Vatican returning to antisemitic era?

When I was about 11 years old, the sisters teaching catechism in my neighborhood incited a small riot.  My family were the first Jews to live in our town and, the Catholic children, my classmates were taught that we Jews had killed their God.  So, my classmates stoned me.  My father, the local doctor for many of these boys, stitched up my head.  I remember very little of how my parents got me through that period.

This was nothing new to a Jew.  From the time of its establishment as the religon of Rome, the Church has denied Roman guilt by blaming the death of their Jesus not on Rome, not on the corrupt priests of the time appointed by Rome, but on the Jewish people.  

A bit more than a  half dozen years after my stoning, while I was in college in the 60s,  Vatican II  changed all that.  The Council’s reforms to the Catholic Church, included outreach to Jews. My ancestors no longer were to blamed and antisemitism toward Jews of today became itself sinful. 

The Swiss-based Society of St. Pius X was formed in 1969, to oppose Vatican II’s reforms.  Becaue of those reforms, he Society denies the authority of the pope and has six seminaries, three universities and 70 primary and secondary schools around the globe. Aside from the four bishops, it boasts more than 550 priests and 200 seminarians.

Aside from its preference for Latin, the  breakaway sect appointed the Holocaust-denying priest , Richard Williamson as a Bishop and counts in its followers the actor Mel Gibson, known for his interpretation of the New Teastament as an anti-Semitic screed.

Now Pope Benedict is inviting the Society of St. Pius X to rejoin the church and has said that some reforms need not be followed.  The key issue is  Nostra Aetate.  Nostra Aetate revolutionized the Catholic Church’s relations with Jews by declaring that Christ’s death couldn’t be attributed to Jews as a whole.

Pope Benedict, who has the taint of service as a youth in Hitler’s army….  provoked outrage in 2009 when he lifted the excommunication of Williamson, who denied gas chambers were used during the Holocaust.  The Pope has also pushed for the sanctification of Pious XII and his predecessor Pious IX, one who may have been complicit in genocide against the Italian Jews and the other who estabished the doctrne of infallibility, placed Jews back into ghettoe, kidnapped at least one Jewish child and forced the child’s conversion. 

Full story on Ynet

excerpts

‘Catastrophic effects’ on Catholic-Jewish ties

Elan Steinberg of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, said there would be “catastrophic effects” on Catholic-Jewish relations if the Vatican didn’t require the society to accept the document.

“We mustn’t allow the moral imperative of Catholic-Jewish amity to fall victim to a policy of appeasement or blithe expediency,” he said in a statement.

Rabbi David Rosen, who heads the American Jewish Committee’s interreligious affairs office and is a veteran of Catholic-Jewish dialogue, said he was worried about the Vatican’s gesture and awaited further clarification.

“If ‘Nostra Aetate’ and ‘Lumen Gentium’ (another Vatican II document) are not considered fundamental doctrines of the Church, and it is possible to question them without challenging the authority of the church, then we (and not just Jewish-Catholic relations) are in for a very rough ride ahead,” he said in an email.