Posted on 12/16/2015 12:50:41 PM PST by Mrs. Don-o
Trust me, I know that it is hard to write accurate, easy-to-read articles about complicated Vatican theological documents. This is especially true when dealing with materials focusing on very nuanced issues that continue to cause behind-the-scenes debates among Catholics.
It's even harder to write informative, catchy and, yes, accurate headlines for these kinds of stories.
This brings me to a recent New York Times report that ran with this headline: "Vatican Says Catholics Should Not Try to Convert Jews."
The problem with that headline is that it is simplistic to the point of being inaccurate -- that is, if the goal is for readers to understand the document ("The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable") addressed in this story.
Now here is the ironic part. You can tell that the headline is inaccurate by carefully reading the actual Times story, which means reading past the flawed lede on which the headline is based. Let us attend.
ROME -- Catholics should not try to convert Jews, but should work together with them to fight anti-Semitism, the Vatican said on Thursday in a far-reaching document meant to solidify its increasingly positive relations with Jews.
Then, in the third paragraph, there is this:
Addressing an issue that has been a sore point between the two faiths for centuries, the commission wrote that the church was "obliged to view evangelization to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views." It specified that "the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews."
Did you catch the subtle, but very important, difference between the lede and the actual quote from the document?
The lede says that it is wrong for Catholics -- which would mean priests, laypeople and other Catholic individuals -- to try to win Jewish individuals to Christian faith. But what does the document say? It says that the Catholic Church, as an institution, "neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews (italics added)."
So evangelism by individual Catholics talking with individual Jews is acceptable, while organized efforts targeting Jews alone -- perhaps a Catholic version of Jews for Jesus -- are considered out of bounds.
Thus, the headline and the lede need to be corrected to reflect the actual content of the story and the document on which it is based.
If you want to know more about this complicated issue, let me point you toward a Q&A piece by the conservative apologist Jimmy Akin, writing in The National Catholic Register. It contains lots of detailed quotes drawn from the Vatican document, which is precisely what the Times piece is lacking.
Akin explains that, beginning with the title, this document was clearly crafted to reject a concept called "supersessionism," which argues that the "Church has completely taken over the promises of God regarding Israel, so that today the Jewish people have no special status whatsoever."
The document also addresses another theological issue linked to this -- the "two paths to salvation" concept that says that Christians find salvation through Jesus Christ and Jews through their own covenant. "Two paths" theory is, of course, an open door to full-out Universalism, which argues that all religious and nonreligious paths lead to the top of the same eternal mountain (so to speak).
The problem: What to do with the statement (John 14:6) in which Jesus -- a Jew -- states, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me."
Akin notes that this Vatican document addresses this issue head on, in material that really needed to be in the Times report:
... There are not two paths to salvation according to the expression "Jews hold to the Torah, Christians hold to Christ." Christian faith proclaims that Christ's work of salvation is universal and involves all mankind. God's word is one single and undivided reality which takes concrete form in each respective historical context. ...Since God has never revoked his covenant with his people Israel, there cannot be different paths or approaches to God's salvation. The theory that there may be two different paths to salvation, the Jewish path without Christ and the path with the Christ, whom Christians believe is Jesus of Nazareth, would in fact endanger the foundations of Christian faith.
Confessing the universal and therefore also exclusive mediation of salvation through Jesus Christ belongs to the core of Christian faith. . . . [T]he Church and Judaism cannot be represented as "two parallel ways to salvation."
There are other complicated subjects attached to that issue, but for the purpose of this story the Times team -- in order to cover the material accurately -- really needed to address the "two paths" section of "The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable" and another section that focuses on PERSONAL, as opposed to INSTITUTIONAL, evangelism.
Akin underlines this crucial passage:
Christians are nonetheless called to bear witness to their faith in Jesus Christ also to Jews, although they should do so in a humble and sensitive manner, acknowledging that Jews are bearers of God's Word, and particularly in view of the great tragedy of the Shoah [i.e., the Holocaust] (GCGI 40).
And the logical implication of this is seen in two other statements:
Jesus ... calls his Church from both Jews and Gentiles (cf. Eph 2:11-22) on the basis of faith in Christ and by means of baptism, through which there is incorporation into his Body which is the Church (GCGI 41).
And:
It is and remains a qualitative definition of the Church of the New Covenant that it consists of Jews and Gentiles, even if the quantitative proportions of Jewish and Gentile Christians may initially give a different impression [GCGI 43]
So what is the point, journalistically speaking?
Clearly, at this point, the Times urgently needs a reporter or two willing to listen carefully to the views of doctrinally traditional Catholics, as well as to progressive Catholics. Once again, the goal is not to AGREE with the Catholic doctrines being discussed, but to understand them well enough to cover them accurately and clearly (which is, as I said up top, often very hard to do in a daily newspaper).
If the Times is not willing to hire such reporters, then it would really help the newspaper's coverage if there were conservative Catholics who were willing to seek out Times people and offer insights (with people on both sides recording the exchanges).
Would the Times people listen?
If the goal is journalism, the answer has to be "yes." Liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics have different takes on these kinds of documents and their debates would be illuminating for readers (including legions of journalists elsewhere who read and heed what is printed in the Times).
Talking to worthy, respected voices on both sides would also help the Times avoid the kinds of errors found in this headline which, as I noted, actually conflicts with information quoted in the story.
Correction, please.
What your posts show is that you are ignoring the real issue....that what is being professed in the Vatican contradicts traditional Catholic teaching.
This is why we can pray in all sincerity, along with the Guardian Angel of Portugal (Fatima 1916):
O my Jesus,
Forgive us our sins,
Save us from the fires of Hell.
Lead all souls to heaven,
Especially those in most need of Thy mercy.
Why do I say this? Because Salvation is still a mystery in the hands of God, like the unbaptized, ostensibly nonChristian poor Jew Lazarus at rest--- as Christ said --- in the bosom of Abraham.
Which is what the document you object to, said: "That the Jews are participants in God's salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery."
Tagline.
You tellin’ me the Noo Yawk Times lied? Again?
Do they manage to get anything right?
My point: Roman Catholocism says it worships the same god as Muslims.
Either you believe that you worship the Muslim god like Rome says you do, or you disagree with Rome.
Either you believe in the Muslim god, as the Pope does. Or you don’t.
Either you follow a religion that says you believe in the Muslim god, or you don’t.
There is no mystery here:
1 John 5:13 Â These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God;
that ye may know that ye have eternal life,
and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.
1 John 5:20 Â And we know that the Son of God is come,
and hath given us an understanding,
that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true,
even in his Son Jesus Christ.
This is the true God, and eternal life.
Yes, and tagline.
Jews who do not believe in Christ can be saved in the same way that all others who do not believe in Christ can be saved—by God’s mercy and by a sincere desire to live in accordance with what is true and good. And a necessary condition for them is either absolute ignorance of Christ or invincible ignorance of Christ. Jews who may be saved are not saved by any power of the Old Covenant.
It’s very clear that you, Catholics in general, the Pope claim to worship the same God as Muslims. That’s certainly your right to do so.
As for me, I’d rather die than worship the Muslim’s God.
My God is Jehovah.
As an American, why would you follow a religion that aligns itself with the God of Islam?
Lazarus is the bosum of Abraham is not Heaven.
No, the document is saying is that “the Jews” as a whole can be saved without explicitly accepting Christ. It is not speaking about individual souls who may or may not be invincibly ignorant.
The document speaks heresy. You can either accept that and deal with it or you can choose to continue to explain it away like Jimmy Akin and his ilk and live in ignorance.
There is only one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Will you also profess to worship and adore the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob on this thread or will you forbear ?
As for me, I’d rather die than worship the Muslim’s God.
Would you rather die than worship the Jew's God ?
My God is ... And the LORD shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one LORD, and his name one. Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: Seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith.
Zechariah, Catholic chapter fourteen, Protestant verse nine,
Romans, Catholic chapter three, Protestant verses twenty nine to thirty,
as authorized, but not authored, by King James
As an American, why would you follow a religion that aligns itself with the God of Islam?
Faulty logic; false premise; you fail the test. There is no God of Islam, although there is a God of the Muslims.
Why in the world would you worship the god of Islam?
Why would you for one minute agree with anyone who did? It’s a shame to me, to even speak of such things, that an American would knowingly follow a religion that worships a false god.
With that having been said, it’s your right to choose to worship the god of the Muslims.
Me? They’d have to murder me first.
Rome is wrong. Muslims god had no son. They, and by confession, Rome, do not worship God.
The section we are volleying back and forth about at the moment, states:
" Confessing the universal and therefore also exclusive mediation of salvation through Jesus Christ belongs to the core of Christian faith. . . . [T]he Church and Judaism cannot be represented as "two parallel ways to salvation."
There's no way around that. It's clear as a bell. Then it also says,
"That the Jews are participants in God's salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery."What exactly is meant by 'participants' needs to be clarified.
It does NOT say "the Jews as a whole can be saved without explicitly accepting Christ."
Consider that God used words like 'forever" and "for all generations" and "perpetually" dozens, maybe hundreds of times when referring to His covenant with Israel and His ordinances and His gifts and His promises to them. The Jews, as a nation, have a historic and ongoing role in the Salvation History of the human race.
What exactly is the ongoing signiicance of the providential survival of the Jews in history and to this present day? What has it to do with God's "perpetual" gifts and promises to them? We can't quite fathom it, but it has somethng to do with the Lord Jesus' ultimate saving victories as Messiah of Israel and Savior of the World. When we see the whole story unfolded at the End of the Age, we will see that the Jews had some role as participants in God's plan of salvation.
That paragraph that so troubles you does not mean "All Jews are automaticaly saved, they don't need Christ." It means that the Jewish People had, and still have, some role, some participation in Salvation History. We don't know exactly what it is, but God's ways are "unfathomable," (Isaiah 40:28) and His promises to the Jews are --- in His words --- perpetual.
It sure ain’t hell.
You have never directly responded to Pope Pius IX's comments about the Jews here (and no one else has either). He is CLEARLY stating that the Jews are no longer the Chosen people and they no longer have the promises. Rather you chose to go off on an "invincible ignorance" tangent.
the Catholic Church has always been accustomed to pray for the Jewish people, who were the depository of divine promises up until the arrival of Jesus Christ, notwithstanding their subsequent blindness, or rather, because of this very blindness. Moved by that charity, the Apostolic See has protected the same people from unjust ill-treatment, and just as it censures all hatred and enmity among people, so it altogether condemns in the highest degree possible hatred against the people once chosen by God, viz., the hatred that now is what is usually meant in common parlance by the term known generally as anti-Semitism.
What is said in the most recent heretical document would never have been uttered by the lips of pre-Vatican II popes.
17. On the part of many of the Church Fathers the so-called replacement theory or supersessionism steadily gained favour until in the Middle Ages it represented the standard theological foundation of the relationship with Judaism: the promises and commitments of God would no longer apply to Israel because it had not recognised Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God, but had been transferred to the Church of Jesus Christ which was now the true ‘new Israel’, the new chosen people of God. Arising from the same soil, Judaism and Christianity in the centuries after their separation became involved in a theological antagonism which was only to be defused at the Second Vatican Council. With its Declaration "Nostra aetate" (No.4) the Church unequivocally professes, within a new theological framework, the Jewish roots of Christianity. While affirming salvation through an explicit or even implicit faith in Christ, the Church does not question the continued love of God for the chosen people of Israel. A replacement or supersession theology which sets against one another two separate entities, a Church of the Gentiles and the rejected Synagogue whose place it takes, is deprived of its foundations. From an originally close relationship between Judaism and Christianity a long-term state of tension had developed, which has been gradually transformed after the Second Vatican Council into a constructive dialogue relationship.
Good thing we had Vatican II and this document to clear up the errors in the Church for hundreds of years since Christ! /s
(2)ALL of the promises f God to the Jewish people could not have been revoked, because, first, He said he could not do so:
( Numbers 23:20)
" See, I received a command to bless; he has blessed, and I cannot revoke it." And this is particularly clear in context, Numbers23:19-21, which rewards careful reading). And second, because some of those promises refer to things which will only happen at the End of the Age, for instance in the 7th chapter of Revelation:
"And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the people of Israel:
From the tribe of Judah twelve thousand sealed,
from the tribe of Reuben twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Gad twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Asher twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Naphtali twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Manasseh twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Simeon twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Levi twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Issachar twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Zebulun twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Joseph twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Benjamin twelve thousand sealed.
The is part of what we mean by "How inscrutable are Your ways, O Lord!" And likewise part of what Jesus spoke of so mysteriously (Tagline)
And O - O -O !
Happy Third Day of the O Antiphons!
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