Top Vatican official says controversial Latin prayer for Jews could be dropped - Haaretz - Israel News

Haaretz : By The Associated Press

ROME - The most senior official in the Vatican after the Pope suggested yesterday that a highly controversial prayer for the conversion of the Jews could be dropped from the re-introduced Latin-language rite.

Speaking at a news conference, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone was asked about Pope Benedict's recent decree allowing a wider use of the old Latin missal, or prayer book, that was phased out after the reforms of the so-called Second Vatican Council.

Jewish leaders sharply criticized the decree, which revived the possible use of a passage from the old Latin prayer book for Good Friday calling for Jews to be converted. ...

Bertone said the prayer that many Jews have found offensive could be substituted with one introduced into church rituals in the 1970s and which makes no reference to conversion of Jews.

Given the sensitivity of the issue, one wonders why this was not more fully considered and implemented before the Pope's announcement, rather than floated at this point.

I have read reports, not fully confirmed, that the restoration of the Latin rite does not apply to the Easter weekend liturgy. It is peculiar that there is so much speculation and apparent confusion about Vatican policy on the issue following the Pope's announcement.

Window Opens on Holocaust in Ukraine

New York Times:

PARIS (AP) -- Children, stomachs empty and knees quivering, saw and heard Jews massacred by the Nazis all across the killing fields of Ukraine. Teenagers were forced to bury the victims, shoveling dirt over neighbors and playmates.

Today, these now aged men and women are unburdening themselves of wartime memories, many for the first time, in testimonies to a French priest. Their words may change history as they shed light on this poorly known chapter of the Holocaust.

The project is central to a broader reassessment of the Nazi horrors in Ukraine. Last month, a team of rabbis in another project visited a newly found grave site in the Ukrainian village of Gvozdavka-1 where thousands of Jews were killed during the occupation by Adolf Hitler's army.

That was just one site among many: Father Patrick Desbois and his mixed-faith team have been crisscrossing Ukraine for six years and have located more than 500 mass graves so far, many never before recorded. ...

Desbois ''discovered that elderly eyewitnesses who had never been asked about this, when speaking with a priest, opened up. If you are ever going to bare your thoughts, if you are a Christian, you will bare them to a priest,'' Shapiro said.

Given Ukraine's history of anti-Semitism, from imperial-era pogroms to modern-day vandalism of Jewish sites, some are reluctant to absolve the Ukrainian witnesses and participants of responsibility in the Holocaust.

Shapiro, however, said: ''It is too late to be in a blame game. Our obligation is to understand.''

Healing wounds between Jews and Christians has been central to Desbois' career. He heads a group called Yahad-In Unum -- combining the Hebrew and Latin words for ''together'' -- founded in 2004 by Paris' influential Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, whose Jewish mother died at Auschwitz, and officials at the World Jewish Congress. ...

Yahad-In Unum's researchers rely heavily on family members of victims or survivors. At the Paris exhibit, which is displayed in English and French, a sign near the exit asks anyone with information about someone killed by Nazis in Ukraine to leave a note in a box or to send an e-mail.

''I want to return dignity to the families,'' Desbois said. ''Every story helps us.''

Latin Mass May Damage Catholic-Jewish Relations

The New York Sun: By GABRIELLE BIRKNER

Pope Benedict XVI's expected decision this week to ease restrictions on a traditional Mass that includes a reference to Jewish conversion could damage Catholic-Jewish relations, interfaith leaders say.

The pope is said to have authorized the broader use of the Latin-language Tridentine Mass, which was widely supplanted more than 40 years ago by a less formal Mass in the local vernacular.

When celebrated in the traditional format that is favored by some conservative Catholics, the Good Friday liturgy contains a passage stating that Jews live in "blindness" and "darkness" and asking God to "remove the veil from their hearts." A reference to Jews as "perfidious" was excised from the liturgy in 1969....

The editor of a religion journal, First Things, the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus... posited that Pope Benedict XVI's forthcoming decree on the Tridentine Mass would 'reflect the language adopted by the Second Vatican Council,' and that phrases that could be construed as offensive to Jews would be removed.

Even if that language were not changed, Rev. Neuhaus said relations between Catholics and Jews would remain strong. 'We're not talking about a major part of Catholic worship,' he said. 'We're talking about one sentence that occurs once a year. That's not to say it is unimportant, but the things done with Catholic-Jewish relations over the past half-century is not going to be compromised. The church's commitment to a respectful dialogue with Judaism is irrevocable.'

The chairman of the board of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the Reverend Philip Eichner, said the traditional Good Friday references to conversion are well meaning — not anti-Semitic. 'We would say everyone who doesn't see Jesus is living in a certain amount of darkness, and we want them to see the light,' he said.

Why, thanks. We are so appreciative of your consideration.

Google advertises Prayers Ringtones. O'perfidious Jews, find the light.

Help us to find the light

washingtonpost.com: By Michelle Boorstein

A two-week evangelical campaign designed to bring Jews to Jesus is underway in Washington, taking this question to Metro stations, Nationals games and popular spots like U Street: Is Jesus the Jewish messiah?

That is the core belief of the international missionary organization Jews for Jesus, the best known of dozens of messianic Jewish groups that have sprung up in recent decades. Followers believe that Jesus was the messiah mentioned in Jewish scripture. The group, which has a $17 million annual budget, defines its mission as 'making the messiahship of Jesus an unavoidable issue to Jewish people worldwide.' ...

But it comes at a time when congregations of messianic Jews are growing, albeit slowly. There are about 300 such congregations in the United States, up from none around 1970, according to the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations. Jewish groups that work to oppose conversion efforts estimate that 200,000 American Jews have become believers in Christ in the past three decades. ...

The issue of missionizing to Jews is becoming more explosive as evangelical Christian groups -- the primary backers of messianic organizations -- draw closer than ever with Jewish groups over their shared support of Israel. Christian blogs lighted up last year when the
Jerusalem Post reported that Texas megapreacher and stalwart Israel ally John C. Hagee believed that Jews have a special covenant with God that allows them salvation without accepting Jesus. The Rev. Hagee is already criticized by some evangelicals because he doesn't advocate proselytizing to Jews. He disputed the newspaper report, saying he believes that Jews do need Jesus, but many messianic Jews remain angry that some evangelical leaders are willing to tone down evangelizing in order not to offend Jews. ...

Pope Approves Wider Use of Latin Mass

New York Times:

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI has approved a document that relaxes restrictions on celebrating the Latin Mass used by the Roman Catholic Church for centuries until the modernizing reforms of the 1960s, the Vatican said Thursday....

Benedict's move is widely seen as an attempt to reach out to an ultra-traditionalist and schismatic group, the Society of St. Pius X, and bring it back into the Vatican's fold. ...

Some cardinals and bishops, particularly in France -- where Lefebvre's group is strong -- have objected publicly to any liberalizing of the old rite, saying its broader use could lead to divisions within the church, and could imply a rejection of other Vatican II teachings.

Other concerns have come from groups involved in Christian-Jewish dialogue, because the Tridentine rite contains prayers that some non-Christians find offensive. The Tridentine liturgy predates the landmark documents from Vatican II on improving relations with Jews and people of other faiths....

Benedict has made clear for years that he greatly admires the Tridentine rite and has already incorporated Latin into Masses at St. Peter's Basilica....

''I am of the opinion, to be sure, that the old rite should be granted much more generously to all those who desire it,'' then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said. ''It's impossible to see what could be dangerous or unacceptable about that.''

Where is Tom Lehrer when we really need him?

Pope to Neusner: Go Girl!

Haaretz :

In his new book, 'Jesus of Nazareth,' the pope devotes no fewer than 18 pages to a deep theological discussion that he has carried on with Neusner. The headline of an article about the book in the Catholic News Service says it all: 'After saints, most-quoted author in pope?s new book is a U.S. rabbi.'

This is no small thing. Judeo-Christian dialogues in which the head of the Catholic Church takes part personally are rare indeed. In fact, since the Middle Ages, when the Church, for its own reasons, organized theological debates - known as disputations - between Christian and Jewish clergy (the identity of the winning side was, of course, known in advance), no such public, theological exchange has taken place between Judaism and Christianity. ...

The roots of the theological dialogue between the American rabbi-professor and the German cardinal lie in a provocative book Neusner published in 1993, bearing the presumptuous title "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus." In that book, Neusner imagines himself present among the crowd that gathered at Capernaum, above the Sea of Galilee, to listen to the charismatic Nazarene. He then proceeds to pick apart Jesus? teachings there, and find holes in them from the viewpoint of a practicing Jew.

Neusner says that his goal in that book was to explain why, if he had been present at the Sermon on the Mount, "I would not have become a follower of Jesus." The reason is that the criterion Jesus himself lays down - "Think not that I have come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I have come not to destroy but to fulfill" (Matthew 5:17) - according to which the sermon he delivers on the mount gives him a status equal to that of Moses, is in contradiction to the Torah, Neusner explains.

He argues that Jesus contradicts his own declaration, and of course the Torah, by forgoing the sanctity of the Sabbath and placing himself above the commandment to honor one's parents. Beyond this, Neusner views Jesus? formulation (invoked insistently in the Sermon on the Mount), "You have heard that it was said [in the Torah] ... But I say unto you ..." as the most grievous sin of all: Jesus puts himself above the Torah and, it follows, above God. ...

Newsner says that if he had succeeded in the mission of that book, Christians would have adopted Judaism. "That won't happen overnight, but it will happen at the End of Days," Neusner says, with a faint smile in the corner of his mouth. "The Torah says that if one treats it as a criterion for truth - as Christianity and Islam do - Judaism is bound to triumph."...

Ratzinger, it turns out, was deeply impressed by what Neusner had to say, and not in the least offended by the frontal attack on the founder of Christianity. On the contrary: After reading the manuscript of "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus," he sent Neusner his compliments, which were used to publicize the book. "He wrote that it was the best book written within the framework of the Judeo-Christian dialogue in the past 10 years and he recommended it to his students when he taught at the Vatican. That was very generous of him," Neusner notes. At the same time, he adds, the impact at the time of his book - which was translated into Russian, German, Swedish, Italian and Polish - is nothing like what it is now, after it has been so extensively quoted by the pope in his new work.

Like Neusner, Pope Benedict XVI also has no fear of confrontation.... In his new book, the pope terms Neusner "a great Jewish scholar" and adds that the rabbi's arguments aided him in his personal search for the answers embedded in the Scriptures. Neusner, according to the pope, is conducting the theological dialogue "with profound respect for the Christian faith."

The Pope's Favorite Rabbi

From TIME:

[Jewish studies scholar Jacob] Neusner, 74, lives by the story's moral: confrontation is part of his makeup, take it or leave it. One might expect many Christians to leave it. But at least one has not. In his new book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday; $24.95), Pope Benedict XVI devotes 20 pages to

A Rabbi Talks with Jesus

, a 161-page grenade Neusner lobbed in 1993. In that volume, the professor (now at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) and noncongregational rabbi projected himself back into the Gospel of Matthew to quiz Jesus on the Jewish law. He found the Nazarene's interpretation irredeemably faulty. In his 14-years-delayed response, Benedict not only compliments Neusner as a 'great Jewish scholar' but also recapitulates the thesis of A Rabbi Talks and spends a third of one of his 10 chapters answering it.

There is no real precedent for this. The last time Christianity and Judaism had knockdown debates was during medieval 'disputations' convened by Christian authorities and decisively rigged against the Jews. Although the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 renounced the Roman Catholic teaching that Jews were Christ killers and John Paul II acknowledged Jews' ongoing presence by visiting a synagogue, postwar papal discourse has focused on Christianity's view of Judaism, not the reverse, and steered serenely around fundamental controversies. Jesus of Nazareth takes the next huge step: "a Pope taking seriously what a Jew says--and says critically--about the New Testament," marvels Eugene Fisher, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' liaison for Catholic-Jewish relations. "Wow. This is new."...

Regarding one verse, Benedict writes that "Neusner shows us that we are dealing not with some kind of moralism, but with a highly theological text, or, to put it more precisely, a Christological one." He acknowledges the rabbi's point that Jesus is offering the Jews a transformation rather than a continuation of the Torah but maintains that the trade-off is worth it, provided Jesus is not merely "a liberal reform rabbi" but "the Son." That Neusner and other Jews regard that very Sonship as a deal breaker does not bother him much. "It would be good for the Christian world to look respectfully at this obedience of Israel," he writes, "and thus to appreciate better the great commandments" as universalized by Jesus.

Neusner is not my favorite rabbi (or rabbinic scholar). Then again, Benedict is not my favorite Pope.
Kind of reminds me of Orthodox rabbis, Christian priests, and Muslim imams coming together in their opposition to the gay rights parades in Jerusalem.