19 March 2023

IS JERUSALEM JEWISH?

So clergy and sacristans are busily fishing out rose vestments for 'Mothering Sunday'; although I'm unclear why today is so observed by those who do not follow either the Tridentine Rite or the 1662 Prayer Book. 

"Mothering Sunday" is still (thanks to commercial interests) still part of our culture, both religious and secular ... but not even this was sufficient to protect Mothering Sunday from the ruthless scissors of the post-Conciliar 'reformers'.

So the theme of the old Roman Mass is (Galatians 4) of our Mother the heavenly Jerusalem; but in the modern rite, the Roman Pontiff is not instructed to have a statio at the basilica of Holy Cross in Jerusalem, as so long a list of his predecessors were. 

This is the Roman church which the Empress Helena, my Colcestrian concivis, devised to be 'Jerusalem in Rome' and to which she imported cartloads of soil from Jerusalem together with significant relics of the Crucifixion. Sadly, moreover, choirs are now rarely required to sing all those lovely Siony texts, from the Introit onwards, which embellish the old propers. Anglican Common Worship, of course, slavishly, pathetically, follows the modern Roman Rite in abandoning the theme of the Heavenly Jerusalem, our Mother; the City whose politeuma we enjoy.

Of course, those old propers and S Paul's teaching in Galatians 4 raise in an acute form the very problem involved in the Good Friday prayers for the Jews. Has God's Covenant with the Jews been superseded? Do they need to take Christ on board to be saved, or are they, alone of all races and peoples, given a Christless way to salvation? It seems to me clear that S Paul teaches throughout Romans that there is no difference between Jew and Gentile either in the problem - sin - or in the solution - faith in Christ. 

I recall that the founder of the late twentieth century New Line on S Paul, Ed Sanders, concluded that, qua exegete of Paul, he was obliged to admit that in Paul's view Jews as well as Gentiles do need Christ (although qua liberal he did not think that Paul's view was now plausible).

So: 'cast out the bondwoman and her son'; Jews both need and are entitled to Christ. The Old Covenant was the type, the shadow, of the reality which is Christ. Not, of couse, that it would be particularly seemly somehow to to seem to single out Jews for mission in a Western society which largely consists of lapsed Christians: it would seem as if we were saying 'We've made a hash of hanging onto our own people so now we're going to try to get our hands on yours'. But the principle needs maintaining; all have sinned and all need Christ.

I have sometimes wondered if Pope Benedict had in his mind, when revising the EF Good Friday Prayer for the Jews, that his own ordaining bishop, Cardinal von Faulhaber, was a member of the group Amici Israel, which proposed a revision in the 1920s. ( Merry del Val may have been among those who scuppered this proposal.) But I am not convinced that, in its essence, the original Good Friday Bidding (Let us pray for the unbelieving Jews) was anti-semitic - on the contrary. 

There have always been Christian Jews and they are as fully privileged as any other Christians ... indeed ... more so. In the Good Friday prayer we were not disdainfully and in a racist way praying against the Jews as a race but for those members of that race who do not believe. The reason why we prayed for them specifically was simply their special place in God's dealings with Man and the steady New Testament witness, echoed in Pope Benedict's revised prayer, that the Eschaton will mean the combined redemption of Jew as well as Gentile. 

There is also, as S Paul reminds us in I Corinthians 10, a sharp reminder for all of us in the fact that the great majority of Jewry, for whom first the Euangelium was intended, failed to hear God's call. 

(By the way: in the reading from I Corinthians 10, which the Novus Ordo does allow once in every three years, verses 7-9 [mentioning Idolatry and Fornication {porneia} and their divine punishment] are characteristically expunged. The Authentic Use of the Roman Rite, as it was prior to what Arthur Roche calls its 'enrichment', contains the passage complete and unbowdlerised.)

I draw to your attention the book Index Lectionum A Comparative Table of Readings for the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite published in 2016 by Matthew P Hazell (and his wife Lucy; I reviewed it when it first came out. ISBN 978-1-5302-3072-3); if you want to take a serious interest in what the Bugnini junkies did after Vatican II, you really do need to have this book. At the flick of a wrist it reveals that the Novus Ordo Sunday Lectionary entirely dumped this old reading from Galatians (a pitifully bowdlerised version of it was allowed to survive on a Monday morning in Ordinary Time in alternate years).

I can just imagine Screwtape's glee: "The bad news, my dear Wormwood, is that the Christian leaders have decided to encourage their people to become more familiar with the pestilential Enemy propaganda known as The Bible. But all is not lost ... far from it! Our policy is now to work through the soi disant 'liturgical experts', whom we already have securely under our control. They will be easily persuaded to increase the amount of time reading the Bible in Church, while eviscerating the text of passages and ideas which we will convince them are 'difficult'. Thus any teaching which is not currently popular among a certain narrow portion of the intelligentsia in the 1960s will be carefully concealed. The next stage, which we have scheduled for the beginning of the Third Millennium, will be to use the dominant ideologues to promote the notion that the portions of Scripture which have been censored out of public use contain ideas which it is actually forbidden for Christians accept. We will then stir up particular, easily duped, constituencies (our planning department has the especially gullible German and English episcopates primarily in mind) to demand peremptorily the elimination of these ideas from any public prayers".

2 comments:

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

I have sometimes wondered if Pope Benedict had in his mind, when revising the EF Good Friday Prayer for the Jews, that his own ordaining bishop, Cardinal von Faulhaber, was a member of the group Amici Israel, which proposed a revision in the 1920s. ( Merry del Val may have been among those who scuppered this proposal.) But I am not convinced that, in its essence, the original Good Friday Bidding (Let us pray for the unbelieving Jews) was anti-semitic - on the contrary.

Yes, it was the excellent Merry del Val who guillotined the proposal and the group.

There have always been Christian Jews and they are as fully privileged as any other Christians ... indeed ... more so. In the Good Friday prayer we were not disdainfully and in a racist way praying against the Jews as a race but for those members of that race who do not believe. The reason why we prayed for them specifically was simply their special place in God's dealings with Man and the steady New Testament witness, echoed in Pope Benedict's revised prayer, that the Eschaton will mean the combined redemption of Jew as well as Gentile.

Dear Father. The covenant made with Abraham included with Jews and Gentiles because it was through Abraham that all would be blessed - Gal 3:8

But as to the Jews as a race, the Jews consider as other Jews children born of a Jewish woman.

Except.

A person born of a Jewish mother who converts to Catholicism.

As to changing prayers to satisfy the objection and complaints of those of other religions, what about the cursing of Christians in some Synagogues?

https://www.defendingthebride.com/bb/curse.html

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

What we can know is that the Jews will continue to err in thinking this or that man is the Messias. The most recent one I can think of is this Rabbi whom many expected to resurrect within days of his death.

America honors a Jew who hates Christians and celebrates his special day every year

Who said this and why was he given high honors by our Gov't?


We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have
a case of . . . a totally different species. . . . The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of[members] of all nations of the world . . . The difference of the inner quality [of the body] . . . is so great that the bodies would be considered completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews “their bodies are in vain”. . . . An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul.
Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.



"Starting with President Carter in 1978 the U.S. Congress and President have issued proclamations each year, declaring that .... birthday — usually a day in March or April that coincides with his recognized Hebrew Calendar birthdate of 11 Nissanbe observed as Education and Sharing Day in the United States. ..... would usually respond with a public address on the importance of education in modern society, and holding forth on the United States' special role in the world.

(Its April 1st thus year)

Honored by Congress

After ..... death, a bill was introduced in the US House of Rep sponsored by Congressman Charles Schumer and cosponsored by John Lewis, Newt Gingrich, and Jerry Lewis, as well as 220 other Congressmen—to posthumously bestow upon Schneerson the Congressional Gold Medal.

President Bill Clinton spoke these words at the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony:

The late ... eminence as a moral leader for our country was recognized by every president since Richard Nixon. For over two decades, the .. movement now has some 2000 institutions; educational, social, medical, all across the globe. We (the United States Government) recognize the profound role that .... had in the expansion of those institutions.

https://nationaltoday.com/education-sharing-day/

Did any Jewish group apologise to us Catholics for the evil teaching of this Rabbi?