Still Running Off at the Keyboard

ONE MORE TRY

Pope Benedict XVI is preparing to clarify the Vatican’s position on the controversial Good Friday Prayer for the Jews, a Jewish interfaith official said.

The Vatican will issue a letter within a week aimed at easing Jewish fears that the Catholic Church wants to convert them, said the chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, Rabbi David Rosen.

Rosen, who has seen a preliminary draft of the letter, said it will come from the pope via the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone....

“It has no bearing on Jewish-Catholic relations, and certainly in no way compromises the Church's total opposition to proselytizing," Rosen said.

Read all of it...

Maybe what's needed is a definition of proselytizing, because it seems to me that proselytizing is what interreligious dialogue is suppose to be about. Or so my fellow Catholics have argued when I've pointed out that interreligious dialogue is a break with the past when Catholics believed they were supposed to be missionaries.

We don't hear much about missionaries these days unless someone has their hand out. Why would a Catholic believe it is important to contribute to the missions if we are no longer missionaries?

But wait, this is only the Jews that we're talking about here. It's not the other religions that were formerly called "pagan", and now I suppose are called "separated brethren".

No, that isn't right either. "Separated brethren" are Christians but not Catholics, so the pagans must be called something else. But we still dialogue with them just like we dialogue with the Jews. It just doesn't mean the same thing since we aren't trying to convert the Jews but we are trying to convert the pagans, at least until they object to being proselytized, at which time I suppose we'll have to issue guarantees to the pagans that we just want to talk with them and we aren't trying to convert them.

Or something like that. Maybe it's not assurances against proselytizing that the world needs. Maybe it's a redefinition of the Gospel?

I guess if I were Jewish and if I knew the long history of Roman Catholic missionary efforts, and if I didn't trust popes, I might be upset about the Good Friday prayer as well, because the Catholic Church no longer seems to know what She is doing and some careful thought about all of the hair-splitting brings that out.

Let me re-headline this blog..."WHO'S ON FIRST ?"