Pro Iudaeis

This concludes the subject raised in two previous posts.
It is not so very long to Good Friday; when we shall probably be reminded of the controversy last year about the Prayer for the Jews. Incidentally, nobody ever replied then to my request for information about whether SSPX did obey the Holy Father's imposition of a rewritten Collect.
It would be easy to enter a technical defence of those original references in the Orationes Sollemnes to Jewish perfidia; since the Jews were those to whom the Messiah was long promised and then finally sent, it seemed particularly terrible to the early Christian centuries that so very many of the Jewish people abandoned their Faith in their ancient Covenant God by refusing to accept his Messiah. But there can be no doubt that the phrase sounds very nasty nowadays and I believe it was completely right to eliminate any causes that any reasonable person might have for taking offence. Undoubtedly, the original phraseology bears a considerable risk of sounding as though it is suggesting that Judaica perfidia, taken as meaning dishonesty and perjury, is some sort of congenital failing of all those who are racially Jewish (despite the fact that it really means something like "those of the Jews who have remained unbelieving"). And that would be a nasty and improper slur. It is essential unconditionally to repudiate it.

But even after the Sovereign Pontiff had composed a new prayer, solidly based upon the theology of the last part in the Letter to the Romans of the Rabbi from Tarsus, this replacememt prayer was heavily criticised. I think we must be quite clear about why this was. The guilt of the Holocaust is felt to hang heavily over all of Western society and seems to be felt most strongly by the liberal elements in it. It has become an orthodoxy among these people and in the Interfaith Dialogue industry to raise one's hands in horror at any suggestion that the Christian Gospel might have a claim on people of Jewish origin*. And this instinctive modern orthodoxy has been given conceptual expression in the the assertion that their original covenant and promise remain valid for the Jews in such a way that the New Covenant is not for them. Readers of the posts leading up to this one will have read my explanation of why this is a flawed piece of logic. Or you could reread Romans, helped, perhaps, by E P Sanders' exegesis.

Frankly - and this is to put my head upon a very uncomfortable block - I do sometimes wonder for how many more generations people are to be disciplined with the whip of the Holocaust for any word or deed with which some admirers of Zionism choose to disagree.

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*In fact, I suspect that these people are really opposed to any idea that the Gospel has a claim on anybody; but the Jewish question is the most plausible area in which to establish their bridgehead of repudiating the universal explicit claim of Christ.
I would be grateful if readers would refrain from comments which are, or could be misrepresented as being, anti-semitic or anti-judaic; or as constituting 'Holocaust denial'.