From the Editor's Desk

Across the lines of faith

The description, part of an ongoing conversation I have enjoyed with the rabbi for some time now, was in a letter he sent me several years ago. It was one of the cleverest reductions of the complex relationship between Christians and Jews that I’d heard, one that held all the possibilities for ugliness even as two parties approached extensive conversation across the lines of faith.

“The fact is that we encounter each other in complicated ways,” said Rabbi Yehiel Poupko of the Jewish Federation/Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago. “There is no such thing as a simple encounter between a Jew and a professing Christian. When a Christian meets a Jew, a Christian is meeting someone who, on the one hand, gave to the Christian, from his or her very own flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, and then rejected him. And when a Jew encounters a Christian, a Jew is encountering someone born out of her very own womb, who then turned upon her mother.”

There were no false pretenses or disingenuous blurring of differences.

At the same time, the rabbi noted, he and I were able to engage in conversation beyond pleasantries because we existed in the era after Vatican II, the church’s reform council, had rebuked centuries of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish teachings, and in an American context in which religious bigotry was officially not tolerated. In other words, the fact that he and I could meet and discuss and disagree on matters both religious and political was the result of rather recent phenomena. It would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, 50 years ago.

Eugene Fisher, who retires in a few months as a result of the downsizing of the staff at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was singularly responsible for acting on the corrective teaching of that 1962-65 council and fashioning a Catholic-Jewish relationship that was revolutionary and remains distinctive in the world of interfaith cooperation.

Fisher’s retirement illustrates dramatically the shrinking nature of the bishops’ conference and the danger that intramural concerns and money problems could diminish the church’s presence in the wider world and damage its relationships with other religions.

John Allen’s story and revealing interview describes the void that Fisher’s leaving will create. We can only hope that someone among the new generation of bishops will find a passion for exploring and expanding the church’s relationship with Judaism. ( See story)

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It was a happy coincidence that I had just read Padraic O’Hare’s Spiritual Companions: Jews, Christians and Interreligious Relations as news came of Fisher’s imminent retirement.

O’Hare, director of the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations at Merrimack College, North Andover, Mass., writes in a compelling and compact way of the value in understanding that one’s spiritual journey can always be enriched by understanding how others in religious traditions different from one’s own live the spiritual life.

Don’t get the wrong idea -- this is not an invitation to undifferentiated syncretism. He does, after all, teach at a college that describes itself as in the Augustinian tradition. Quite to the contrary, he delivers a rich discussion of what it means to maintain borders yet share and benefit from the spiritual insights of others; of the difference between religion and spirituality; and of the difficulties involved in advancing toward understanding of the other even as the embers of ancient hatreds have not entirely cooled.

The best example for Catholics, of course, is the relationship with Jews, a relationship that took enormous leaps forward during the papacy of John Paul II. And yet -- and it seems as if these matters always have an “and yet” -- he takes on the abounding “ambiguity” and “paradox” that emanates from the Vatican, in no small measure because of John Paul. There are “backward steps” that mix with progress, beginning with the language (or lack of it) in the 1993 Catechism of the Catholic Church through the 1998 document on the Shoah and finally “the disconcerting rash of politics of canonization through the 1990s,” including several particularly disturbing to Jews.

An aside: O’Hare provides an amazingly concise and on-target description of the pre- and post-Vatican II eras. I know that such concerns are supposed to reside only in the psyches of my generation and that those who were not caught up in the excitement of the council view it as ancient history. But take a look at this analysis because he further makes the valid point -- and it goes for many areas beyond interfaith relations -- that the differences deeply affect the church’s approach to the wider world.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the U.S. church, at least in the posture of its national structure, is giving off the message that its interests are shrinking.

There are more than a few of what I might call ancillary benefits one might trip across in this slim but packed volume. (See the quick description of “theological liberalism,” a convincing effort to save the term’s reputation.)

In this era of meeting not only Jews but increasingly Muslims in complicated ways, we need more efforts to understand, not fewer. John Allen, in his online column this week, further describes the compelling need for such efforts. It was good to come across the distinguished case that O’Hare puts forth and to understand that a small Catholic institution has made a place for serious interreligious work.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, February 23, 2007