Rabbi defends pope for SSPX rehabilitation

As an eighth generation rabbi and someone who lost much family in the Holocaust, it could just be me, but this official Jewish response seems outrageously over the top. Do millions of American Jews sufficiently care that the Pope revoked the excommunication of this unheard of bishop such that major Jewish organizations should devote so much energy and attention to this and turn it into a cause célèbre worthy of front page attention? And is this the way we speak to each other after decades of successful inter-faith work on improving our relationship?

OK, here it is:

ikula@clal.org

Dear Rabbi Kula,

I just wanted to drop everything and say THANK YOU for your sensible, decent, and fair-minded article about Pope Benedict's decision to lift the excommunication on Bp. Williamson.

Williamson is ("Bless his heart," as we say here in Tennessee) a horse's ass --- as a Catholic, I can say that --- and Benedict is trying his level best to rescue the little SSPX flock from the kooky-korner and bring them back into the sanity of normal Catholicism. The way Canon Law works --- I think your realize this --- you don't get excommunicated for having asinine or even offensive opinions: you get excommunicated for violating precise norms concerning heresy, apostasy and schism.

Williamson's stupid opinions, in other words, are completely irrelevant to this process. B16 is trying to reach past him and get his congregation out of that crazy-making place and back into the Family of the Faith.

You understand this. You stated it clearly. And justly. And to an audience I could never reach in 100 years.

So (whew) thanks. I just wanted you to know that somebody noticed.

[signed]

My partner’s father-in-law was the chief rabbi of a central European capital. He survived Auschwitz and the communists. He thinks the attacks on the Pope are absurd; that they say far more about phony victimhood and the egomania of some attention seeking Jews than about the Pope.

Catholic FReepers especially need to be aware that traditional Jews are strictly forbidden to engage in any official “interfaith dialog”, and that the more traditional they are the stronger the Jewish legal prohibition is.

So any rabbis involved officially in interfaith dialog are almost always from secular or otherwise liberal groups, or are actually representing political organizations such as the secular Israeli government.

The irony is that many VERY strict rabbis actually have warm personal friendships with Christian clergy, which I believe is rare compared to their more liberal counterparts.

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