Suppose a group of American Catholics were to organize a campaign targeting Jewish people for conversion to Christianity. Would such a campaign have the approval of the Catholic Church?
Definitely not, according to a new statement issued by a committee of the American Catholic bishops and the National Council of Synagogues. The Catholic side states that such organized efforts at conversion are “no longer theologically acceptable in the Catholic Church.”
This announcement by the two organizations in Washington makes religious history. Yet, despite its importance for two major faiths and perhaps a much larger community, the document has received surprisingly little public attention.
Had the commitment by Catholics not to aim at the conversion of Jews been made at any point before the middle of the last century, it would have astounded everyone. But the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 statements on the Jews scored such a breakthrough that this 2002 announcement may fail to have much impact.
The Vatican II document expressed attitudes toward the Jews that were widely regarded as revolutionary. Measured against the sorry history of Catholic persecution of Jews they certainly were. That history was filled with atrocities whereby, for example, Jews were forced, over and over, to accept conversion or to be exiled from their homeland or even put to death.
In particular the charge that they had killed Christ was hurled against Jews for centuries to justify attacks on them. Tales of Jewish plots to kill Christian children became part of religious folklore and further destroyed respectful relations between the two groups.
Cardinal William Keeler, the bishops’ moderator for Catholic-Jewish relations who co-chaired the discussions leading up to the announcement, explained the current relationship of the two communities. He spoke of an “essential compatibility, along with equally significant differences, between the Christian and Jewish understandings of God’s call to both our peoples to witness to the One God to the world in harmony.”
For his part, Rabbi Gilbert Rosenthal, Executive Director of the National Council of Synagogues, said: “Neither faith believes that we should missionize among the other in order to save souls via conversion.” Rather, he pointed to a new goal, namely “the healing of a sick world and the imperative to repair the damage we humans have caused to God’s creations.”
The new attitudes of the Catholic Church come from what the statement calls “a deepening Catholic appreciation of the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people, together with a recognition of a divinely-given mission to Jews to witness to God’s faithful love.”
If the new view of conversion efforts directed toward Jews were simply a way chosen by the Catholic Church to promote better feeling with the Jewish community, it would lack the punch of this announcement. But the church has gone beyond diplomacy by now branding such efforts as no longer “theologically acceptable.”
This means the church now recognizes Jews as having their own call from God, a call that has never been taken back. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has not changed his mind about having chosen the Jewish people. And they cannot be faulted if they do not accept Jesus as Messiah, the way Christians do.
Despite this striking new sign of progress in the relationship between the two faith communities, the two groups express concern about “the continuing ignorance and caricatures of one another that still prevail in many segments of the Catholic and Jewish communities.”
Another columnist writing about this agreement has made fun of Catholic leaders taking almost forty years after Vatican II to arrive at the no-conversion statement. She took this as yet another sign of the molasses-like pace of change in the church. And, the leaders who issued the new statement admit that it required them to meet “twice a year for more than two decades,” before they could produce it.
However, large-scale institutional change almost always proves difficult. To reverse deeply ingrained historical attitudes, however perverse, is a complicated business. That a committee of the American Catholic bishops has now officially renounced efforts to bring Jewish communities into the church and even regards such efforts as based on bad theology must be accounted momentous and a spiritual change to be thankful for.
Richard Griffin