[Mrs. Don-o]

I reply that I and my "ilk", encountering the same paradoxical or ambuguous elements in these Vatican douments that you yourself encounter, strive to interpret them according to a Hermeneutic of Continuity. In other words, when there is a reasonable way to do so, I resolve ambiguities by hewing to an interpretation which protects the coherence of Catholic doctrine "pre-VatII, in VatII, and post-VatII."

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.

• Does it mean "The Jews Are Saved Without Christ"? Plainly not, since first of all you can't say that membership in some "group" is the basis of salvation, whether Jew or Gentile or Member of St. Mary's Latin Mass Community or anything else. Salvation is personal, and pertains to the heart and soul of each believer. Second of all, the document just re-stated the certain truth that we can only be saved by Christ, so it cannot also be saying that some "group" can be saved in some alternate or parallel way.

  It does NOT say "the Jews as a whole can be saved without explicitly accepting Christ."

• So, does "participation" something other than "they are saved"? That must be the case.

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.

[piusv]

So, you still believe that the promises to the Jews have not been revoked after Christ. This is the crux of the heresy in that document and in post Vatican II thinking. You are only furthering it with your comments and apologies. That should give you pause.

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.