Pontifex Maximus--The Great Bridgebuilder

On Sunday Pope Francis visited Rome’s historic central Synagogue following a precedent set by his two predecessors, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI to assure the Jewish community of Rome of his good wishes and to re-iterate the teachings of the Second Vatican Council regarding Catholic-Jewish relations.  Even  more important, however, is Francis’ repeated call, given once more during his visit to the Synagogue, for an end to religion-based violence.  The obvious allusion is to the so-called Islamic State and its program of slaughter of non-Muslims, but the problem is considerably deeper and more wide-spread.  

Coincidentally today begins the week of prayer for Christian Unity.  This practice goes back over a hundred years when then Episcopalian priest, Father Paul Wattson conceived the idea of an annual week of prayer for the restoration of unity among Christian denominations.  Father Wattson and his immediate associates were received into the Catholic Church within a year or two of his beginning the movement for this week of prayer, but the idea persisted both among Catholics and Protestants despite the aversion of the Catholic Church for “ecumenism.”  (Pius XI condemned the Ecumenical Movement in the 1928 Encyclical, Mortalium Animos.)  It was only under Popes John XXIII and Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council that this negative polity was reversed. 

There are still those quasi-Catholics who are opposed to Ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue.  (Ecumenism refers to the move to restore church unity among Christians; Inter-Religious Dialogue concerns the dialogue (in this case) between the Catholic Church and the non-Christian religions.)  Perhaps the most sensitive sticking-point between the Catholic Church and the Lefebvrist semi-schism is  not the liturgy but the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on Ecumenism and on Inter-Religious Dialogue. 

The danger in any sort of theological dialogue, whether ecumenical or inter-religious, is that faith will devolve into syncretism or indifferentism.  In our search for common ground we might settle for the least-common-denominator and settle rather than pursue an honest inquest for the Truth.  There is always a danger when we—individually or collectively—fall into the delusion that “I (or we) possess the fullness of the Truth.”   Truth is not something static—or rather, our appreciation of the Truth is not something static.  Our Christian faith tells us that God has revealed himself once and for all in Christ Jesus, but the history of our Christian faith shows us that we mature in our understanding and apprehension of that Truth over the centuries.  We are able to articulate a faith that would not be unknown to the Apostles but a faith far richer and deeper than they were able to express.  Future generations—if we do not destroy the planet and its inhabitants in the meantime—will be able to comprehend and articulate the Truth far better than we. 

Those who resist the guidance of the Holy Spirit over the Church as we forge into the future hold to the idea that the Church’s treasure house of Truth has all been catalogued and filed and there is nothing more at which we can marvel.  They also betray an astounding ignorance of the history of the Church and how doctrines and disciplines alike have continued to unfold and develop over the centuries.  What if the Fathers of the Church had never cracked open the scripture and help us articulate the Doctrines of the Trinity and of the Incarnation?  What if Saint Augustine had never written his treatises on the Eucharist or on the Church?   What if Saint Gelasius had never composed his Sacramentary?  Or if Saint Gregory had never written his Moralia?  Or what if the Desert Fathers and Mothers had never established Monasticism?  What if Saint Thomas had not taken the work of centuries and re-interpreted it according to Aristotelian/Scholastic Philosophy?  What if the Roman Rite had frozen in the second century?  What if Leo XIII had never initiated the Social Theology that has adapted the Church to the contemporary world?  What if Ignatius Loyola had never established a radically different form of religious life adapted to the Missions and to working undercover in Protestant Europe?  What if the Church had never founded the great universities of Europe in the 12^th and 13 centuries?  What if the Church had suppressed polyphony as a “novelty?”  What if the Roman Rite never abandoned Greek for Latin in the 3^rd century.  What if we had never permitted the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to develop in the Middle Ages?  What if we had never let the doctrine of Purgatory develop in the 11^th century?  What if Saint Thomas had never been able to talk about Transubstantiation?  We are a Church that continues to mine the vein of Truth ever more deeply.  Our faith is constant but it is not static.  As Cardinal Newman said: To live is to change and to change often is to live perfectly. 

Meanwhile over at the neo-trad blog Rorate Caeli, John Rao writes an incredibly stupid essay scoring Pope Francis as an “idolator of change.”  Change is threatening and the track of change that the Church has been on (albeit intermittently) since Leo XIII, is particularly threatening to the socio-economic-political establishment.  It is shaking the foundations way beyond levels of which we—or those leading us—are aware.  Even for its insensitivity towards the full participation of women, it is, at seismic levels, shaking the patriarchy found in the Church itself.  But this is where faith comes in.  Faith in not intellectual assent to a fixed body of doctrine but putting ourselves trustingly in the hands of God to do his will to the best of our ability to comprehend how he has revealed it to us.  There are those who long for the fleshpots of Egypt and the slavish security they provide but for those who are God’s chosen ones the uncertainty of the journey through the desert is what will bring us to the Promised Kingdom.  That is a lesson that the Holy Father’s visit to the synagogue keeps us mindful of. 

Before There Were Muslims To Hate the Jews, French Christians Did A Pretty Good Job Of It (cont)

French Knights killing Jews

during the First Crusade

We have been looking at the long history of anti-Semitism in France so as to better understand the current tensions that French Jews are experiencing after the murder of four Jewish victims in a Kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris three weeks ago.  The current outbreak of anti-Semitism is being blamed on Muslim immigrants to France while it is overlooked that the French have a long tradition of persecuting and harassing the Jews.  We have looked at the story up until the Crusades and the High Middle Age.  We will now pick up on that saga.    

The situation of the Jews in France only deteriorated as the Middle  Ages wore on.  All through the period of the Crusades various local bishops and feudal lords instituted programs of forced conversions or expulsion from their territories.  In Lent of 1181 King Philip Augustus had his soldiers round up the Jews in the royal domains while they were at synagogue and forced them to surrender their money and jewelry.  The following year he expelled all those who would not convert to Christianity, giving them three months notice during which they could sell their assets while he confiscated their homes, shops, mills, factories, and other properties.  Their synagogues were turned into churches.  It was not long, however, before the King realized the disastrous implications on the economy of the Kingdom that was caused by the expulsion of the Jews and in 1198 he recalled them, permitting them to settle in Paris and several larger cities in his domain where he licensed them to engage in moneylending and pawnbroking with the Crown receiving a hefty cut of the profits.  The Crown viewed the Jews as their property and it was illegal for a Jew to move from the royal domain to that of another feudal lord.  This restricted their freedom of movement and put them in a position somewhat akin to that of a serf though their work was economic rather than agricultural. 

Louis IX (Saint Louis, reigned 1226-1270) was a particularly pious man and while he seems to have no animosity towards the Jews he did want, in accord with Christian theology, to abolish usury (moneylending at interest).  This had disastrous implications for the Jewish community in as that moneylending at interest was their chief business.  In an effort to end the practice, the King reduced the all debts of Christians owed to Jewish moneylenders by one third but insisted that the remaining two thirds had to be paid to the Jews within a given time frame.  This would pretty much cut the profits from the money lending and return the original amount of the loan.  While requiring the debts to be paid promptly guaranteed a certain justice for the moneylenders, at the same time he handicapped them in their collection.  The moneylenders could not have their Christian debtors imprisoned for failure to pay.  He then ordered the confiscation of all property owed by those who still engaged in moneylending.  On a religious level—as differentiated from the economic questions—in 1243 Louis ordered the burning of 12,000 Talmudic manuscripts.  The King also enforced a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council that required all Jews to wear on their outer garments, both back and front, a circular badge that identified them as Jews.  

Philip the Fair (reigned 1285-1314) expelled the Jews from France in 1306, confiscating their properties, money, and the debts owed them by Christians.  The Jews were arrested on July 22^nd, the day following Tisha B’Av, the annual fast marking the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.  In prison they were told that they had to leave the kingdom before the end of August and they could take with them only the clothes they were wearing and 12 sous (about .6£, at the time not an inconsiderable amount, perhaps two months wages for a working man.)  Everything else was confiscated to the crown; debts owed them by borrowers were transferred to the crown.  Philip was a truly evil man whose concern was motivated by greed for the crown revenues.  The following year he would turn on the Knights Templar, executing their leaders and confiscating their vast wealth to the crown.

In 1315 Philip’s Successor, Louis X, recalled the Jews to France, guaranteeing them they could remain for a trial period of 12 years.  They were forbidden to engage in money lending and required to wear a distinctive armband identifying them as Jews. They could only resettle in those cities and towns where they had lived before and they were not permitted to discuss religion with Christians.  They had to work either at manufacturing or at trade; money lending was forbidden them.  The situation did not last the promised twelve years.  In 1322 many Jews were expelled again from France under Charles IV, being blamed for poisoning wells in the 1321 Leper scare—an alleged conspiracy of spreading leprosy through poisoning the drinking water.  Another expulsion of the Jews from France occurred in 1394 during the Reign of Charles VI.   

In the late 15^th century, much of the region of Provence—until that time not part of France but held by a number of independent feudatories (including the Pope and the King of Naples), passed to the French Crown and was incorporated into the kingdom of France.  In 1501 the Jews of Provence, ancient communities going back to Roman days, were given an order to covert or leave the Kingdom.  Many did convert to Christianity but others crossed the Pyrenees into Catalonia and Aragon.      

Jews began migrating back into France in the early sixteenth century and remained relatively unmolested; in fact unnoticed amid the turmoil and tragedies facing the House of Valois.  In 1615, however, Marie de Medici, regent for her young son, Louis XIII, decreed that Christians should not shelter Jews nor converse with them.  Louis’ son, Louis XIV, considered another expulsion of the Jews in 1648 but by that time more enlightened understanding was beginning to affect political decisions.  Moreover, the economic impact of the Jewish community was considerable to a French Crown that was on a wild spending spree.  As the Church began losing its influence with the spread of Enlightenment thought, religious toleration began to replace  the more rigid patterns of the medieval and counter-reformation periods.  Of course not all saw this as good; nor do all see religious toleration as good today.  We will see that anti-Semitism survived the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to take root in the Catholic Restoration of the 19^th century and still colors right-wing French Catholicism today.

When Religion Is Used For Evil

Meriam Yahya Ibrahim,
A Sudanese woman 
sentenced to death for 
converting to Christianity.
She was later released but
then re-arrested.

I was planning to move on to another topic today—possibly the accession of Elizabeth I and her religious policies as she reestablishes non-papal Anglicanism in England or perhaps the problem of the Tridentine Mass as a hangout for those who reject the Second Vatican Council.  But there were two riveting editorials in the New York Times this morning that I think, each in a very different way, carry on with the problem of the negative influence of religion in certain circumstances.  Now for the person who trips across this blog entry, I am not anti-religion: not by any means.  I am a practicing Roman Catholic.  But I do see how religion—including Catholicism—is often corrupted by some of its most devoted followers and becomes very easily a tool for immeasurable evil. 

I will give you the links to the articles in the Times but I am also going to reprint the articles for you to encourage you to read them for yourselves. 

The First Article is by Nicholas Kristoff and deals with the problem of the apostasy laws and people wishing to give up Islam for another faith. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/opinion/nicholas-kristof-religious-freedom-in-peril.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

Religious Freedom in Peril

Nicholas Kristoff

A Sudanese court in May sentences a Christian woman married to an American to be hanged, after first being lashed 100 times, after she refuses to renounce her Christian faith.

Muslim extremists in Iraq demand that Christians pay a tax or face crucifixion, according to the Iraqi government.

In Malaysia, courts ban some non-Muslims from using the word “Allah.”

In country after country, Islamic fundamentalists are measuring their own religious devotion by the degree to which they suppress or assault those they see as heretics, creating a human rights catastrophe as people are punished or murdered for their religious beliefs.

This is a sensitive area I’m wading into here, I realize. Islam-haters in America and the West seize upon incidents like these to denounce Islam as a malignant religion of violence, while politically correct liberals are reluctant to say anything for fear of feeding bigotry. Yet there is a real issue here of religious tolerance, affecting millions of people, and we should be able to discuss it.

 I’ve been thinking about this partly because of the recent murder of a friend, Rashid Rehman, a courageous human rights lawyer in Multan, Pakistan. Rashid, a Muslim, had agreed to defend a university lecturer who faced the death penalty after being falsely accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. This apparently made Rashid a target as well, for two men walked into his office and shot him dead.

No doubt the killers thought themselves pious Muslims. Yet such extremists do far more damage to the global reputation of Islam than all the world’s Islamophobes put together.

The paradox is that Islam historically was relatively tolerant. In 628, Muhammad issued a document of protection to the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery.

“No compulsion is to be on them,” he wrote. “If a female Christian is married to a Muslim, it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray.”

Anti-Semitism runs deep in some Muslim countries today, but, for most of history, Muslims were more tolerant of Jews than Christians were. As recently as the Dreyfus Affair in France more than a century ago, Muslims defended a Jew from the anti-Semitism of Christians.

Likewise, the most extreme modern case of religious persecution involved Europeans trying to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust. Since then, one of the worst religious massacres was the killing of Muslims by Christians at Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It’s also true that some of the bravest champions of religious freedom today are Muslim. Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, an Iranian lawyer, represented a Christian pastor pro bono, successfully defending him from charges of apostasy. But Dadkhah was then arrested himself and is now serving a nine-year prison sentence.

 Saudi Arabia may feud with Iran about almost everything else, but they are twins in religious repression. Saudis ban churches; it insults Islam to suggest it is so frail it cannot withstand an occasional church.

Particularly insidious in conservative Muslim countries is the idea that anyone born Muslim cannot become a Christian. That’s what happened in the case I mentioned in Sudan: The court considered the woman, Meriam Ibrahim, a Muslim even though she had been raised a Christian by her mother. The court sentenced her to die for apostasy; that was overturned, and she is now sheltering with her family in the United States Embassy in Sudan, trying to get permission to leave the country.

A Pew Research Center study found Muslims victims of religious repression in about as many countries as Christians. But some of the worst abuse actually takes place in Muslim-dominated countries. In Pakistan, for example, a brutal campaign has been underway against the Shiite minority. Likewise, Iran represses the peaceful Bahai, and similarly Pakistan and other countries brutally mistreat the Ahmadis, who see themselves as Muslims but are regarded as apostates. Pakistani Ahmadis can be arrested simply for saying, “peace be upon you.”

COAll this is a sad index of rising intolerance, for Pakistan’s first foreign minister was an Ahmadi; now that would be impossible.

I hesitated to write this column because religious repression is an awkward topic when it thrives in Muslim countries. Muslims from Gaza to Syria, Western Sahara to Myanmar, are already enduring plenty without also being scolded for intolerance. It’s also true that we in the West live in glass houses, and I don’t want to empower our own chauvinists or fuel Islamophobia.

Yet religious freedom is one of the most basic of human rights, and one in peril in much of the world. Some heroic Muslims, like my friend Rashid in Pakistan, have sacrificed their lives to protect religious freedom. Let’s follow their lead and speak up as well, for silence would be a perversion of politeness.

The second is the story of a Palestinian mother’s anxiety for the safety of her children in East Jerusalem and the discrimination against her and her family because of their Palestinian nationality.  While this may appear to be a political issue rather than a religious one, in fact it is not only the historic antagonism between Judaism and Islam that is causing the current outbreak of violence in Palestine/Israel but the conviction by Jewish extremists that the land of “Eretz Israel” belongs exclusively to the Jewish people by God’s gift and that they have a right to drive all others from the land.  In fact the Palestinian people were settled in the land at the time that Joshua led the ancient Israelites into the land approximately twelve centuries before “the Common Era,” and the struggles for possession of land were as much an issue in the times of the Judges and Kings as they are today. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/opinion/a-palestinian-mothers-fear-in-east-jerusalem.html?ref=opinion

A Palestinian Mother’s Fear in East Jerusalem

By RULA SALAMEHJULY 9, 2014

JERUSALEM — THERE was a huge crash, and I felt the ground shake under my family’s home. We heard the first explosion just as we had finished our iftar meal ending the daily Ramadan fast and settled down in front of the television. Out the window, I could see people running in the streets of Beit Hanina, my Palestinian neighborhood. Then came a second crash, and a third.

We heard that bomb shelters had been opened in West Jerusalem, so we assumed these were rockets from Gaza.

But the only bomb shelters near us are in Jewish settlements like Pisgat Ze’ev and Hagiva Hatzarfatit in occupied East Jerusalem, and we were not going to go there, especially after the events of the past weeks. Just days ago, in apparent retribution for the killing of three Israeli youths, Jewish extremists kidnapped, tortured and murdered Muhammad Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian boy one year younger than my own son, and Israeli authorities have arrested and beaten hundreds of Palestinians throughout East Jerusalem.

So we sat in our living room listening to the explosions — the sound of rockets being intercepted in the air — painfully aware that Gaza civilians would pay a heavy price for their leaders’ attempt to hit the Israeli seat of government.

I was born and raised in Beit Hanina, and I attended Bir Zeit University near Ramallah. When the first intifada started in 1987 and the Israeli military closed my university, I began working as a journalist, covering not only the stone-throwing demonstrations but also the lesser-known civil-resistance campaign to end the Israeli military occupation.

In 1989, I flew to a conference in London about education in the Palestinian territories; there I met the man who would become my husband. He was a Palestinian, too, and his family came from Nablus. But he was born and raised in Doha, Qatar, so he had never been allowed to visit the West Bank, like millions of other Palestinian refugees.

In 1994, both of our families traveled to Jordan and we celebrated our marriage in a country that was home to none of us. I moved to live with my husband in the Persian Gulf, and I became pregnant in 1996. After consulting with lawyers, I realized that I would need to go home to Jerusalem to deliver my son so that he would be issued a Jerusalem residency number, and not risk being banned from visiting the Palestinian territories, like his father.

I returned to Jerusalem alone. In a cruel twist of fate and policy, the Israeli authorities informed me that my son would not be given a Jerusalem ID as long as I remained married to his father. Because one of his parents was a Palestinian without a Jerusalem ID, my son was not entitled to inherit my residency status. After years of financially and emotionally draining legal struggle, my husband and I divorced — the strain ended not just our marriage but our relationship — and my son, Marwan, was given his identity card.

Today Marwan — whom we call Memo — is 17 years old. One week ago, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, who was 16 and who lived two minutes down the road, left his house to go to the mosque in the early morning after eating breakfast with his mother before starting the fast for Ramadan. As he was standing outside, he was grabbed by a group of Israelis in a white car, tortured and burned alive and then left in a nearby forest.

I have not been able to sleep since I heard this news. I constantly think of Memo, who often goes out with his friends to watch a football game or to pick up groceries, and I think of Muhammad’s mother, Suha, whose son went out one morning and never returned, and I think of the mothers whose sons have been arrested, beaten and humiliated by the Israeli police in the days since. Every mother I have spoken to in East Jerusalem is thinking of the same things. We are all terrified for our children’s safety.

My neighborhood of Beit Hanina borders the Israeli settlements Pisgat Ze’ev and Neve Yaakov. How can we continue to live like this? In September, when our children return to school, how will we let our sons and daughters walk by themselves in the mornings and evenings? How can a mother let her children out of the house, knowing now that in addition to the harassment and threats they have always faced from the Israeli police and authorities, they may be grabbed off the street and murdered?

No parent — Israeli or Palestinian, Jewish or Muslim — should have to live with such fear. Violence and repression will not make anyone’s children safer.

The situation didn’t begin with the kidnappings, and we have to pay attention to that fact. The world must hold the Israeli government accountable for its actions. For its military campaigns that have taken the lives of too many sons and mothers in Gaza over the past few days and in the West Bank over the past few weeks. For its blatant disregard for Palestinians living in East Jerusalem — the lack of bomb shelters is just one of many basic services that the Israeli authorities fail to provide to Palestinians living under their rule. And for the entire occupation, whose violence and cruelty is the dark context for so much of what has happened over the past few weeks.

Seventeen years ago I returned to Jerusalem so that my son would not be denied the right to live in the city of his ancestors. I never thought I would be so frightened for him to do so.

Rula Salameh is a journalist and outreach manager at Just Vision, an organization that documents the stories of Palestinians and Israelis who use nonviolence to end the occupation and conflict.

I found the following comment after Ms. Salamenh’s article particularly troubling.  It is from one Michael Danzinger. 

“It's hard to know where to start correcting all the selected truths in this op-ed.”  “Correcting all the selected truths…”—really, Mr. Danzinger.  Can’t you listen to a person’s story without feeling the need to “correct it.”

Rather than listen to Ms. Salamenh’s story and the anguish behind it, Mr. Danzinger and others who share his views are only anxious to discredit her anxiety for her family’s safety.  Historians will assure Mr. Danzinger that in the telling of any story by anyone on any side of any issue, that the truths are “selected.”  Even when the goal of the historian is to be as objective as possible and include as much data as is available to him or her, there will be facts yet unknown to the historian and the manner in which he arranges the facts and tells the story—the choice of words, the syntax, the language itself—will reflect his conscious or unconscious prejudices.

When religion increases human communication, when it opens us up in compassion to the one who is different from ourselves, when it makes us think and reflect critically and examine—and reexamine—our prejudices, it is a good thing but when it is used to uncritically support those in power over and against those who are not in power, when it is used to support unjust social, political, or economic structures, when it is used to divide people into factions rather than unite them in mutual respect, then it becomes evil.  The religious situation in Israel/Palestine is about as evil as it can get.