xx Preface
Jews; they saw no contradiction between on the one hand condemning the talmud
for blasphemy and on the other insisting on protection for Jews, believing both
activities to be part of their duty as spiritual heads of christian society.
during John Paul ii’s pontificate, committees such as the bishops’ committee
for ecumenical and interreligious affairs of the United states council of catholic
bishops sought further to clarify the church’s teaching on Jews. and following the
teachings of st Paul, in a number of encyclicals and less formal statements, John
Paul emphasized that Jews are the people of the old covenant which has not and
never will be revoked by God. addressing delegates of episcopal conferences and
other experts who met in Rome to study relations between the church and Judaism
in March 1982, he emphasized that:
... the permanence of israel is accompanied by a continuous spiritual fecundity, in the
rabbinical period, in the Middle ages, and in modern times...
in particular he made statements which revised the church’s attitude to rabbinical
Judaism. addressing a delegation of the american Jewish congress in Rome in
May 2003, he again stressed that God’s ‘word’ travels along two independent
paths:
The word is given to our Jewish brothers and sisters especially in the torah. to
christians this word finds fulfilment in Jesus christ.and a statement of 12 august 2002 by the bishops’ committee for ecumenical
and interreligious affairs of the United states council of catholic bishops entitled
‘Reflections on covenant and Mission’ affirmed:
The church must bear witness in the world to the Good news of christ (the Gospel)
so as to prepare the world for the fullness of the kingdom of God. However, this evan-
gelizing task no longer includes the wish to absorb the Jewish faith into christianity
and so end the distinctive witness of Jews to God in human history. Thus, while the
catholic church regards the saving act of christ as central to the process of human
salvation for all, it also acknowledges that Jews already dwell in a saving covenant with
God... The catholic church must always evangelize and will always witness to its
faith in the presence of God’s kingdom in Jesus christ to Jews and to all other people.
in so doing, the catholic church respects fully the principles of religious freedom
and freedom of conscience, so that sincere individual converts from any tradition of
people, including the Jewish people, will be welcomed and accepted.‘Reflections on covenant and Mission’ cited cardinal walter Kasper, one of the
foremost more recent promoters of Jewish-catholic relations, who clarified further
the church’s position in stating that ‘the church believes that Judaism... is salvific
for them (the Jews), because God is faithful to his promises’ and that ‘the catholic
church... acknowledges that Jews already dwell in a saving covenant with God’.
all this has signalled a major development in the church’s understanding of the
relationship between christians and Jews.
so John Paul ii’s statements were not so far from the ancient Pauline–augustinian
idea which, as we shall see, remained dominant throughout the papal pronounce-
ments of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries: Jews should not be converted