Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (122 page)

12. Neudecker, "The Catholic Church and the Jewish People," in Latourelle,
Vatican II,
283.

13. Ibid.

14. Kung,
Reforming the Church Today,
65.

15. For a pointed analysis of the "structure of deceit" tied to the Church's position on birth control, see Wills,
Papal Sin,
78–9. The contemporary rejection of Church authority on this and other issues has been a definitive turn in the Catholic story. For example, here are the percentages by which American Catholics dissent from Church teaching: on birth control, 93%; divorce, 85%; abortion, 69%; homosexuality, 51%; women's ordination, 60%. See Wolfe, "Liberalism and Catholicism," 20.

16. "And all the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'" Matthew 27: 26.

17. Quoted by Neudecker, "The Catholic Church and the Jewish People," in Latourelle,
Vatican II,
288.

18. Ibid., 286.

19. Ibid., 282–83.

20. Quoted by O'Malley,
Trent and All That,
18.

21. Küng,
The Council, Reform, and Reunion,
9–10.

22. Quoted by Küng,
The Council, Reform, and Reunion,
162.

23. In this context, Hans Küng recalls Voltaire, but also Dante, who placed three popes in hell (Ibid., 46). Küng is the greatest contemporary advocate of Catholic reform, but he remains a fiercely committed Roman Catholic. The Vatican, under John Paul II, tried to silence him in 1979, as we saw, particularly because of his questions about papal infallibility, but Küng has refused to be silent. He has refused to leave the Church. His work remains an inspiration for me, which is why it is cited so often in this book. His case has special poignancy for Catholics for two reasons: First, his 1961 book
The Council, Reform, and Reunion,
cited here, gave expression to an entire generation's hope for Vatican II. He has suffered the consequences of the Church's failure to fulfill that hope. Second, his first conflict with the Catholic hierarchy came in the mid-1960s, when he dared to assert that the Roman Catholic Church was "co-responsible" with the Nazis for the Holocaust. See Carroll, "The Silence," 61.

24. That the dream of a Vatican III, in the spirit of John XXIII, inspires my kind is indicated by the fact that while I was editing this manuscript, I read the galleys of a memoir by John Dominic Crossan, who had so profoundly influenced my understanding of the historic Jesus and who had sparked reflections on my own Irish heritage. In his new book he writes, "I imagine something like this. There is a Third Vatican Council...[The Bishops] all implore God to take back the gift of infallibility and grant them instead the gift of accuracy."
A Long Way from Tipperary,
98.

55. Agenda for a New Reformation

1. Kung,
Reforming the Church Today,
160. A step toward such a lifting of the anathema was taken in the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification issued by the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican. This statement represented a mutual acknowledgment by the former antagonists that each side had its point.

2. Küng,
The Council, Reform, and Reunion,
74.

3. John 4:22.

56. Agenda Item 1: Anti-Judaism in the New Testament

1. Joyce Carol Oates, "The Calendar's New Clothes,"
New York Times,
December 30, 1999.

2. Luke 24:25.

3. John 1:11.

4. John 8:23, 40–44.

5. See Levine, "Teaching Troubling Texts," 1.

6. The phrase is Christopher Leighton's, quoted by O'Hare,
Enduring Covenent,
9.

7. See, for example, Fisher,
Seminary Education;
Cunningham,
Education for Shalom.

8. Stendahl,
Paul among Jews and Gentiles.
See also Stendahl,
Final Account,
1–7, 35–40.

9. Romans 11:1.

10. Luke 22:20.

11. Jeremiah 31:31–34. What the Revised Standard Version translates as "new covenant" carries the sense, in Hebrew, of "renewed."

12. Lohfink,
Covenant Never Revoked,
83. Paul van Buren, a Christian leader in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, approached the problem this way: "As for ourselves, the Gentile Church, I believe that we are the fruit of one of the many renewals of the one covenant. It turned out strangely, but then so have many other creative renewals of that covenant. This particular renewal led to a new entity called the Church, consisting of Gentiles mostly, who found in one Jew an opening to the knowledge and love of the God of the covenant, and a calling to serve that God in a Gentile way. It is a tragedy of major proportions that we failed for so long to see that this was the universal God's particular calling for us, alongside Israel's particular calling. If we are beginning to see that now, it is because Christians have begun in the last couple of decades finally to meet Jews and so discover a living covenant." Van Buren, "When Christians Meet Jews," in Fisher,
Visions of the Other,
65.

13. Tracy,
Analogical Imagination,
426.

14. Baum, introduction to Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide,
17–18.

15. Some scholars already routinely refer to "Hebrew Scriptures" and "Christian Scriptures" as a way of avoiding the Old Testament-New Testament dichotomy, but this division suggests that the Hebrew Scriptures are not part of what Christians revere. Another formulation, "First Testament" and "Second Testament," seems off too. "Apostolic Writings" is also used to define the specifically Christian texts.

16. In a session devoted to "troubling texts" at a meeting of the American Association of Religion in Boston, November 1999, 1 heard Professor Robert Goldenberg say, "Troubling texts are only truly troubling if the tradition is
not
troubled by them ... An ethical act of reading requires a reading as if you are the lew, the woman, the Canaanite. Then the glory of the texts is their troubling character."

17. Tracy,
On Naming the Present,
14.

18. David Hartman, "Judaism Encounters Christianity Anew," in Fisher,
Visions of the Other, 76–77, 79.

57. Agenda Item 2: The Church and Power

1. Quoted by Pelikan,
Jesus Through the Centuries,
108.

2. John Paul II, "Universal Prayer: Confession of Sins and Asking for Forgiveness," March 12, 2000,
http://jcrelations.com/stmnts/vatican3-oo.htm
.

3. Schussler Fiorenza and Tracy, "The Holocaust as Interruption," 86.

4. Schussler Fiorenza,
In Memory of Her,
xiv.

5. See Wills,
Papal Sin,
2.

6. Quoted by Eugene Kennedy, "A Dissenting Voice," 28.

7. Quoted by Kung,
Reforming the Church Today,
157.

8. Ibid., 156.

9. Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide,
245.

10. Tracy,
On Naming the Present,
14–15.

11. Hans Kung made this point in conversation with me. See Carroll, "The Silence," 60.

58. Agenda Item 3: A New Christology

1. Abraham Joshua Heschel,
The Insecurity of Freedom
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 119.

2. Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide,
246.

3. Tracy,
Dialogue with the Other,
98.

4. Genesis 1:27.

5. Elizabeth A. Johnson, "Jesus and Salvation,"
CTSA Proceedings
49 (1994), 5.

6. John 6:63.

7. Rahner,
Theological Investigations,
vol. 5, 120.

8. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "Universal Prayer: Confession of Sins and Asking for Forgiveness," March 12, 2000,
http://jcrelations.com/stmnts/vatican3-oo.htm
.

9. Thomas F. O'Meara, in
Encyclopedia of Catholicism,
1077.

10. Rahner,
Theological Investigations,
vol. 5, 116–17.

11. Numerous theologians have developed versions of this "anonymous Christianity," all seeking to protect the universalist claims for Jesus Christ. Raimon Panikkar, for example, speaks of "the Unknown Christ of Hinduism." For a discussion of the possibilities and limits of these approaches, see Dupuis,
Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.

12. Van Buren,
Theology of the Jewish Christian Reality,
pt. 3, 164–65.

13. Rahner,
Theological Investigations,
vol. 5, 116. I am indebted to Padraic O'Hare, who helped me appreciate Rahner's "enormous positive influence" on this question, despite—or perhaps because of—his commitment to the Catholic tradition. O'Hare, equally Catholic himself, has written: "Here in this radical Christocentrism, in a classic doctrinal understanding of salvation as victory, in the tradition of universalist Christian claims; here is religion as a source of brutality. It has been so in the past; it is so to an extent in the present. It could be so in the future. Universalist absolutism thrives on the diminishment of the other, on ignorance of the other."
Enduring Covenant,
36.

14. Quoted by John L. Allen, Jr., "Doubts about Dialogue: Encounter with Other Religions Runs Up Against the Vatican's Hard Doctrinal Realities,"
National Catholic Reporter,
August 27, 1999.

15. After a storm of protest greeted the Vatican's action, particularly from Balasuriya's fellow theologians, he was reinstated as a member of the Church, though he refused to recant his theological positions.

16.
http://www.Vatican.va/roman_curia/congreg...cfaith_doc_2000o8o6_dominus-iesus_en.html
.

17. Matthew 5:45.

18. Rahner,
Theological Investigations,
vol. 5, 171–72.

19. Rahner,
The Rahner Reader,
20.

20. Macquarrie,
Christian Theology,
183.

59.
Agenda Item 4: The Holiness of Democracy

1. Curiously enough, the wall was breached on November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Because of the overwhelming significance of the dismantling of the wall, that anniversary trumped the earlier one in the German, and European, memory. This is a prime example of supersessionism.

2. "Playwright-Dissident Vaclav Havel Assumes the Presidency of Czechoslovakia," in
Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History,
selected and introduced by William Safire (New York: Norton, 1992), 629, 631.

3. Monsignor Lorenzo Baldisseri presented his diplomatic credentials as papal nuncio to the junta in Port-au-Prince on March 30, 1992, six months after the overthrow of Aristide. No other nation followed suit, and eventually, after an American invasion in 1994, Aristide was restored to the presidency.

4. Kwitny,
Man of the Century,
467.

5. John Paul II, homily, St. Peter's Basilica, March 12, 2000.

6. John 18:37–38.

7. Lynch,
Christ and Apollo,
118.

8. David Tracy, quoted by Kennedy, "A Dissenting Voice," 28.

9. Bednar,
Faith as Imagination,
16f.

10. Tracy,
Analogical Imagination,
362.

11. Lynch,
Christ and Apollo,
136.

12. Tracy,
Analogical Imagination,
363.

13. Ibid., 252.

14. Quoted by O'Brien,
Renewal of American Catholicism,
106–7.

15. 1 Corinthians 13:12.

16. Ibid., 13:9.

17. 1 John 4:7–12.

18. Ibid., 3:12–13.

19. Spinoza, too, needs criticism. For an example of the offense Jews can take at his denigration of the Bible, see Heschel,
God in Search of Man,
322.

20. David Tracy, "Religious Values after the Holocaust: A Catholic View," in Peck,
Jews and Christians,
92.

60. Agenda Item 5: Repentance

1. James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
8.

2. Quoted by Sarah Hall, "Past as Prologue: Blair Faults Britain in Irish Potato Blight,"
New York Times.
June 3, 1997.

3. "Memory and Reconciliation," 4.1.

4. Ian Buruma, "War Guilt and the Difference Between Germany and Japan,"
New York Times,
December 29, 1998. Buruma is the author of
The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). In December 1999, the president of Germany, Johannes Rau, said, "I pay tribute to all those who were subjected to slave and forced labor under German rule and, in the name of the German people, beg forgiveness." But this was said at a private observance. A month later, at ceremonies dedicating the site for a Holocaust memorial near the Brandenburg Gate, Elie Wiesel urged the German parliament to "do it publicly. Ask the Jewish people to forgive Germany for what the Third Reich had done in Germany's name. Do it, and the significance of this day will acquire a higher level. Do it, for we desperately want to have hope for this new century." Quoted by Roger Cohen, "Wiesel Urges Germany to Ask Forgiveness,"
New York Times,
January 28, 2000.

5. Quoted by Ben Lynfield, "For Israelis, Papal Visit Struck a Deep Chord,"
National Catholic Reporter,
April 7, 2000.

6. Blumenthal, "Repentance and Forgiveness," 76.

7. Ibid., 81.

8. Quoted by John'T. Pawlikowski, O.S.M., "Christian Theological Concerns after the Holocaust," in Fisher,
Visions of the Other,
32.

9. As noted before, I attribute this observation to the columnist George Will,
Boston Globe,
May 8, 1998.

10. Boys, "The Cross," 22–23.

11. Van Buren,
Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality,
pt. 3, 165.

12.
Mystici Corporis Christi,
in Carlen,
Papal Encyclicals,
42.

13. Quoted by Cohn-Sherbok,
Crucified Jew,
233.

14. Rahner,
Theological Investigations,
vol. 5, 15–16. Rahner goes on to say, "It would be silly self-deceit and clerical pride, group-egoism and cult of personality as found in totalitarian systems—which does not become the Church as the congregation of Jesus, the meek and humble of Heart—if it were to deny all this, or tried to hush it up or to minimize it, or made out that this burden was merely the burden of the Church of previous ages which has now been taken from her."