Are Jews Our Friends?

Are Jews Our Friends?

On February 19, 2020, Bishop Kevin Rhoades wrote a statement for his Fort Wayne-South Bend, IN diocese regarding how Catholics are to relate to Jews. Seeking collaboration in human affairs, however, often spills over into religious issues about which Christians and Jews are naturally at odds. It is a tough road for those who are seeking human friendship to wade through the rough waters inherent in spiritual matters. Over the last 70 years or so, various Catholic and Jews have attempted to forge these deep waters. Unfortunately, they find the pathway strewn with the dead bodies of compromise, contradiction and confusion. As a case in point, let us delve into the bishop’s efforts to give it another try.

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Is the Gospel Hate Speech?

Is the Gospel Hate Speech?

Melanie Phillips, writing in Commentary Magazine a few years back, informed readers that:

“The really difficult problem is that supersessionism is not some fringe theology but is deeply rooted in Christian thinking. At the most basic level, the Church believes that Christianity superseded Judaism. The Holocaust caused Western churches to rethink this, although those in Eastern countries remained unmoved. But whereas in the 1965 Papal encyclical Nostra Aetate, the Catholics tried openly to face up to and repudiate their own anti-Jewish thinking, the Protestant churches quietly brushed supersessionism under the carpet.”

In other words, those who entirely embrace Christ and his teachings and become members of the Church He founded are, it seems, necessarily ‘anti-Jewish’. For some reason, the foul mass-murder of Jews in Europe under the profoundly anti-Semitic (not to mention anti-Christian) race-obsessed Nazi regime is an event which should make people rethink their acceptance of Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah prophesied in the Jewish scriptures and the true source of unity of the people of God. Quite why this follows is never explained.

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