and talking with the Vatican and this pope are less mild. Their rage is not suppressed (see reference, below). Vatican-friendly Edward T. Oakes, S.J., in a helpful editorial in the January 30th Wall Street Journal, summarizes: "Needless to say...the pope still has a huge public-relations problem on his hands."
How and why did he get into this situation? Theories abound, as they did when the Vatican-Muslim flap occurred. This time is different, says Father Oakes, since the offenders are not medieval Byzantine rulers (as in the Muslim case) but living, breathing excommunicated schismatics for whom the pope will do anything, including offend the whole Jewish world and millions of bystanders, among them those who do remember the Holocaust, in order to reincorporate Bishop Williamson and his three Episcopal leaders in the Pius X society. Put simply, as Father Oakes and numerous Catholic commentators have thus put it: Benedict XVI has such a horror of schism that he and his team can let almost anything else go-including Pius X Society's insults to the Vatican II bishops and their successors, and interpretations of Catholicism which the previous pope and team adjudged to be heretical-in order to stall or demolish schismatic movements.
Is Benedict XVI, such a learned and informed and open-intentioned scholar, too much the German with his historian-fed memories of Martin Luther and other 16th century "schismatics" and an inordinate fear of repetition? We'll wait and see.
Read entire article at Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
The day after that tomorrow, on January 24, he incautiously set out to abort a schism in Roman Catholicism by welcoming back four excommunicated bishops, among them Richard Williamson, who is a very public and recent Holocaust-denier. While we are at it, Vatican officials had to know the bishop's very public corollary views, that the forgery "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is authentic, that the United States "did" the 9/11 attacks, that women should not be allowed to attend universities, and that everything about Vatican II reforms, including support of religious liberty, was heretical. Leadership of his Pius X Society also calls Jews "the artisans for the coming of the Antichrist" and argues that Jews' "grave defects rendered them odious to all nations among which they were established." Wounded and grieving, Jewish leaders planning for a papal visit to the Holy Land this time expressed resolve to continue Jewish-Catholic relations.
We'll let good Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's point man on Catholic ecumenism and relations to Jews, begin to repair the damage, along with German bishops, who know that what Williamson said publicly in Germany subjects him to criminal prosecution. Intra-Catholic affairs are less the concern of the non-Catholic press than are offensive public actions which add potential for tumult to a tumult-torn world. Jews less formally involved in hosting and talking with the Vatican and this pope are less mild. Their rage is not suppressed (see reference, below). Vatican-friendly Edward T. Oakes, S.J., in a helpful editorial in the January 30th Wall Street Journal, summarizes: "Needless to say...the pope still has a huge public-relations problem on his hands."
How and why did he get into this situation? Theories abound, as they did when the Vatican-Muslim flap occurred. This time is different, says Father Oakes, since the offenders are not medieval Byzantine rulers (as in the Muslim case) but living, breathing excommunicated schismatics for whom the pope will do anything, including offend the whole Jewish world and millions of bystanders, among them those who do remember the Holocaust, in order to reincorporate Bishop Williamson and his three Episcopal leaders in the Pius X society. Put simply, as Father Oakes and numerous Catholic commentators have thus put it: Benedict XVI has such a horror of schism that he and his team can let almost anything else go-including Pius X Society's insults to the Vatican II bishops and their successors, and interpretations of Catholicism which the previous pope and team adjudged to be heretical-in order to stall or demolish schismatic movements.
Is Benedict XVI, such a learned and informed and open-intentioned scholar, too much the German with his historian-fed memories of Martin Luther and other 16th century "schismatics" and an inordinate fear of repetition? We'll wait and see.