Evangelizing Jews and the Second Coming

The Martyr Century

In 1884 Pope Leo XIII experienced a terrifying vision. Consulting with several cardinals after the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in his private Vatican chapel, the Pope paused at the foot of the altar. Suddenly he became pale and catatonic. After a short interval, however, he resumed normal behavior and said, “Oh, what a horrible picture I was permitted to see!” The Pope told his cardinals that he had seen demons and heard Satan’s guttural voice boasting to God that he could destroy the Church and drag the world to hell if he were given sufficient time and power. Satan had asked God for a century of enhanced influence and it was granted. The Pope further understood that if Satan didn’t destroy the Church during the twentieth century he would suffer a crushing defeat. The Pope hurried to his office, wrote the St. Michael prayer, and asked that every Catholic say it every day.

Satan announced his challenge through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), in The Gay Science, depicting a madman crying out, “Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I.” Nietzsche’s satanic madman smashed the lamp he brought to shed light on this revelation and say in disgust, “I have come too early, my time is not yet, an allegory for smashing Jesus, Jn 8:12 the light of the world, who told His mother Mary at Cana, Jn 2:4 “My hour has not yet come.” The madman continued, “This tremendous evil is still on its way, still wandering, it has not yet reached the ears of men.” Nietzsche saw the human condition as gravely ill, made especially so by Christianity with its emphasis on good and evil. His solution was the reconstitution of the human race through the development of a master race and the elimination of inferior races which would overcome the Christian paradigm of good and evil, and Christianity itself. The Nazis based their effort to destroy the Jews on Nietzsche’s model.

Our Lord answered by sending His Blessed Mother on May 13, 1917 to make the first of her six appearances to the three children at Fátima, Portugal. “If what I say is done,” she told them, “Many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father.” On the night of January 25-26, 1938, the sky over most of the earth was aglow with crimson light. In March 1938, during the pontificate of Pius XI, Nazi soldiers marched into Austria to begin the Anschluss.

Both Nietzsche and the Blessed Virgin pointed straight toward the Shoah, Satan’s attempt to destroy the Jews and thereby prevent Christ’s final victory at the Second Coming. It has been widely observed that in a mysterious way, Jews across the centuries have reflected the image of Jesus. They have walked a long via crucis, beaten, mocked and derided. Mystically speaking, the Jews were crucified at Auschwitz and three years later rose from the dead in the nation Israel. The great Jewish artist Marc Chagall painted images of a very Jewish Christ crucified in White Crucifixion, Exodus, and other works. Christ used the Shoah to prepare the Jewish people for the fulfillment of their election.

The Shoah martyred six million Jews. More Christians were martyred during the twentieth century than in all the previous nineteen centuries combined. Jews and Christians participated together in Christ’s redemptive crucifixion.

The Coming Together

Rabbi Jacob Neusner believes that much of what passes for dialogue is a sham, what he calls “juxtaposed monologues” and that a true encounter has not yet begun. He says it is not enough merely to find beliefs in common, but that we must look for resources within our own faith tradition that form a point of entry into the other.

He offers the example of a Jewish attempt to enter into the Roman Catholic devotion to Mary and her special role as an intercessor before God. He looks at a story in the Lamentations Rabbah, a midrash, rabbinic treatise, on the Lamentations of Jeremiah. This story concerns God during the Babylonian Exile. Abraham pleads with God to return them to Israel, so do Isaac, Jacob and Moses, all to no avail. Then “Rachel, our mother, leapt to the fray” and pointed out to God that she had waited for Jacob for seven years and that after those seven years when the time came for her wedding, her sister took her place in bed. But having compassion for her sister, Rachel crawled under the bed on which Jacob was lying with her sister and “I made all the replies so that he would not discern the voice of my sister. I paid my sister only kindness, and I was not jealous of her, and I did not allow her to be ashamed, and I am a mere mortal, dust and ashes... But you are the King, living and enduring and merciful. How come then that you are jealous of idolatry which is nothing, and so have sent my children into exile”... Forthwith the mercy of the Holy One, blessed be he, welled up, and he said: “For Rachel I am going to bring the Israelites back to their land.” This story enables him to grasp something of the Blessed Virgin.

We have to look for the bridge upon which we can cross into one another’s reality.

On the Jewish Side

The great Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, in The Star of Redemption, looked closely at the Star of David as a model for the basic unity of the universe. Separating it into two triangles, he saw in the upper triangle the three-point relationship between God, the world, and man. In the lower he saw creation, revelation and redemption. The complete star is the symbol of Israel. Rosenzweig saw in the Star of David a two-covenant theory of redemption. He saw the Jews in their own saving covenant anchored in Sinai, and he saw Christians in a saving covenant anchored in Christ.

During the 1960s, after Jewish leaders had uniformly praised Pope Pius XII for doing all he could to save Jews, liberal Jews suddenly turned against him. The charge was inherently dishonest because it was framed as what formal logic calls an “unfalsifiable proposition.” No matter how often Pius XII publicly spoke out against the Shoah, it could always be argued that he should have done more. Satan thought he was attacking the Catholic Church. As always, Christ was thinking farther ahead. The Jews, in their intense focus on the Shoah, the “final solution,” were becoming ever more like Catholics who are intensely focused on Christ’s Final Sacrifice.

In the distance we can see the faint outline of a bridge.

On the Catholic Side

Pope John Paul II has described the survival of the Jewish people until the present day as a “supernatural fact.” The evidence is visible. All the ancient tribes from their part of the world, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, and Philistines, are gone. Today’s Egyptians and Greeks are nothing like their ancient counterparts. Yet, even most Jews would not go that far. Liberal Jews, the great majority, say Jewish survival depends more on culture and ethnicity than on God and Torah. The Pope has more faith in the Covenant than most Jews.

Holy Mother Church is starting to see Rabbi Yeshua as the most Jewish Jew of all. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 578 tells us, “Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and therefore the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, was to fulfill the Law by keeping it in its all-embracing detail ... He is in fact the only one who could keep it perfectly.” Of the 613 Torah mitzvot, 102, more than on any other subject, address Sacrifices and Offerings. That does not count the 30 mitzvot on Priests and Levites or the 33 on Temple, Sanctuary and Sacred Offerings. Sacrifice was the highest form of Jewish worship, the only one for which a priest was required, the only one for which the priest entered the Holy of Holies. Rabbi Yeshua fulfilled the Torah mitzvot on sacrifices through His Final Sacrifice, after which the Temple sacrifices ceased forever. His followers, through the Church that He instituted, have re-presented His Final Sacrifice ever since, and will until the end of time.

Fr. Elias Friedman, OCD, the spiritual father of the AHC, wrote in Jewish Identity, “C.A. Rijk expressed the opinion ‘that we suffer from a total absence in the Church of a real theology of Israel, one which would be faithful to the Biblical vision of things.’ He went on, ‘The manuals of theology deal with the Old Testament, but never with Judaism after the coming of Christ.’” For example, the traditional explanation for the ingathering of Jews into the Catholic Church has been to open the way to the Second Coming. “The glorious Messiah’s coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition of all Israel, for a hardening has come upon part of Israel.” But I believe there is more to it. We have needed the Jews as living witnesses of Jesus’ extremely pure Jewishness. Post-Christic Judaism, by driving the Jewish Christians out of the synagogues, separated us from a vital part of who He is, the most Jewish Jew of all. The Catholic Church has all the teachings, all that we need for salvation. To become the bride of Christ, Holy Mother Church has to become Jewish in its stories, in its sense of self.

The outline of a bridge becomes discernible.