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Presentation
The editors
Why, in this issue, are we placing Jews and Christians in the presence of death? In so many areas of our lives as believing men and women we are being challenged to give an account of the faith that is in us to a secular and technological world. We see more and more how advances in science, wonderful as they are, are able to prolong life. In improving thus the quantity of life, are we thereby also improving the quality of life? Let us pause for a moment and ask what we can do to make our lives and the lives of those around us more human, as well as to impart to our dying and our death this same human quality lest they be swallowed wp by a dehumanized technology.
Since our Western culture is so afraid of death, treating it as a taboo and hiding from its reality, we wish rather to come face to face with st as with a friend and to ponder on its mystery. We are convinced that the correct attitude towards death is an fact an affirmation of life. We have much to learn from Jewish tradition with its emphasis on life and its almost total lack of pre-occupation and speculation on the "after-life", being content rather to praise God in the words of the Kaddish and leave this mystery in his hands.
François Cardinal Marty said recently that death is an occasion to stress life. We see others die, but we ourselves are travelling the same road. The moments of our lives are each of infinite worth and the perspective of death gives importance to what we do.
If it be true that society hides from death, as we have maintained, yet paradoxically, we observe that ~it has never been more preoccupied with death, as present wars and conflicts as well as future threats fill our mass media. Let us take courage in faith and hope as we seek, not to escape from death and the thought of death, but rather, to be bearers of life.
Choose life!
RECONCILIATION
During this Holy Year, the thoughts of the Catholic world have been centered on Reconciliation, culminating, as we go to print, with the meeting here in Rome of the Synod of &shaps on this theme.
With this in mind, many Christians have been asking what they have to do if they are to become truly reconciled with their Jewish brothers and sisters who have suffered so much and for so many centuries on account of persecutions perpetrated by those who may have borne the name of Christ but lived at variance with his reconciling love.
Let us hope that more and more we will open our hearts to this true reconciliation and shalom in the spirit of this prayer attributed to Pope John XXIII (1):
"We are conscious today that many, many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer see the beauty of Thy chosen people nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren. We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in the blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love.
Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we know not what we did..."
1. Catholic Herald, May 14, 1965. Cf. P.E. Lapide: The Last Three Popes and the Jews, Souvenir Press, London 1967, Preface.
