Sunday, August 19, 2012

Is this Benedict XVI's Reform Cardinal?


Vatican. [kreuz.net] The President of the Pontifical Council For Unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch, sees apparent anti-Jewish tendencies in the Church. He told the Jewish weekly magazine 'Tacheles'. The chief Cardinal see anti-Jewish tendencies in Traditionalists or theologians who teach that the Old Testament has been abolished by the New Testament. The teaching criticized by the Cardinal corresponds to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the New Testament and the faith of the Catholic Church.

Edit: He's made other statements regarding Jewish-Catholic relations that are controversial, which points decisively to a powerful incompatibility between those who are in positions of power and those in the periphery or in some cases, out in the cold. Here he implicates the Catholic Church in the German persecution of the Jews during World War II:
On the Catholic side, the Declaration of the Second Vatican Council on the relationship of the church to the non–Christian religions, “Nostra aetate”, can be considered the beginning of a systematic dialogue with the Jews. Still today it is considered the “foundation document” and the “Magna Charta” of the dialogue of the Roman Catholic Church with Judaism, so my tour d’horizon of the Jewish–Catholic conversation must begin there. It did not develop in a vacuum, since on the Christian side there had already been approaches to Judaism both within and outside the Catholic Church before the Council. But after the unprecedented crime of the Shoah above all, an effort was made in the post–War period towards a theologically reflected re–definition of the relationship with Judaism. Following the mass murder of the European Jews planned and executed by the National Socialists with industrial perfection, a profound examination of conscience was initiated about how such a barbaric scenario was possible in the Christian–oriented West. Must we assume that anti–Jewish tendencies present within Christianity for centuries were complicit in the anti–Semitism of the Nazis, racially motivated and led astray by a godless and neo–pagan ideology, or simply allowing it to run its course? Among Christians too there were both perpetrators and victims; but the broad masses surely consisted of passive spectators who kept their eyes closed in the face of this brutal reality. The Shoah therefore became a question and an accusation against Christianity: Why did Christian resistance against the boundless brutality of the Nazi crimes not demonstrate that measure and that clarity which one should rightfully have expected? Have Christians and Jews today the will and the strength for conciliation and reconciliation on the common foundation of faith in the one and only God of Israel? What significance does Judaism have in the future for churches and ecclesial communities, and in what theological relationship do we stand today in connection with Judaism?

4 comments:

Kane said...

Idolator.

schmenz said...

This will be, and in fact already is, Benedict's Achilles Heel: his fear of That Tribe which even led him to ignominiously change the Good Friday Prayers for the Conversion of the Jews. He is terrified of these people, a fact altogether obvious. In this he emulates his predecessors, the Apostles, who would sometimes hide for fear of them.

It might also explain his promoting such intellectual pygmies as Koch (and Wuerl, and Dolan) to high office. The Church will once again begin to heal once this fear is conquered, and conquered by the Love that requires Catholics to urge these unbaptized persecutors to come into the Faith.

Meem said...

facepalm!
Read "How Christ Said the First Mass" and begin to live as a Catholic!

Rick DeLano said...

The intention to establish a dual covenant heresy was seriously impeded, notably, by the heroic intervention of Robert Sungenis in the US.

But it clearly has regrouped, and is seeking a new formulation, less ham-handedly heretical than the astonishing formulation excised from the US Bishops' Catechism:

"Therefore, the covenant God made with the Jews through Moses remains eternally valid for them."

That disgrace marks the high-water mark (so far) of progress for this heresy insofar as teaching documents are concerned.

This fight is obviously not over.