Page 1 of 2 Benedict's tragedy, and Israel's
By Spengler
World history is the history of Israel, argued the great German-Jewish
theologian Franz Rosenzweig - not the tiny Jewish nation as such, but the
Jewish idea, embraced by billions in the form of Christianity, or parodied and
rejected by additional billions in Islam. The trouble is that no one wants to
actually be Israel, least of all the Jews, who recite with fervor the prayer of
Sholom Aleichem's Tevye: "God of mercy, choose a different people!" Jealousy at
Israel's Election has provoked the persecution of the Jews for millennia, and
it is not surprising that many Jews look for safety in insignificance.
Like many Jewish prayers, Tevye's prayer to be un-chosen also has become
popular among some Catholics. The Catholic Church
holds itself to be Israel, the People of God descended from Abraham in the
Spirit. But many Catholics, including some in leading positions in the Roman
Curia, think it an affront to the sensibilities of other cultures to insist on
the unique role of the Church. At the other extreme , misnamed traditionalists
do not think that the mustard-seed of faith is sufficient, and that the Church
cannot fulfill its function without returning to the bygone days of state
religion. Pope Benedict XVI, like his predecessor John Paul II, has fought
manfully against these prospective deserters within his ranks. The tawdry
burlesque over the case of the paranoid Jew-hater and Holocaust denier Richard
Williamson is a sad gauge of his degree of success.
Benedict's September 2006 Regensburg address established him as the only leader
of the West able to defend the spiritual foundations that distinguish the West
from the Islamic world. Since then he has been under continuous fire from
defeatists inside and outside the Church. The Regensburg speech offered the
prospect of a great papacy (Please see
Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and eternal life, September 19, 2006); the
Williamson affair diminishes that hope. If the Vatican retreats from its role
as the moral citadel of the West, the consequences will be tragic.
Bad governance and worse public relations explain why a philo-Semitic Pope was
pilloried for lifting the excommunication of a schismatic bishop notorious for
his lurid hatred of Jews. Twenty years of negotiation prepared a cautious first
step towards reconciliation of four bishops of the Society of Pius X, founded
by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. L'Espresso's veteran Vatican reporter
Sandro Magister posted a complete account of the events on February 4 entitled
"Double Disaster at the Vatican". [1] Concludes Magister, "It is possible that
some [officials of the Roman Curia] deliberately oppose this pontificate. It is
certain that most of them simply do not understand it, do not measure up to
it."
The Pope responded by reaffirming his support for the Jews, "our brothers of
the First Covenant", and with an admission that he was not informed about
Williamson's lurid anti-Semitism, although it had been a matter of public
record for years, and Magister is justified to suggest that the failure to
inform the pontiff betrays a malicious intent. Benedict's enemies inside the
Church will wait for additional opportunities to harm his papacy, if they are
allowed them. The leaders of the Italian Jewish community contributed
incidentally to the disaster, on which more below.
For a millennium and a half, from the conversion of Constantine to the
unification of Italy, the Pope reigned not only as a spiritual leader, but also
as the monarch of a substantial swath of territory. The central issue to be
affirmed at the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965, was the
abandonment of Christianity as a state religion in favor of a religion of
personal conscience.
The "traditionalist" enemies of Vatican II whom the Pope hoped to reconcile
stem from a dark corner of European politics, as George Weigel reported in a
January 26 Newsweek column [2]. Weigel notes, "[Archbishop] Lefebvre was also a
man formed by the bitter hatreds that defined the battle lines in French
society and culture from the French Revolution to the Vichy regime. Thus his
deepest animosities at the council were reserved for another of Vatican Council
II's reforms: the council's declaration that 'the human person has a right to
religious freedom', which implied that coercive state power ought not be put
behind the truth-claims of the Catholic Church or any other religious body."
That is the lost world of "throne and altar" conservatism, the arrangement
whereby the Vatican in effect delegated power to the Catholic dynasties of
Europe. The term "traditionalist" is entirely misleading, however. France
emerged as the dominant European power at the end of the terrible Thirty Years'
War of 1618-1648, and overthrew Europe's ancient political order, founded on a
universal Christian Empire and a universal Catholic Church. In response, the
Vatican reluctantly ceded authority to Catholic monarchs, as Professor Russell
Hittinger of the University of Tulsa has shown [3]. Inevitably, this concession
by the Vatican led to nationalist churches, what Hittinger has called "the
churches of earthly power" [4]. The Vatican's response to 1648 contributed to
Europe's descent into nationalism and world war.
Because Archbishop Lefebvre had the Apostolic authority to create other
bishops, his four schismatic followers to whom Benedict offered communion in
the Church (but not episcopal function) remain bishops, under Canon law. The
small Lefebvrist movement is a schism, a wound in the Church that the pontiff
must attempt to heal. It complicates matters that Benedict XVI agrees with the
Lefebvrists that Vatican II was wrong to remove the Latin mass in favor of a
vernacular liturgy. As a universal language spoken by no particular people,
Latin embodies the universalism of the Church. By allowing any congregation to
return to the Latin mass, Benedict has offered a remedy.
Even though the Lefebvrist association repudiated Bishop Williamson's
anti-Semitism, it is no accident that a paranoid anti-Semite would turn up in
their ranks rather than in the Catholic mainstream. Throne-and-altar
conservatism embodied some profoundly unpleasant elements, including clergy who
supported the pro-German Vichy regime in France, as well as some who supported
Adolf Hitler.
The "left" of the Catholic Church agrees in principle with the Lefebvrists that
the Catholic Church cannot fulfill its role as the Israel of the Spirit without
the apparatus of state power to enforce its social position. Unlike the
Lefebvrists, the left of the Church is not caught up in nostalgia for the
Catholic past. It is modern, multicultural, open-minded and non-judgmental. It
simply isn't particularly Catholic.
Benedict XVI horrifies the Catholic left. As I reported in June 2008 in
The pope, the president and politics of faith, a leading Jesuit
Islamologist denounced the Pope in the Order's Italian-language monthly Popoli
for receiving into the Church the Italian journalist Magdi Allam at the Easter
Vigil last year. The Curia was aghast at the Pope's September 2006 criticisms
of Islam at Regensburg. But the issue that separates the sheep and the goats
inside the Curia is the Jewish issue.
Most of the Curia looks at the State of Israel as a gross inconvenience at
best, and as a stumbling-block at worst. The leftist sentiments of the Curia
play out in theology: the Catholic left and right never accepted the
affirmation of John Paul II and Benedict XVI that God's covenant with the
Jewish people never was revoked. Benedict XVI is the most prominent opponent of
substitution theology in the Church, and his nuanced and sympathetic
understanding of Jewish theology is evident in his 2007 book Jesus of Nazareth.
As Sandro Magister reports, "In the Catholic camp, not everyone accepts the
road marked out by Ratzinger in dialogue with Judaism. It is opposed by the
so-called 'theology of substitution', both in its 'left-wing' pro-Palestinian
versions, and in its traditionalist 'right-wing' versions. According to this
theology, the covenant with Israel has been revoked by God, and only the Church
is the new chosen people. For some, this view amounts to a substantial
rejection of the Old Testament." The misnomered "traditionalist"right does not
want a People of God, that is, a congregation, but rather the restoration of
Catholic theocracy; the left wants a multicultural stew rather than a unified
People of God. In a perverse sort of coincidentia oppositorum, the two
extremes join in their hatred of the Jews.
Even before the ill-informed decision to lift the excommunication of Bishop
Williamson, Catholic-Jewish relations were at risk. Cardinal Renato Martino, a
prominent Vatican left-winger who heads the Council for Justice and Peace,
compared conditions in Gaza during last January's Israeli incursion to a
concentration camp, drawing a moral equivalence between the Nazis and the State
of Israel. Although the Vatican quickly repudiated Martino's outburst, the
sting remained.
But the gravest blow to Catholic-Jewish relations before the Williamson
incident came from the Italian association of rabbis, who suspended the annual
day of talks with their Catholic counterparts in protest over the Pro Judaeis
prayer in the new version of the Church's Latin Easter Liturgy. It prays for
the Jews, asking that "God our Lord should illuminate their hearts, so that
they will recognize Jesus Christ, the savior of all men." The Jews have the
longest memory among the peoples of the world, and scarred into that memory are
forced conversions by Christians over the centuries.
Writing in the Jesuits' Italian-language monthly Popoli, the Chief Rabbi of
Venice, Elia Enrico Richetti, had this to say (my translation):
This
has been the more or less official response (a response from the Conference of
Bishops is lacking): the Jews have nothing to fear, the hope expressed in the
prayer "Pro Judaeis" is "purely eschatological", a hope for the End Times, and
not an invitation to active proselytism (which already was forbidden by Paul
VI). This response has not satisfied the Italian Rabbinate. If I insist, even
in a purely eschatological tone, that my neighbor would have to become like me
to be worthy of salvation, I am not respecting his identity. It is not a
matter, therefore, of hypersensitivity; it is a matter of the most banal sense
of respect owed to the other person as a creature of God.
The
late Abba Eban quipped that the Arabs never miss an
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
