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My comments
are in italicized brackets:
For the simple
tenets of their faith, most Roman Catholics rely on the catechism's
hard questions and imprimatured answers. Children in Church schools
memorize its passages, which they rarely forget the rest of their
lives. In the catechism, they learn that Catholic dogma does not change
and, far more vividly, that Jews killed Jesus Christ. Because of that
Christian concept, for the past 20 centuries anti- Semitism spread as a
kind of social disease on the body of mankind. Its incidence rose and
fell, but anti-Semites were never quite out of style. The ill-minded
who argued all other matters could still join in contempt for Jews. It
was a gentlemen's agreement that carried into Auschwitz. [Ed.
"Anti-semitism" spread because of Jewish anti-Christianism, Jewish
power used against Christian society, and usury, not because of
Christian theology]
Few Catholics were ever directly taught to hate Jews. Yet Catholic
teaching could not get around the New Testament account that Jews
provoked the Crucifixion. The gas chambers were only the latest proof
that they had not yet been pardoned. [Ed. Nazism was an
anti-Christian pagan ideaology against which Pope Pius IX issued the
encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge,
and because of which 3,000,000 Catholics died in Poland alone.] The
best hope that the Church of Rome will not again seem an accomplice to
genocide is the fourth chapter of its Declaration on the Relation of
the Church to Non- Christian Religions, which Pope Paul VI declared
Church law near the end of Vatican Council II. At no place in his
address from the Chair of Peter did the Pope talk of Jules Isaac. But
perhaps the archbishop of Aix, Charles de Provenchères, had made
Isaac's role perfectly clear some few years earlier. "It is a sign of
the times," the Archbishop said, " that a layman, and a Jewish layman
at that, has become the originator of a Council decree."
Jules Isaac was a history scholar, a Legion of Honor member, and the
inspector of schools in France. In 1943, he was 66, a despairing man
living near Vichy, when the Germans picked up his daughter and wife.
From then on, Isaac could think of little but the apathy of the
Christian world before the fate of incinerated Jews [Ed. The man
lived in France, a country that was invaded by Nazis. He should've been
quite aware that the French had their own problems at that time, but I
guess they should've been worried about the Jews alone -- whom, he is
claiming, were being "incinerated" in a foreign country. Nevermind that
"the Christian world" was there in WWII fighting the Nazis! I guess we
should've fought harder and faster. Or something.]. His book Jesus
and Israel was published in 1948, and after reading it, Father Paul
Démann in Paris searched schoolbooks and verified Isaac's sad claim
that inadvertently, if not by intent, Catholics taught contempt for
Jews [Ed. Catholics teach contempt of the post-Temple Jewish
religion and usury, not "the Jews." Big difference. It is Judaism that
teaches contempt not only of the Catholic religion, but of all
"Gentiles"]. Gregory Baum, an Augustinian priest born an Orthodox
Jews, called it "a moving account of the love which Jesus had for his
people, the Jews, and of the contempt which the Christians, later,
harbored for them."
Isaac's book was noticed. In 1949, Pope Pius XII received its author
briefly. But 11 years went by before Isaac saw real hope. In Rome, in
mid-June, 1960, the French Embassy pressed Isaac on to the Holy See.
Isaac wanted to see John XXIII. He was passed from the old Cardinal
Eugene Tisserant to the archconservative Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani.
Ottaviani sent him on to the 83-year-old Cardinal Andrea Jullien, who
stared without seeing and stayed motionless as stone while Isaac told
how Catholic teaching led to anti- Semitism. When he had finished, he
waited for a reaction, but Jullien stayed in stone. Isaac, who was hard
of hearing, stared intently at the prelate's lips. Time passed, neither
spoke. Isaac thought of just leaving, then decided to intrude. "But
whom should I see about this terrible thing?" he asked, finally, and
after another long pause, the old Cardinal said," Tisserant." The
silence settled in again. The next word was, "Ottaviani." Isaac shook
that off too. When it was time for another, the word was, "Bea." With
that, Jules Isaac went to Augustin Bea, the one German Jesuit in the
College of Cardinals. "In him, I found powerful support," Isaac said.
The next day, the support was even stronger. John XXIII, standing in
the doorway of the fourth-floor papal apartment, reached for Jules
Isaac's hand, then sat beside him. "I introduced myself as a non-
Christian, the promoter of l'Amitiés Judéo-Chrétiennes, and a very deaf
old man," Isaac said. John talked for a while of his devotion to the
Old Testament, told of his days as a Vatican diplomat in France, then
asked where his caller was born. Here, Isaac felt a rambling chat with
the Supreme Pontiff coming on and started worrying about how he would
ever bring the conversation around to his subject. He told John that
his actions had kindled great hopes in the people of the Old Testament,
and added: "Is not the Pope himself, in his great kindness, responsible
for it if we now expect more?" John laughed, and Isaac had a listener.
The non-Christian beside the Pope said the Vatican should study anti-
Semitism. John said he had been thinking about that from the beginning
of their talk. "I asked if I might take away some sparks of hope,"
Isaac recalled. John said he had a right to more than hope and then
went on about the limits of sovereignty. "I am the head, but I must
consult others too....This is not monarchie absolue!" To much of the
world, it seemed to be monarchy benevolent. Because of John, a lot was
happening fast in Catholicism and Jewry.
A few months before Isaac spelled out his case against the Gentiles, a
Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity was set up by Pope
John under Cardinal Bea. It was to press toward reunion with the
churches Rome lost at the Reformation. After Isaac left, John made it
clear to the administrators in the Vatican's Curia that a firm
condemnation of Catholic anti-Semitism was to come from the council he
had called. To John, the German Cardinal seemed the right legislative
whip for the job, even if his Christian Unity secretariat seemed a
vexing address to work from.
By then, there was a fair amount of talk passing between the Vatican
Council offices and Jewish groups, and both the American Jewish
Committee and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith were heard
loud and clear in Rome. Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel of New York's Jewish
Theological Seminary, who first knew of Bea in Berlin 30 years ago, met
with the Cardinal in Rome. Bea had already read the American Jewish
Committee's The Image of the Jews in Catholic Teaching. It was followed
by another AJC paper, the 23-page study, Anti-Jewish Elements in
Catholic Liturgy. Speaking for the AJC, Heschel said he hoped the
Vatican Council would purge Catholic teaching of all suggestions that
the Jews were a cursed race. And in doing that, Heschel felt, the
Council should in no way exhort Jews to become Christians. About the
same time, Israel's Dr. Nahum Goldmann, head of the World Conference of
Jewish Organizations, whose members ranged in creed from the most
orthodox to liberal, pressed its aspirations on the Pope. B'nai B'rith
wanted the Catholics to delete all language from the Church services
that could even seem anti-Semitic. Not then, nor in any time to come,
would that be a simple thing to do. The Catholic liturgy, where it was
drawn from writings of the early Church Fathers, could easily be
edited. But not the Gospels. Even if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were
better at evangelism than history, their writings were divinely
inspired, according to Catholic dogma, and about as easy to alter as
the center of the sun. That difficulty put both Catholics with the very
best intentions and Jews with the deepest understanding of Catholicism
in a theological fix. It also brought out the conservative opposition
in the Church and, to some extent, Arab anxieties in the Mideast. The
conservative charge against the Jews was that they were deicides,
guilty of killing God in the human-divine person of Christ. And to say
now that they were not deicides was to say by indirection that Christ
was not God, for the fact of the execution on Calvary stood
unquestioned in Catholic theology. [Ed. Catholic teaching is that
1st c. Jews did use Roman power to kill Christ, and that the Jewish
religion -- i.e., post-Temple Judaism, Pharisiac Rabbinism -- rejoices
in the death of Jesus. As to culpability for His death, we are all
culpable] Yet the execution and the religion of those demanding it
were the reasons Jews were "God-killers" and "Christ-killers" in the
taunts of anti-Semites. Clearly, then, Catholic Scripture would be at
issue if the council spoke about deicides and Jews. Wise and long-
mitred heads around the Curia warned that the bishops in council should
not touch this issue with ten-foot staffs. But still there was John
XXIII, who said they must.
If the inviolability of Holy Writ was most of the problem in Rome, the
rest was the Arab-Israeli war. Ben-Gurion's Israel, in the Arab
League's view, like Mao's China in the world out of Taiwan, really does
not exist. Or, it only exists as a bone in the throat of Nasser. If the
Council were to speak out for the Jews, then the spiritual order would
seem political to Arab bishops. Next, there would be envoys passing in
the night between the Vatican and Tel Aviv. This was a crisis the Arab
League thought it might handle by diplomacy. Unlike Israel, its states
already had some ambassadors to the papal court. They would bear the
politest of reminders to the Holy See that some 2,756,000 Roman
Catholics lived in Arab lands and mention the 420,000 Orthodox
Catholics separated from Rome, whom the Papacy hoped to reclaim.
Bishops of both cuts of Catholicism could be counted on to convey their
interests to the Holy See. It was too soon for the threats. Instead,
the Arabs importuned Rome to see that they were neither anti-Semitic
nor anti-Jewish. Arabs, too, are Semites, they said, and among them
lived thousands of Jewish refugees. Patriotic Arabs were just
anti-Zionist because to them, Zionism was a plot to set a Judaic state
in the center of Islam.
In Rome, the word from the Mideast and the conservatives was that a
Jewish declaration would be inopportune. From the West, where 225,500
more Jews live in New York than in Israel, the word was that dropping
the declaration would be a calamity. And into this impasse came the
ingenuous bulk of John XXIII - not to settle the dispute but to enlarge
it. Quite on his own, the Pope was toying with an idea, which the Roman
Curia found grotesque, that non-Catholic faiths should send observers
to the Council. The prospect of being invited caused no crisis among
Protestants, but it plainly nonplussed the Jews. To attend suggested to
some Jews that Christian theology concerned them. But to stay away when
invited might suggest that the Jews did not really care whether
Catholics came to grips with anti-Semitism. When it was learned that
Bea's declaration, set for voting at the first Council session, carried
a clear refutation of the decide charge, the World Jewish Congress let
it be known around Rome that Dr. Haim Y. Vardi, an Israeli, would be an
unofficial observer at the Council. The two reports may not have been
related, but still they seemed to be. Because of them, other
reports-louder ones-were heard. The Arabs complained to the Holy See.
The Holy See said no Israeli had been invited. The Israelis denied then
that an observer had been named. The Jews in New York thought an
American should observe. In Rome, it all ended up with a jiggering of
the agenda to make sure that the declaration would not come to the
Council floor that session. Still, for the bishops, there was quite a
bit of supplementary reading on Jews. Some agency close enough to the
Vatican to have the addresses in Rome of the Council's 2,200 visiting
cardinals and bishops, supplied each with a 900-page book, Il Complotto
contro la Chiesa (The Plot Against the Church) In it, among reams of
scurrility, was a kind of fetching shred of truth. Its claim that the
Church was being infiltrated by Jews would intrigue anti- Semites. For,
in fact, ordained Jews around Rome working on the Jewish declaration
included Father Baum, as well as Msgr. John Oesterreicher, on Bea's
staff at the Secretariat. Bea, himself, according to the Cairo daily,
Al Gomhuria, was a Jew named Behar. Neither Baum nor Oesterreicher was
with Bea in the late afternoon on March 31, 1963, when a limousine was
waiting for him outside the Hotel Plaza in New York. The ride ended
about six blocks away, outside the offices of the American Jewish
Committee. There, a latter- day Sanhedrin was waiting to greet the head
of the Secretariat for Christian Unity. The gathering was kept secret
from the press. Bea wanted neither the Holy See nor the Arab League to
know he was there to take questions the Jews wanted to hear answered.
"I am not authorized to speak officially," he told them. "I can,
therefore, speak only of what, in my opinion, could be effected,
indeed, should be effected, by the Council." Then, he spelled out the
problem. "In round terms" he said, "the Jews are accused of being
guilty of deicide, and on them is supposed to lie a curse." [Ed.
Those who follow the Jewish religion -- not those who happen to merely
be born of a Hebrew mother -- curse themselves by their own choices,
just as anyone else can. "Race" has nothing to do with it, as the
anti-Catholics would like us to believe] He countered both
charges. Because even in the accounts of the Evangelists, only the
leaders of the Jews then in Jerusalem and a very small group of
followers shouted for the death sentence on Jesus, all those absent and
the generations of Jews unborn were not implicated in deicide in any
way, Bea said. As to the curse, it could not condemn the crucifiers
anyway, the Cardinal reasoned, because Christ's dying words were a
prayer for their pardon. [Ed. Christ was speaking about the Romans,
who didn't know what they were doing]
The Rabbis in the room wanted to know then if the declaration would
specify deicide, the curse and the rejection of the Jewish people by
God as errors in Christian teaching. Implicit in their question was the
most touchy problem of the New Testament. Bea's answer was oblique. He
cautioned his listeners that an unwieldy assemblage of bishops could
not possibly get down to details, could only set guidelines, and hope
not to make the complex seem simple. "Actually," he went on, "it is
wrong to seek the chief cause of anti- Semitism in purely religious
sources - in the Gospel accounts, for example. These religious causes,
in so far as they are adduced (often they are not), are often merely an
excuse and a veil to cover over other more operative reasons for
enmity." Cardinal and rabbis joined in a toast with sherry after the
talk, and one asked the prelate about Monsignor Oesterreicher, whom
many Jews regard as too missionary with them. "You know, Eminence," a
Jewish reporter once told Bea, "Jews do not regard Jewish converts as
their best friends." Bea answered gravely, "Not our Jews."
Not long after that, the Rolf Hochhuth play The Deputy opened, to
depict Pius XII as the Vicar of Christ who fell silent while Hitler
went to The Final Solution. From the pages of the Jesuit magazine
America, Oesterreicher talked straight at the AJC and B'nai B'rith [Ed.
Jewish Freemasonic organization]. "Jewish human- relations
agencies," he wrote, "will have to speak out against The Deputy in
unmistakable terms. Otherwise they will defeat their own purpose." In
the Table of London, Giovanni Battista Montini, the archbishop of
Milan, wrote an attack on the play as a defense of the Pope, whose
secretary he had been. A few months later, Pope John XXIII was dead,
and Montini became Pope Paul VI.
At the second session of the Council, in the fall of 1963, the Jewish
declaration came to the bishops as Chapter 4 of the larger declaration
On Ecumenism. The Chapter 5 behind it was the equally troublesome
declaration on religious liberty. Like riders to bills in congress,
each of the disputed chapters was a wayward caboose hooked to the new
ecumenical train. Near the end of the session, when On Ecumenism came
up for a vote, the Council moderators decided the voting should cover
only the first three chapters. That switched the cabooses to a siding
and averted a lot of clatter in a council trying hard to be ecumenical.
Voting on the Jews and religious liberty would follow soon, the bishops
were promised. And while waiting around, they could read The Jews and
the Council in the Light of Scripture and Tradition which was shorter,
but more scurrilous than Il Complotto. But the second session ended
without the vote on the Jews or religious liberty, and on a distinctly
sour note, despite the Pope's announced visit to the Holy Land. That
pilgrimage would take up a lot of newsprint, but still leave room for
questions about votes that vanished. "Something had happened behind the
scenes," the voice of the National Catholic Welfare Conference wrote."
[It is] one of the mysteries of the second session."
Two very concerned Jewish gentlemen who had to reflect hard on such
mysteries were 59-year-old Joseph Lichten of B'nai B'rith's Anti-
Defamation League in New York, and Zachariah Shuster, 63, of the
American Jewish Committee. Lichten, who lost his parents, wife and
daughter in Buchenwald, and Shuster, who also lost come of his closest
relatives, had been talking with bishops and their staff men in Rome.
The two lobbyists were not, however, seeing a lot of one another over
vin rosso around St. Peter's. The strongest possible Jewish declaration
was their common cause, but each wanted his home office to have credit
for it. That is, of course, if the declaration was really strong. But
until then, each would offer himself to the American hierarchs as the
best barometer in Rome of Jewish sentiment back home.
To find out how the Council was going, many U.S. bishops in Rome
depended on what they read in the New York Times. And so did the AJC
and B'nai B'rith. That paper was the place to make points. Lichten
thought Shuster was a genius at getting space in it, but less than
deeply instructed in theology. Which is just about the way Shuster saw
Lichten. Neither had much time for Frith Becker. Becker was in Rome for
the World Jewish Congress, as its spokesman who sought no publicity and
got little. The WJC, according to Becker, was interested in the
Council, but not in trying to shape it. "We don't have the American
outlook," he said, "on the importance of getting into print."
Getting into print was even beginning to look good to the Vatican. Yet
an expert at the public relations craft would say the Holy See showed
inexperience in the Holy Land. When Paul prayed with the bearded
Orthodox Patriarch Athenagora in the Jordanian sector, the visit looked
very good. Yet when he crossed over to Israel, he had cutting words
about the author of The Deputy and a conversionest sermon for the Jews.
His stay was so short that he never publicly uttered the name of the
young country he was visiting in. Vaticanlogists studying his moves
thought they saw lessened hope for the declaration on the Jews.
Things looked better at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. There, at a
Beth Israel Hospital anniversary, guests learned that, years earlier,
Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver had told Cardinal Francis Spellman of Israel's
efforts to get a seat in the United Nations. To help, Spellman said he
would call on South American governments and share with them his fond
wish that Israel be admitted. About the same time, il Papa americana
told an AJC meeting it was "absurd to maintain that there is some kind
of continuing guilt." In Pittsburgh, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the AJC
spoke to the Catholic Press Association about the deicide charge, and
the editorial response was abundant. In Rome, six AJC members had an
audience with the Pope, and one of them, Mrs. Leonard M. Sperry, had
just endowed the Sperry Center for Intergroup Cooperation at Pro Deo
University in the Holy City. The Pope told his callers he agreed with
all Cardinal Spellman had said about Jewish guilt. Vaticanologists
could not help but reverse their reading and see a roseate future for
the declaration.
Then came the New York Times. On June 12, 1964, it reported that the
denial of deicide had been cut from the latest draft of the
declaration. At the Secretariat for Christian Unity, a spokesman said
only that the text had been made stronger. But that is not the way most
Jews read it, nor a great many Catholics. Before the Council met and
while the text was still sub secreto, whole sections of it turned up
one morning in the New York Herald Tribune. No mention of the deicide
charge was to be found. Instead, there was a clear call for the
ecumenical spirit to extend itself because " the union of the Jewish
people with the Church is a part of the Christian hope." Among the few
Jews who did not mind reading that were Lichten and Shuster. They could
look at it professionally. It read, say , much better over coffee in a
morning paper than it would if the Pope were promulgating it as
Catholic teaching. On other Jews, its effect was galvanic. Their
disappointment set off indignation among some American bishops, and
Lichten and Shuster appreciated their concern. Chances that a
deicideless declaration, with a built-in conversion clause, would ever
get by the American bishops and cardinals at the Council were what a
couple of good lobbyists might call slim.
About two weeks before that, Msgr. George Higgins of the National
Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington, D.C., helped arrange a papal
audience for UN Ambassador Arthur J. Goldberg, who was a Supreme Court
Justice at the time. Rabbi Heschel briefed Goldberg before the Justice
and the Pope discussed the declaration. Cardinal Richard Cushing, in
Boston, wanted to help too. Through his aide in Rome, the Cardinal set
up an audience with the Pope for Heschel, whose apprehensions had
reason to exceed Cushing's. With the AJC's Shuster beside him, Heschel
talked hard about deicide and guilt, and asked the Pontiff to press for
a declaration in which Catholics would be forbidden to proselytize
Jews. Paul, somewhat affronted, would in no way agree. Shuster,
somewhat chagrined, disassociated himself gingerly from Heschel by
switching to French, which the Pope speaks but the Rabbi does not. All
agree that the audience did not end as cordially as it began. Only
Heschel and a few others think it did good. He invited notice in an
Israeli paper that the declaration's next text had emerged free of
conversionary tone. To the AJC, that interview was one more irritant.
The Rabbi's audience with Paul in the Vatican, like Bea's meeting with
the AJC in New York, was granted on the condition that it would be kept
secret. It was undercover summit conferences of that sort that led
conservatives to claim that American Jews were the new powers behind
the Church. But on the floor of the Council, things looked even worse
to the conservatives. There, it seemed to them as if Catholic bishops
were working for the Jews. At issue was the weakened text. The
cardinals from St. Louis and Chicago, Joseph Ritter and the late Albert
Meyer, demanded a return to the strong one. Cushing said the deicide
denial would have to be put back. Bishop Steven Leven of San Antonio
called for clearing the text of conversionary pleas and , unknowingly,
uttered a prophetic view about deicide. "We must tear this word out of
the Christian vocabulary," he said, "so that it may never again be used
against the Jews."
All that talk brought out the Arab bishops. They argued that a
declaration favoring Jews would expose Catholics to persecution as long
as Arabs fought Israelis. Deicide, inherited guilt and conversionary
locutions seemed like so many debating points to most Arabs [Ed.
"inherited guilt" on the part of Jews is a red herring; it has never
been taught by the Church]. They wanted no declaration at all,
they kept saying, because it would be put to political use against
them. Their allies in this holy war were conservative Italians,
Spaniards and South Americans. They saw the structure of the faith
being shaken by theological liberals who thought Church teaching could
change. To the conservatives, this was near-heresy, and to the
liberals, it was pure faith. Beyond faith, the liberals had the votes,
and sent the declaration back to its Secretariat for more strength.
While it was out for redrafting again, the conservatives wanted it
flattened into one paragraph in the Constitution of the Church. But
when the declaration reappeared at the third session's end, it was in a
wholly new document called The Declaration on the Relation of the
Church to Non-Christian Religions. In that setting, the bishops
approved it with a 1,770 to 185 vote. There was considerable joy among
Jews in the United States because their declaration had finally come
out. In fact, it had not. The vote had been an endorsement only for the
general substance of the text. But because votes with qualifications
were accepted (placet iuxta modum is the Latin term for "yes, but with
this modification"), the time between the third session and the fourth
- just finished - would be spent fitting in the modifying modi, or
those most of the 31 voting members of the Secretariat thought
acceptable. By Council rules, modi could qualify or nuance the
language, but they could not change the substance of the text. But
then, what substance is or is not had always kept philosophers on edge.
And theologians have had trouble with it too.
But first there were less recondite troubles to face. In Segni, near
Rome, Bishop Luigi Carli wrote in the February, 1965 issue of his
diocesan magazine that the Jews of Christ's time and their descendants
down to the present were collectively guilty of Christ's death. A few
weeks later, on Passion Sunday, at an outdoor Mass in Rome, Pope Paul
talked of the Crucifixion and the Jews' heavy part in it. Rome's chief
rabbi, Elio Toaff, said in saddened reply that in "even the most
qualified Catholic personalities, the imminence of Easter causes
prejudices to reemerge."
On April 25, 1965, the New York Times correspondent in Rome, Robert C.
Doty, upset just about everybody. The Jewish declaration was in trouble
was the gist of his story reporting that the Pope had turned it over to
four consultants to clear it of its contradictions to Scripture and
make it less objectionable to Arabs. It was about as refuted as a Times
story ever gets. When Cardinal Bea arrived in New York three days
later, he had his priest- secretary deny Doty's story by saying that
his Secretariat for Christian Unity still had full control of the
Jewish declaration. Then came an apologia for Paul's sermon. "Keep in
mind that the Pope was speaking to ordinary and simple faithful people
- not before a learned body," the priest said. As to the anti- Semitic
Bishop of Segni, the Cardinal's man said that Carli's views were
definitely not those of the Secretariat. Morris B. Abram of the AJC was
at the airport to greet Bea and found his secretary's views on that
reassuring.
In Rome a few days later, some fraction of the Secretariat met to vote
on the bishops' suggested modi. Among them were a few borne down from
the fourth floor of the Vatican over the signature of the Bishop of
Rome. It is not known for certain whether that special bishop urged
that the "guilty of deicide" denial be cut. But the alternate
possibility that the phrase would have been cut, if he had wanted it
kept, is not pondered on much any more. Accounts of the Secretariat's
struggles over deicide agree that it was a very close vote after a long
day's debate. After deicide went out, there remained the Bishop of
Rome's suggestion that the clause beginning "deplores, indeed condemns,
hatred and persecution of Jews" might read better with "indeed
condemns" left out. That would leave hatred and persecution of Jews
still "deplored." The suggestion stirred no debate and was quickly
accepted by vote. It was late, and nobody cared to fuss any more about
little things.
That meeting was from May 9 to 15, and during that week, the New York
Times had a story every other day from the Vatican. On May 8, the
Secretariat denied again that outsiders were taking a hand in the
Jewish declaration. On the 11th, President Charles Helou of Lebanon, an
Arab Maronite Catholic, had an audience with the Pope. On the 12th, the
Vatican Press Office announced that the Jewish declaration remained
unchanged. If that was to reassure Jews, it came across as a Press
Office protesting too much. On the 15th, the Secretariat closed its
meeting, and the bishops went their separate ways, some sad, some
satisfied, all with lips sealed. A few may have wondered if something
out of order had happened and if, despite Council rules, a Council
document had been substantially changed between sessions. The Times
persisted in making trouble. On June 20, under Doty's by- line, was the
report that the declaration was "under study" and might be dropped
altogether. On June 22, Doty filed a story amounting to a self-
directed punch in the nose. Commenting to Doty on his own earlier
report, a source close to Bea said it was "so deprived of any basis
that it doesn't even deserve a denial." For those who have raised
refutations to a fine art, that was a denial to be proud of, because it
was precisely true while completely misleading. Doty had written that
the declaration was under study when in fact, the study was finished,
the damage was done, and there existed what many regard as a
substantially new declaration on the Jews.
In Geneva, Dr. Willem Visser 'tHooft, head of the World Council of
Churches, told two American priests that, if the reports were true, the
ecumenical movement would be slowed. His sentiments were not kept
secret from the U.S. hierarchy. Nor was the AJC saddened into
inactivity. Rabbi Tanenbaum plied Monsignor Higgins with press
clippings from appalled Jewish editors. Higgins conveyed his fears to
Cardinal Cushing, and the Boston prelate made polite inquiry to the
Bishop of Rome. In Germany, a group for Jewish-Christian amity sent a
letter to the bishops claiming, "There is now prevailing a crisis of
confidence vis-à-vis the Catholic Church." At the Times, there had
never been a crisis of confidence vis-à-vis its reporting from Rome,
but if there had been one, it would have passed on September 10. In his
story under the headline VATICAN DRAFT EXONERATING JEWS REVISED TO OMIT
WORD "DEICIDE," Doty allowed no Times reader to think he had pried into
Vatican secrets. He was pleased to credit as his source, "an authorized
leak by the Vatican."
Similar stories in the Times foretold Council failings before they
happened. Most of these were substantiated in magazine pieces and books
published later, though some had traces of special pleading. The
American Jewish Committee's intellectual monthly, Commentary, had
offered a most bleak report on the Council and the Jews by the
pseudonymous F. E. Cartus. In a footnote, the author referred the
reader to a confirming account in The Pilgrim, a 281-page book by the
pseudonymous Michael Serafian. Later, in Harper's magazine, Cartus,
even more dour, added to the doubts on the Jewish text. To buttress his
case, he recast Pilgrim passages and cited Council accounts in Time,
whose Rome correspondent had surfaced for by-line status as author of a
notably good book on the Council. At the time, both Time and the New
York Times were glad to have an inside tipster. Just for the
journalistic fun of it, the inside man's revelations were signed
"Pushkin," when slipped under some correspondents' doors. But readers
were served no rewritten Pushkin on the Council's last sessions. The
cassock had come off the double agent who could never turn down work.
Pushkin, it turned out, was Michael Serafian in book length, F.E.
Cartus for the magazines, and a translator in the Secretariat for
Christian Unity, while keeping up a warm friendship with the AJC. At
the time, Pushkin-Serafian- Cartus was living in the Biblical
Institute, where he had been known well since his ordination in 1954,
though he will be known here as Timothy Fitzharris O'Boyle, S.J. For
the journalists, the young priest's inside tips and tactical leaks
checked out so well that he could not resist gilding them every now and
then with a flourish of creative writing. And an imprecision or two
could even be charged off to exhaustion in his case. He was known to be
working on a book at a young married couple's flat. The book finally
got finished, but so did half of the friendship. Father
Fitzharris-O'Boyle knew it was time for a forced march before his
religious superior could inquire too closely into the reasons for that
crisis in camaraderie. He left Rome then, sure that he could be of no
more use locally.
Apart from his taste for pseudonyms, fair ladies, reports on the
nonexistent and perhaps a real jester's genius for footnotes,
Fitzharris- O'Boyle was good at his job in the Secretariat, valuable to
the AJC and is still thought of by many around Rome as a kind of
genuine savior in the diaspora. Without him, the Jewish declaration
might well have gone under early, for it was Fitzharris-O'Boyle who
best helped the press harass the Romans wanting to scuttle it. The man
has a lot of priests' prayers.
Other years, Fitzharris-O'Boyle was around Rome when the declaration
needed help. At Vatican II's fourth and last session, there was no help
in sight. And things were happening very fast. The text came out
weakened, as the Times said it would. Then, the Pope took off for the
UN, where his jamais plus la guerre speech was a triumph. After that,
he greeted the president of the AJC in an East Side church. That looked
good for the cause. Then, at the Yankee Stadium Mass, the Pope's lector
intoned a text beginning "for fear of the Jews." And on TV that sounded
quite astonishing. Everywhere, there were speeches on the rises and
falls of the Jewish declaration, many of them preparing for a final
letdown. Lichten's executive vice-president, Rabbi Jay Kaufman, had
told audiences of his own puzzlement "as the fate of the section on
Jews is shuttled between momentary declaration and certain confutation,
like a sparrow caught in a clerical badminton game." Shuster could hear
about the same from the AJC. He could also hear the opposition. Not
content with a weakened declaration, it again wanted the total victory
of no declaration at all. For that, the Arabs' last words were
"respectfully submitted" in a 28-page memorandum calling on the he
bishops to save the faith from "communism and atheism and the
Jewish-Communist alliance." In Rome, the bishops' vote was set for
October 14, and to Lichten and Shuster, the prospects of anything
better looked almost hopeless. Priests had slipped each a copy of the
Secretariat's secret replies to the modifications the bishops wanted.
The modi made disconsolate reading. In the old text, the Jewish origin
of Catholicism was noted in a paragraph, beginning, "In truth, with a
grateful heart, the Church of Christ acknowledges..." In the modi sent
to the Secretariat, two bishops (but which two?) suggested that "with a
grateful heart" be deleted. It could, they feared, be understood to
mean that Catholics were required to give thanks to the Jews of today.
"The suggestion is accepted," the Secretariat decided. The replies went
that way for most of 16 pages. Through all of them, few reasons were
advanced for taking the warmth out of the old text and making the new
one more legal than humane.
When Shuster and Lichten had finished reading, there were telephone
calls to be made to the AJC and B'nai B'rith in New York. But these
were not much help at either end. It was Higgins who first tried
convincing two disheartened lobbyists to settle for what they would
get. Yet for a day or two, Bishop Leven of San Antonio gave them hope.
He thought the new statement was so weakened that the American bishops
should vote en bloc against it. If followed, the tactic would have
added a few hundred negative votes to the Arab- conservative side and
marked the Council as so split that the Pope might not promulgate
anything. The protest-vote tactic was soon abandoned. Lichten's remorse
lasted longer. He sent telegrams to about 25 bishops he thought could
still help retrieve the strong text. But again, it was Higgins who
quietly told him to give up. "Look, Joe," the priest with the
labor-lawyer manner told Lichten, "I understand your disappointment.
I'm disappointed too." Then, he went off to console Shuster.
In his own room, where Higgins thinks he had Lichten and Shuster
together for their first joint appearance in Rome, the priest could
sound as if he were putting it straight to company men looking for a
square shake from the union. "If you two give New York the impression
you can get a better text, you are crazy," he told them. "Lay all your
cards on the table. It's just insane to think by some pressures here or
newspaper articles back in New York, you can work a miracle in the
Council. You are not going to work it, and they will think you fell
down on the job."
Lichten remembers more. "Higgins said, 'Think how much harm can be
done, Joe, if we allow these changes to erect barriers in the path we
have taken for such a long time. And this may happen if your people,
and mine, don't respond to the positive aspects.' That was the
psychological turning point for me," Lichten said. Shuster was still
unreconciled, and he can remember the day well. "I had to break my head
and heart," he said, "to think what should be done. I went through a
crisis, but I was convinced by Higgins. The loss of deicide, frankly, I
did not consider a catastrophe. But 'deplore' for 'condemn' is another
thing. When I step on your toes, you deplore what I do. But massacre?
Do you deplore massacre?" A differing view was taken by Abbé René
Laurentin, a Council staff man who wrote to all the bishops with a
last-minute appeal to conscience. Of itself, the loss of the deicide
denial would not have mattered to Laurentin either, if there would
never be anti-Semitism in the world again. But since history invites
pessimism in this, Laurentin asked the bishops to suppose that genocide
might recur. "Then, the Council and the Church will be accused," he
contended, "of having left dormant the emotional root of anti- Semitism
which is the theme of deicide." Bishop Leven had wanted the word
deicide torn out of the Christian vocabulary when he argued a year
earlier for the stronger text. Now, the Secretariat had even torn it
out of the declaration, and proscribed it from the Christian vocabulary
so abruptly that even the proscription itself was suppressed. "With
difficulty, one escapes the impression,' Laurentin wrote, "that these
arguments owe something to artifice." Before the vote in St. Peter's,
Cardinal Bea spoke to the assembled bishops. He said his Secretariat
had received their modi "with grateful heart" - and the words just
happened to be the very first ones deleted by his Secretariat's vote
from the new version. A year earlier, Bea had argued for getting the
deicide denial into the text, and now he was defending its removal. He
spoke without zeal, as if he, too, knew he was asking the bishops for
less than Jules Isaac and John XXIII might have wanted. Exactly 250
bishops voted against the declaration, while 1,763 supported it.
Through much of the U.S. and Europe, the press minutes later made the
complex simple with headlines reading VATICAN PARDONS JEWS, JEWS NOT
GUILTY or JEWS EXONERATED IN ROME.
Glowing statements came from spokesmen of the AJC and B'nai B'rith, but
each had a note of disappointment that the strong declaration had been
diluted. Bea's friend Heschel was the harshest and called the Council's
failure to deal with deicide "an act of paying homage to Satan." Later
on, when calm, he was just saddened. "my old friend, the Jesuit priest
Gus Weigel, spent one of the last nights of his life in this room,"
Heschel said. "I asked him whether he thought it would really be ad
majorem Dei gloriam if there were no more synagogues, no more Seder
dinners and no more prayers said in Hebrew?" The question was
rhetorical, and Weigel has since gone to his grave. Other comments
ranged from the elated to the satiric. Dr. William Wexler of the World
Conference of Jewish Organizations tried for precision. "The true
significance of the Ecumenical Council's statement will be determined
by the practical effects it has on those to whom it is addressed," he
said. Harry Golden of the Carolina Israelite called for a Jewish
Ecumenical council in Jerusalem to issue a Jewish declaration on
Christians.
With his needling retort, the columnist was reflecting a view popular
in the U.S. that some kind of forgiveness had been granted the Jews.
The notion was both started and sustained by the press, but there was
no basis for it in the declaration. What led quite understandably to
it, however, was the open wrangling around the Council that had made
the Jews seem on trial for four years. If the accused did not quite
feel cleared when the verdict was in, it was because the jury was out
far too long.
It was out for reasons politicians understand but few thought relevant
to religion. The present head of the Holy See, like the top man in the
White House, believed deeply in pressing for a consensus when any
touchy issue was put to a Council vote. By the principle of
collegiality, in which all bishops help govern the whole Church, any
real issue divided the college of bishops into progressives and
conservatives. Reconciling them was the Pope's job. For this rub in the
collegial process, the papal remedy, whether persuaded or imposed,
played some hob with the law of contradiction. When one faction said
Scripture alone was the source of Church teaching, the other held for
the two sources of Scripture and Tradition. To bridge that break, the
declaration was rewritten with Pauline touches to reaffirm the
two-source teaching while allowing that the other merited study. When
opponents of religious liberty said it would fly against the teaching
that Catholicism is the One True Church, a similar solution trickled
down from the Vatican's fourth floor. Religious liberty now starts with
the One True Church teaching, which, according to some satisfied
conservatives, contradicts the text that follows.
The Jewish issue was an even more troublesome one for a consensus-
maker. Those who saw a dichotomy in the declaration could find it in
the New Testament, too, where all are agreed it will stay. But to what
extent was that issue complicated by the politics of the Arabs? In
Israel, there is the feeling since the vote, and in Mideast journals
there is considerable evidence for it, that the masses of Arab
Christians were more indifferent to dispute then the Scriptural
conservatives would like known. By the Newtonian laws of political
motion, pressure begets counterpressure more often than lobbyists like
to admit. And one of the hypotheses that B'nai B'rith and the AJC must
ponder is that much Arab resistance and some theological intransigence
were creatures of Jewish lobbying. There was anxiety all along about
that, and Nahum Goldmann cautioned Jews early to "not raise the issue
with too much intensity." Some did not. After the vote, when Fritz
Becker, the WJC's silent man, admitted he once called on Bea at home,
he said the declaration was not mentioned. "We just talked, the
Cardinal and I," Becker said, "about the advantages of not talking."
There are Catholics close to what went on in Rome who think that Jewish
energy did harm. Higgins, the social-action priest from Washington,
D.C., is not one of them. If it had not been for the lobbying, he felt,
the declaration would have been tabled. But in his usual gruff way,
Cardinal Cushing said that the only people who could beat the Jewish
declaration were the Jewish lobbyists. Father Tome Stransky, the
touchy, young Paulist who rides a Lambretta to work at the Secretariat,
thought that once the press got on to the Council there was no way to
stop such pressure groups. If the Council could have deliberated in
secret with no strainings from the outside, he thinks the declaration
would have been stronger.
As it stands, Stransky fears that some Catholics may gleefully pass it
off as if it were written to and for Jews. "This, you have got to
remember, is addressed to Catholics. This is Catholic Church business.
I don't mind telling you I'd be insulted, too, if I were a Jew and I
thought this document was speaking to Jews." For the Catholics, he
thinks it is now written for its best effect. It was Stransky's
superior in the Secretariat, Cardinal Bea, who came around most to the
claims of the conservatives. Bea apparently realized fairly late that
there were some Catholics, more pious than instructed, whose contempt
for Jews was inseparable from their love for Christ. To be told by the
Council that Jews were not Christ- killers would be too abrupt a
turnabout for their faith. These were Catholicism's simple dogmatics. [Ed.
nonsense] But there were many bishops at the Council who, if far
less simple, were no less dogmatic. They felt Jewish pressure in Rome
and resented it. They thought Bea's enemies were proved right when
Council secrets turned up in American papers. "He wants to turn the
Church over to the Jews," the hatemongers said of the old Cardinal, and
some dogmatics in the Council thought the charge about right. "Don't
say the Jews had any part in this," one priest said, "or the whole
fight with the dogmatics will start over." Another, Father Felix
Morlion at the Pro Deo University, who heads the study group working
closely with the AJC, thought the promulgated text the best. "The one
before had more regard for the sensitiveness of the Jewish people, but
it did not produce the necessary clearness in the minds of Christians,"
he said. "In this sense, it was less effective even to the very cause
of the Jewish people."
Morlion knew just what the Jews did to get the declaration and why the
Catholics had settled its compromise. "We could have beaten the
dogmatics," he insisted. They could, indeed, but the cost would have
been a split in the Church.
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