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Perspectives: Issues in Catholic-Jewish Dialogue
John T. Pawlikowski

The following is an excerpt from « Catholic-Jewish Relations 1973: Assessment and Agenda », the keynote address delivered at the First National Workshop on Catholic-Jewish Relations, Dayton, Ohio, November 27, 1973.

RECENT PROGRESS

First an assessment. . . . In my view many good things have happened and are beginning to happen. There was a period about a year and a half ago when it seemed that all efforts at promoting better relations between Catholics and Jews had ground to a halt. And, as we are quite aware, there was considerable tension following the claimed general silence of Christians at the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But in the last year or so there has been a significant increase in the number of programs sponsored by groups and diocesan ecumenical commissions, councils of churches, teachers' groups and other church-related agencies. Increasingly, impetus and money for such programming is coming from the Christian side, which was not always the case in the past when the energy and the funds usually had a Jewish origin. Los Angeles, Toledo, Nashville, Little Rock, Greensburg, Detroit, Kansas City, Hartford, Milwaukee, Chicago, these are some of the areas where Catholic-Jewish programs have taken place or are scheduled for the coming months.

In educational circles the results of the textbook studies completed at St. Louis University a few years ago under the sponsorship of the Institute of Human Relations of the American Jewish Committee, and recently published in my book Catechetics and Prejudice, have begun to have their effect. And a contemplated doctoral dissertation at New York University by a Catholic will likely update the results of the St. Louis studies. The Thering-Gleason-Mudd studies have been largely responsible for the elimination of the deicide charge from all mainline Catholic educational materials and have led as well to the inclusion of substantive amounts of positive material on Judaism and the Jewish context of the early Church. Much still remains to be done in this area. I want to underscore that. Later on in this address as well as in the workshop sessions on Judaism and Catholic Education I will go into this question in greater depth. In addition, we have seen the slow but steady growth of courses on Judaism in Catholic colleges and seminaries, often taught by Jewish scholars and rabbis. Several other groups such as the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Catholic Library Association have contributed to the education of their members by induding Catholic-Jewish relations on the program of recent meetings.

In the liturgical sphere some attempts are under way to handle the use of scriptural texts which are anti-Judaic in tone. The use of such texts in the liturgy is especially crucial since they tend to acquire a kind of « halo » in such a setting and frequently there is little opportunity for background explanations or corrective statements. This is not an easy problem to come to grips with since it involves all sorts of complicated scholarly principles. But a group of Catholic scripture scholars convened under the aegis of the Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations is attempting to prepare a series of recommendations for the American Bishops on the lectionary use of such passages.

The question of Israel and Catholic-Jewish relations has been put to a new test by the present events in the Middle East. While I have as yet been able to make no scientific assessment of the response of the Catholic community in 1973 as compared with 1967, the reports I am receiving from around the country from both Catholics and Jews indicate there is greater understanding and support on the grass roots level from both clergy and laity. The response of institutional Catholicism has been no better than in 1967, but we are beginning to recognize, are we not, that such response on this issue as on many others is simply not as important as it was once thought to be. The real action is moving to the local, grass roots level.

But a cautionary note must be sounded here. Given the energy crisis and the uncertain political situation in our country, coupled with the fact that any ceasefire in the Middle East will likely be followed by difficult negotiations rather than by the relative calm of the no-war no-peace climate which came to prevail following the June '67 war, Israel will be in a difficult position for the foreseeable future. Hence Catholics must be willing to offer their support on a continuing basis to American Jews and to their Israelibrothers and sisters in the difficult days ahead. This could perhaps involve the establishment of non-Jewish Israel support groups around the country that would have the resources to provide help in an organized fashion. One such group is currently in the planning stages in Chicago and one already exists in Houston. While praying for, and encouraging, peace in the Middle East and sensitive to the legitimate claims of the Palestinian people, Catholics must resolve to support the meaningful survival of Israel within relatively safe and defensible borders and insure that a new Holocaust is not perpetrated in the Middle East, not now by the Arabs driving the Israelis into the sea but by the world community acquiescing step-by-step in a gradual, subtle, yet very real, choking off of Israel's life and breath.

A final ray of hope that deserves mention has been the support given by Catholics on the Soviet Jewry issue which has included the establishment of the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry in Chicago of which Sister Ann Gillen is the Executive Director. The Soviet Jewry question has elicited one of the most favorable and widespread responses coming from Catholics on any Jewish issue in this century. Fr. Robert Drinan SJ (Dem.-Mass.) has been in the forefront of political action in this area. Conservative-leaning Catholics have always been concerned about the persecution of religious groups within the Soviet bloc of nations. And Soviet Catholics have begun to imitate the Soviet Jews in protesting against religio-cultural oppression by their government. This has intensified Catholic support for the overall protest movement in the USSR of which the Soviet Jewry stuggle is a core element. The liberal Catholic community has generally supported the Soviet Jewish struggle on the grounds of civil rights and the United Nations Charter. It is important that we not lose sight of this crucial issue, as well as its companion issue of the plight of Jews in Syria and Iraq, in the midst of the present crisis in the Middle East. Please recall that nearly one-third of the people Israel today reside in the Soviet Union. The religio-cultural genocide that is taking place there at this moment could in the end result be as destructive for the body and soul of Judaism as the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. During the week of December 10, Human Rights Day will be observed by Jewish groups throughout the United States with special focus on Soviet Jewry. Catholic participation in these events would be a positive proof of our support and solidarity. Further information on specifics can be obtained by contacting the National Interreligious Task Force office in Chicago.

TEACHING ON THE PHARISEES

So much for the assessment. Now to the agenda . . . The first part has to do with those issues which need further clarification and cleansing in order to heal the wounds in the Catholic soul caused by the centuries of persecution and indifference towards Jews and Judaism . . . Of highest priority must be the removal of the distorted image of the Pharisees in Catholic teaching and preaching. Who of us has not heard a sermon denouncing the Pharisees or used them as a model of hypocrisy, as the antithesis of everything that Jesus stood for? Which Catholic student has not seen this same stereotyped image presented in graphic form in Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar? The recent literature on the Pharisees by Christian and Jewish scholars must begin to be fed into Catholic theology and education. This is vital in view of the fact that the St. Louis textbook studies found the image of the Pharisees one of the three most common distortions of Judaism. And with the virtual removal of the deicide charge from Catholic materials, I would assert that the negative image of the Pharisees stands as the single most important source of Christian distortions of Judaism remaining in the biblical area. This removal becomes doubly important when we recognize that all modern forms of Judaism, despite their many differences, basically owe their existence to the Pharisaic-rabbinic movement which truly produced a revolution within Second Temple Judaism. So to attack Pharisaism is in a real way to attack the centrality of modern Judaism.

But even apart from the interreligious point of view, it is crucial that Christians become better acquainted with Pharisaism. For this movement formed the context (not merely the background) of the teachings of Jesus and the early church in such key areas as ethics, the notion of God, liturgy, ministry and church structure. My teacher at the University of Chicago, Dr. Norman Perrin, once asserted that there exist only a handful of good New Testament scholars in the world today because only a handful are familiar with Jewish materials. So for a proper appreciation and understanding of the New Testament it is essential for Christians to have a grasp of Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism. I will return to this point later on in my presentation. While the increased interest in and use of the Hebrew Scriptures is welcome, profound developments took place in Judaism after the canonical Hebrew Scriptures had been completed. And it was these developments in the Second Temple period (which Christians erroneously call the « inter-testamental » period) that most directly influenced Jesus and early Christianity. On the question of the image of the Pharisees we have hardly moved forward at all from the time of the St. Louis studies. One exception to this that might be noted is the recent declaration on Catholic-Jewish relations by the French Bishops. It contains a section on Pharisaism that is very much in tune with the best in current Christian and Jewish scholarship in the area.

Catholics likewise need to become acquainted with the two issues that most Jews see as central. to their identity in our time: the Nazi Holocaust and the State of Israel. Even the best of contemporary Catholic efforts with respect to the image of the Jews tend to completely by-pass these issues. Yet there is no way a Catholic can truly relate to a real-life Jew in our time unless he or she understands how profoundly the Holocaust and the State of Israel have stirred their Jewish neighbor's spirit.

THE HOLOCAUST

With respect to the Holocaust I would repeat the comment of my colleague Professor Franklin Littell of Temple University who has said that from one perspective the Holocaust is something that happened to us Christians rather than to the Jews. We have been truly afraid to probe the significance of this tragedy for Christian self-understanding. And now we must ask, why? The answer, I believe, is a complex one. I would suggest the following as contributing factors to the silence. The first is the fact that the United States as a nation, and therefore the American Catholic church, was generally removed from the physical ravages of World War II. We simply did not feel its impact in the same existential way as the Europeans. And the American Catholic church was not faced with the same type of immediate and painful judgments about political allegiance or protest that confronted many European Catholics. But this represents only a small part of the total explanation. A residual anti-Semitism that subconsciously still regards Jewish life as expendable because of the Jewish people's past « sins » and the general exterminations of human beings in our century throughout the world probably also account in part for the failure to confront the Holocaust.

In my view, however, the principal reason for silence about the Holocaust is to be found in a theological attitude that is deeply ingrained in Catholics. In essence this attitude looks upon the church as a holy and spotless institution incapable of any major moral defects. It is extremely difficult to suggest to a believing Catholic even the possibility that his or her church could have been guilty of serious moral irresponsibility in suqh an event as the Holocaust. The initial reaction is usually hostility and extreme defensiveness. I recall an institute on Judaism for Catholic teachers which I helped to direct a few years ago. In one of the classes a Catholic professor exposed the participants to concrete examples of anti-Jewish attitudes and teachings among some of the major church fathers such as John Chrysostom. The negative reaction that ensued was shocking, as most of the participants simply tried to dismiss the evidence the professor was presenting them. And this outburst came from a group of Catholics who were well-educated and on the whole quite open to ecumenism generally and to Jewish-Christian relations in particular.

I cite the above example because I feel it well illustrates the problem. One could not ascribe the teachers' reaction to uninformed prejudice against Jews. Rather, I think it was a result of a serious shaking of the foundations of their faith commitment. After awhile some of them were able to take a more sober and mature look at the evidence presented in the class. But if such reactions can spring up among Catholics from a presentation of what would have to be called minor failings in the distant past, so much more will it be trying for Catholics to face an infinitely more serious and more recent challenge to the traditional Catholic notion of the church's basic moral integrity.

Certainly it will prove trying for Catholics to confront the reality of the Holocaust. But in spite of the probable pain, face it we must. Our credibility as religious people depends on it. As the Catholic philosopher Fredrich Heer of the University of Vienna has said in his book God's First Love, our failure to confront the Holocaust is symptomatic of how Catholicism has confronted all other evils, especially war and the potential of a nuclear holocaust.

I should add two further comments at this point. First of all, among many liberal Catholics there has been a serious erosion of the belief in the absolute moral purity of the church. But such Catholics have generally omitted the Holocaust from their reflections. There seem to be several reasons for this. One would be the fact that Jews are no longer classed by them as a persecuted minority and their attention has been focused on the church's failures with respect to Blacks, the Spanish-speaking, Native Americans and other minorities in this country and in the whole Third World. The second reason is allied to the first. It has to do with what I consider an overexaggerated concentration on the present in certain liberal Catholic circles with little interest in even the immediate past. The Holocaust is viewed by them as past history and hence discarded as not terribly relevant for present discussions. I consider this most unfortunate, but it is a fact that must be faced. As one who generally sympathizes with a great part of this group's viewpoint, I have tried personally to introduce the historical perspective into their reflections. But the resistance admittedly remains strong.

The neglect of the Holocaust by Catholics, both the traditional and the liberal, reveals one of the basic gaps that exists in the current Jewish-Catholic dialogue. I have read enough contemporary Jewish literature to recognize that the Holocaust is considered by the vast majority of present-day Jews as one of the central experiences in their history as a people. When the issue surfaced a few years back especially in connection with the play The Deputy, the overwhelming response of the Catholic community was to bury rather than to probe. The continuation of such an attitude will certainly widen the gulf between Jews and Catholics in light of the central role the Holocaust has assumed in current Jewish thought.

OTHER AREAS DESERVING ATTENTION

With respect to the State of Israel, it is necessary to present Catholics something about the Vatican's generally hostile attitude to Zionism (originally rooted in the belief that Jews were destined to be perpetual wanderers upon the earth for murdering the Messiah), the history of the Jewish people's twentieth-century struggle to establish a national homeland, how Israel has become central to the self-identity of American Jews, some of the pro's and con's of the Vatican's continuing non-recognition of the State of Israel, how the theology of the land has functioned in biblical Judaism and its meaning to Jews, and why and how one Jewish rabbi could say recently to a Christian audience « Israel is our Jesus ». Efforts must also be made to curb some of the excessive criticism of Israel now current in some sectors of Christianity. This is not a call for silence about the wisdom of this or that particular policy decision made by the Israeli government, but merely a direct repudiation of that type of sweeping, destructive criticism that really is, as Fr. Edward Flannery has pointed out, anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism.

Catholics also require some further exposure to the cruel history of anti-Semitism. On the whole, the accounts of the Christian persecution of the Jews have been simply torn out of Christian textbooks. But Jews are painfully aware of this history. Until Christians achieve the same awareness, our relationships will of necessity be strained. We must also be on our guard against the resurgence of anti-Semitism in our time. While anti-Semitism in overt forms has tended to disappear in American society in the last decade, its residue still lurks in the American psyche. And the current energy crisis could be just the spark needed to bring it to the surface. With the prospect of a major disruption of American life now before us, the churches must be prepared to lead their people away from any simplistic scapegoat theory. Catholics also must come to recognize that there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish poor, Jewish workers and Jewish students who are suffering various forms of discrimination because the larger Gentile society has too easily assumed that Jews have made it in our nation. In particular, we need an open and frank discussion on the effects of quotas on the American Jewish community. In order to provide our people with the background of anti-Semitism I would suggest that Fr. Flannery's The Anguish of the Jews, A History of the Jews since the First Century A.D. by the Catholic historian Frederick Schweitzer and Sister Suzanne Noffke's sound filmstrip entitled « Christians and Jews: A Troubled Brotherhood » as excellent resource material.

Catholics need some initiation at this time into the current thinking of Christian theologians on how Christianity's message about Christ and the New Covenant can be understood without implying that Judaism's covenant is outdated or inferior. This was the third major source of distortion with respect to Judaism that emerged from the St. Louis textbook studies. Catholics must come to view the Jewish « no » to Jesus as a positive contribution to the ultimate salvation of mankind, not as an act of unfaithfulness or unbelief. The pioneering work of writers such as James Parkes, Jules Isaac, Gregory Baum, Monika Hellwig, J. Coert Rylaarsdam, Rosemary Reuther, Eva Fleischer and Peter Chirico should be brought to the attention of our Catholic people in an appropriate form. While the views of these theologians must certainly be viewed as provisional, they are beginning a process that will profoundly alter Christianity's self-definition and make possible a more realistic relationship to Judaism and to all other non-Christian religions. The recent document of the French Bishops would also serve as an excellent study tool as would the statement released in June by the Israel Study Group sponsored by the National Council of Churches' Faith and Order Commission and the Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations with the support of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the Social Concerns Committee of the Eastern Province of Servites. This latter document goes well beyond Vatican II in coming to grips with the issue of the basic relationship between Judaism and Christianity and it bears the signatures of some eighteen Christian theologians representing Protestantism, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The actual text along with recommendations for further study can be found in the August 1973 issue of Ecumenical Trends [also in SIDIC Vol. VI No. 3 p. 33. Ed.].

This process of re-definition is especially necessary, but will also prove especially unnerving, for Catholicism in view of our long-standing claim to be the full and totally complete religion. What these theologians are generally saying isthat Christianity must re-examine its belief that the messianic age, the time of fulfillment, took place at the coming of Christ. However we may eventually come to explain the uniqueness and mystery of the Christ Event, it has become obvious to these theologians and to me that we can no longer simply say that the Jewish notion of the messianic age, far more important to Judaism than the idea of a personal Messiah, was realized in the Death-Resurrection of Christ. We may still call Jesus the Messiah but we are going to have to radically reshape our definition of this term.

The task of theologically re-interpreting the fundamental Jewish-Christian relationship still requires much work and research. Our call at the moment is to acquaint ourselves with the new ideas in this area, to inculcate in our students and parishioners the realization that Christianity in and by itself does not contain in their fullness all the ideas necessary for a complete understanding of man's religious dimension, and to help our Catholic people appreciate that only through interfaith sharing can a person even begin to approach such an understanding. All this must be done now even though we cannot as yet articulate in any complete fashion a new definition of Christianity's role vis-a-vis Judaism and the other world religions. Humble acknowledgment that our past viewpoint was shortsighted is the imperative of the hour, especially for Catholicism.

Other areas that deserve some attention as a way of improving the quality of our interdependence with Jews are the following.

1. Exposure of Catholics to modern and contemporary Jewish thought. Too often even those quite sensitive to the positive Jewish influence on the New Testament leave the impression that Judaism's creative period ended in biblical times. Special consideration should be given to introducing Catholics to the world of Jewish literature. This is especially crucial for an appreciation of Judaism since so much of its cultural life and theology has been presented through the medium of literature. Modern and contemporary Jewish thought has much to offer Catholics today. And in the area of church renewal we can profit from a study of the struggles of Reform Judaism in particular to up-date Jewish belief and practice in the light of modern scientific experience.

2. In the teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures ample use should be made of Jewish commentaries. It is amazing to me that most Christians almost totally avoid Jewish scholarly writings when interpreting the Hebrew Bible. Some utilization of Jewish commentaries on the books of the New Testament by such respected authors as Samuel Sandmel and David Flusser would also prove beneficial in curbing exaggerated Christian claims about the New Testament. There is also need for a greater effort in incorporating an understanding of Judaism and the Jewish context of Christianity within the core theological curriculum in Catholic seminaries and universities. Special courses in Judaism are important and should be increased. But their full impact will never be reached unless students are confronted with the Jewish reality in basic New Testament courses, in courses on Christology, the Eucharist, the Church and so on.

3. Finally, some sensitivity should be developed on the part of Catholic ministers and people regarding the question of intermarriage. This is currently a topic of great concern within the Jewish community. At the moment, we must honestly admit that Catholics and Jews have considerably different stands on the question. Given the present Catholic position on the issue, I cannot honestly say I would discourage such a marriage. But I do feel an obligation to make the couple aware of the great difficulties such a marriage involves, in part due to the fact that Judaism is not just a religion but a cultural lifestyle as well. In addition, it is incumbent upon the Catholic minister in particular to explain to the Catholic partner in the proposed marriage why Judaism feels as it now does about intermarriage, particularly the threat of annihilation by assimilation that it poses for a small community like the Jews in a culturally alien society. We Catholics may not be able to fully accept the pervading Jewish attitude on intermarriage, but at least as Catholics we should make an effort to understand the basis of Judaism's present opposition and react to it in a sensitive fashion.