The Jewish-Catholic Dialogue

Welcome to the Second Exodus section on the Jewish-Catholic dialogue. Evangelization aims as bringing the other into one’s own faith, while dialogue aims at better understanding of the other’s faith. This section supports the dialogue. Most Jews, and many Catholics, do not realize how very Jewish the Catholic Church is underneath its Latin language and culture. Father Louis Bouyer writes, “There is nothing in the fundamental, permanent institutions of the Church which is not Jewish in its source.”

Broad Guidelines

Some Specific Points for Discussion

Holy Mother Church invites us to participate in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue. Her guidelines appear in the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate § 4.

Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ—Abraham’s sons according to faith—are included in the same Patriarch’s call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church is mysteriously foreshadowed by the chosen people’s exodus from the land of bondage. The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles. Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles. making both one in Himself.

The Jewish faith and the Catholic faith are different stages in God’s authentic self-revelation to His people.

The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: “Theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church’s main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ’s Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.

The Church was instituted by Jesus of Nazareth, a devout Jew whose actual Hebrew name, the name He used every day, was Yeshua, pronounced YESHua, Salvation. Jesus’ mother Mary was a devout Jew. All of the twelve original Apostles were Jews. St. Paul was a Jew. Sts. Matthew, Mark and John were Jews. How could the Church that Rabbi Yeshua instituted be anything but Jewish in its heart? The Latin culture that the Church adopted to attract the Gentiles who became most of its people is an overlay on its essentially Jewish character.

Shma

Defending the Gospels

The Holocaust

The Crusades

The Spanish Inquisition

How Catholics See Jews

Persecution of Jews

Rules of Engagement

The “Separate Saving Covenant”

Where’s the Temple?

Answering Charges of Antisemitism

Personal Qualifications of the Messiah

Nostra aetate § 4 reminds us:

“As Holy Scripture testifies, Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation, nor did the Jews in large number, accept the Gospel; indeed not a few opposed its spreading. Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle. In company with the Prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and “serve him shoulder to shoulder.”

God loves the Jewish people, and longs for the day when they will recognize their Messiah and stream into the Church.

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.

The Jewish authorities pressed Pilate to crucify Jesus. The moral responsibility belonged entirely to those particular men. The Jewish people in Jerusalem and in the countryside had no say in that decision and so cannot be held responsible. And certainly Jews who lived during the past two thousand years up to the present day had no say and so also cannot be held responsible. God continues to love the Jewish people. We, His image and likeness, are called to reflect His love. Pope Pius XI in September 1938 proclaimed, “We are all spiritual Semites.”

Besides, as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation. It is, therefore, the burden of the Church’s preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God’s all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows.

We are called to proclaim Christ to the Jewish people as Jesus of Nazareth did. We live holy lives so that Jews will see Him in us. When Jews see us filled with the joyful love of God, which they know is God’s greatest command for them in the Shma, Deut 6:4-9 and see us love one another, which they also recognize from the Torah, Lev 19:18 they will see in us the fulfillment and completion of what they have already begun.