(cont’d)
“He has shown this sensitivity countless times, in meetings with Jewish leadership and in important statements condemning
anti-Semitism and expressing profound sorrow for the
Holocaust,” said Abraham H. Foxman, Anti-Defamation League National Director. “We remember with great appreciation his Christmas reflections on December 29, 2000, when he memorably expressed remorse for the anti-Jewish attitudes that persisted through history, leading to ‘deplorable acts of violence’ and the
Holocaust.
In that Christmas “meditation,” which appeared on the front page of the Vatican newspaper
L’Osservatore Romano, Ratzinger said:
Even if the most recent, loathsome experience of the Shoah (Holocaust) was perpetrated in the name of an anti-Christian ideology, which tried to strike the Christian faith at its Abrahamic roots in the people of Israel, it cannot be denied that a certain insufficient resistance to this atrocity on the part of Christians can be explained by an inherited anti-Judaism present in the hearts of not a few Christians.
According to the Religious News Service, “Ratzinger’s warm tone and repeated emphasis on Christianity’s roots in
Judaism appeared aimed at easing severe strains caused by the controversial document on salvation that his congregation issued in September 2000. The ‘Declaration Dominus Iesus’ asserted the primacy of Catholicism and said followers of other religions are in a ‘gravely deficient situation’ regarding salvation.”
“The entire story of salvation,” Ratzinger said in his meditation, “had Israel as its initial protagonist. For this reason, the voices of Moses and the prophets have resonated in the liturgy of the church from the beginning until today; Israel’s Book of Psalms is also the church’s great book of prayer.”
Ratzinger has also written about dialogue with Jews:
The average observer would probably regard the following statement as obvious: the Hebrew Bible, the “Old Testament,” unites Jews and Christians, whereas faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Redeemer divides them. It is not difficult to see, however, that this kind of division between what unites and what divides is superficial. For the primal fact is that through Christ Israel’s Bible came to the non-Jews and became their Bible…For through the encounter with Jesus of Nazareth the God of Israel became the God of the Gentiles. Through him, in fact, the promise that the nations would pray to the God of Israel as the one God, that the “mountain of the Lord” would be exalted above all other mountains, has been fulfilled. Even if Israel cannot join Christians in seeing Jesus as the Son of God, it is not altogether impossible for Israel to recognize him as the servant of God who brings the light of his God to the nations. The converse is also true: even if Christians wish that Israel might one day recognize Christ as the Son of God and that the fissure that still divides them might thereby be closed, they ought to acknowledge the decree of God, who has obviously entrusted Israel with a distinctive mission in the “time of the Gentiles.”
…I think we could say that two things are essential to Israel’s faith. The first is the Torah, commitment to God’s will, and thus the establishment of his dominion, his kingdom, in this world. The second is the prospect of hope, the expectation of the Messiah — the expectation, indeed, the certainty, that God himself will enter into this history and create justice, which we can only approximate very imperfectly… For Christians, Christ is the present Sinai, the living Torah that lays its obligations on us, that bindingly commands us, but that in so doing draws us into the broad space of love and its inexhaustible possibilities. In this way, Christ guarantees hope in the God who does not let history sink into a meaningless past, but rather sustains it and brings it to its goal. It likewise follows from this that the figure of Christ simultaneously unites and divides Israel and the Church: it is not in our power to overcome this division, but it keeps us together on the way to what is coming and for this reason must not become an enmity.
He also made remarks, however, that raised some concerns among Jews. In 2001, for example, Ratzinger said the Church is waiting for the moment when Jews will “say yes to Christ.” When asked if Jews should acknowledge
Jesus as the
Messiah, Ratzinger said, “We believe that. The fact remains, however, that our Christian conviction is that Christ is also the Messiah of Israel.”
Source:
jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Ratzinger.html
