“When push comes to shove…”

My Grandma Rose: Narrow-minded old lady? Or modern-day prophet?

After the Pogrom, c. 1910 (Maurycy Minkowski)

“When push comes to shove, they’ll call you Christ killer.”

That was Grandma Rose’s warning to me when I was a kid. Things might look okay right now, but when the going gets tough, they [the Gentiles] will come after us… again.

Repulsed by this dour prediction and frustrated by her narrow-mindedness, I’d tell Grandma Rose that the world wasn’t so dark anymore. People had changed. We’re wiser now because we’ve all learned the painful lessons of history.

“This is America, not eastern Europe,” my teenage self would tell her again and again. “Things are different now.”

Grandma wouldn’t argue with me. She’d just shake her head mournfully and sigh.

My grandmother was born in a Lithuanian shtetl in 1892. Mired in poverty and terrorized by pogroms, Jews in the Pale of Settlement faced a bleak future. So in 1908, at the age of 15, Rose immigrated to the United States. She worked hard. She learned English. She got married and raised two children during the depths of the Great Depression. And after World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, she was blessed to see her family grow and flourish during what must be considered a golden age for American Jews. (I’m here today because Grandma had the foresight, opportunity, and courage to leave home. Six million Jews who stayed in Europe were not as fortunate.)

On July 3, 1987, my grandmother died. She was 94 years old. By then I was almost 30, and although I had encountered a few instances of garden variety anti-Semitism, I never experienced anything nasty or violent. So I remained convinced that Grandma was wrong, and that Jews and Christians had entered a new era of cooperation, understanding, and mutual respect. One of the biggest reasons for my optimism: the profound changes promised by the Second Vatican Council.

Bishops of the world line the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica during the opening session of the Second Vatican Council — October 11, 1962. (CNS photo)

A huge revision to The Greatest Story Ever Told

Vatican II was an attempt in the 1960s by the Roman Catholic Church to examine its relationship with the modern world. Over the course of three years, the Council released new documents and declarations about a wide range of topics, including ecumenism, mission activity, and religious freedom.

In 1965, the Council also issued Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) which declared that Jews today “should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God” for the crucifixion of Jesus.

After almost 2,000 years, the Church had officially declared that the Jews were not and are not the killers of Christ. This was a tectonic shift within the Church, and a ray of hope for the Jewish people.

In the decades that followed, the news only got better. In 2015, Pope Francis and the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews said in a statement:

“The Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”

This, wrote James Carroll, was “a historic shift, with implications as much for politics as for religion.”

Humane new Church attitudes that were only hinted at before are being made explicit. The Catholic Church, under Pope Francis, is attempting to cure Western civilization of the illness that it caused.

In other words: Grandma Rose’s warning — “they’ll call you Christ killer” — wasn’t narrow-minded. Instead, it was an accurate distillation of Church doctrine prior to 1965. (I still find it sobering that Grandma was 73 years old when the Vatican finally decided that blaming Jews for the death of Christ was a bad idea.)

Painfully aware of the existential horrors which emanated from their very bad idea, the Church finally revised its worldview. With love, humility, and deep self-awareness, Vatican II transformed almost 2,000 years of Catholic doctrine virtually overnight.

Right?

Better doctrine, but an incoherent Story

It’s one thing to change a doctrine. We once taught A. But we now realize that’s wrong, so now we teach Z.

But being Catholic is about far more than believing a doctrine. It’s also about living a Story, which prior to Vatican II went something like this:

G*d made a covenant with the Jews, but his Chosen People were unfaithful. So G*d sent his Son to redeem both Israel and the entire world. The Church of St. Peter — aka the Roman Catholic Church — became the guardian of this New Covenant, which superseded the Old Covenant. After the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the Jews were no longer part of G*d’s grand plan. The Church, and the Church alone, held the universal key to Salvation.

This storyline was disastrous for the Jews, and ultimately paved the way to Auschwitz. (See: Constantine’s Sword, by James Carroll.) But that ancient narrative about a new covenant displacing the old one had a major strength: all the Story’s pieces fit together perfectly. It was coherent. The plot, the cast of characters (who are the good guys? who are the Baddies?), the dramatic arc, a vision of the Second Coming as history’s big finale — it all dovetailed beautifully as a story.

But after Vatican II, the Story didn’t make much sense anymore. Because if the Jews were not to blame for the death of Jesus, and if the Jews had their own unique role to play in history, independent of Rome, then the universal claims of the Church were not truly universal. The Jews stood out as an awkward exception. And with that exception came all sorts of narrative contradictions that weakened the entire Catholic edifice.

The Jews: In or Out?

In Jacob’s Younger Brother, Karma Ben-Johanan highlights the problems inherent in the well-intentioned declarations in Nostra Aetate:

Updating the Catholic language about the Jews was an obvious necessity in view of the widespread embarrassment over the Holocaust. However, it was not easy for the institutional church to turn its back on ancient theological traditions. The so-called Jewish document (Decretum de Iudaeis) quickly turned out to be one of the most controversial issues in Vatican II. …

The major problem the church coped with in this context was the deicide teaching, which held the Jews collectively responsible for the crucifixion. …

[The] deicide teaching was central to replacement theology, or supersessionism, according to which the divine election of Israel was transferred from Israel “of the flesh” to the Christians, the gentiles who, in accepting the belief in Jesus Christ, had become Israel “of the spirit”—superseding the children of Abraham. Replacement theology was fundamental to the church’s self-perception and its reading of Scripture. …

The denial of supersessionism required a conception of the ongoing election of the Jewish people. This in turn challenged the church’s view of itself as the chosen people and called for a reformulation of the relationship between it and the Jewish people, one that would clarify its priority—if any—over the Jews and whether Jews need the church to be saved (now or in the end of time). In other words, the church was also called upon to examine the implications of changing its relation to the Jews for its claim to universal mediation of salvation. …

It was no longer possible to see the suffering of the Jews and their exile as a punishment and as evidence of Christianity’s victory. To what, then, does their persistent survival throughout their turbulent history (including the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel) testify?

Finally, there was the eschatological question. If the Jews did not murder Christ, were not punished or rejected by God until the end of history, and were not replaced by the church, does this imply that they, alone of all other peoples, do not need the church to achieve salvation? Where do the Jews stand in relation to the church’s universal vision, which is at the heart of its self-perception as God’s chosen people? These questions were waiting for postconciliar theologians to grapple with.

Spoiler alert: Postconciliar theologians have not adequately answered those questions. They haven’t come up with a plausible Story that gives Jews room to be Jews while maintaining the Church’s universal claims. And without a coherent Story to tell about themselves and their Church, what are confused Catholics supposed to do?

Some go searching for a usable past, with or without Papal approval:

The New York Times, November 15, 2022

From this article in the NYT:

… The traditional Latin Mass, also referred to as the “extraordinary form,” was celebrated for centuries until the transformations of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which were intended in part to make the rite more accessible. After the Council, Mass could be celebrated in any language, contemporary music entered many parishes and priests turned to face people in the pews.

But the traditional Latin Mass, with all its formality and mystery, never fully disappeared. Though it represents a fraction of Masses performed at the 17,000 Catholic parishes in the United States, it is thriving. …

This growth is happening as Pope Francis has cracked down, issuing strict new limits on the rite last year. His immediate predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had widened access to the old Mass, but Francis has characterized it as a source of division in the church and said that it is too often associated with a broader rejection of the aims of the Second Vatican Council.

Worth repeating: Pope Francis has said that “[the Latin Mass] is too often associated with a broader rejection of the aims of the Second Vatican Council.”

Chief among those aims: to stop the Jew hatred, the pogroms, and the angry mobs shouting “Christ killers!”

As Catholics yearn for a meaningful liturgy and a coherent Story that will resolve the problems introduced by Vatican II, will the promises of Nostra Aetate still matter? Or will they be cast aside? Does the liberal leadership of Pope Francis represent the future of the Church? Or will conservatives (like the recently deceased Pope Benedict) eventually reclaim the Papacy and return the Church to its pre-Vatican II consensus?

Most of all: Will the centuries-old shriek of “Christ killer” make a comeback anytime soon?

I hope and pray that it won’t. But I now realize that Grandma Rose’s warning might possibly be prophetic.