One can’t help but both admire and pity Montse Alvarado – the new prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication – for the poisoned chalice she has accepted. As director of communications every word will be scrutinised – not only in the present, but also from the past. Recently a video clip emerged from a 2022 podcast for which she has been criticised for stating that it is “obviously wrong” to believe “that all Jews should become Christians”.

The history of the Church’s relationship with the Jews is, of course, long and troubled. It is all too easy to interpret some passages from the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles as laying the blame for Jesus’s death at the feet of the Jews, thus establishing a foundation for centuries of anti-Semitism. In those early days St Peter and St Paul butted heads over the “Judaising” controversy – the question not whether all Jews should become Christians, but whether all Christians should become Jews.

The historic anti-Semitism in Europe was fuelled by the Good Friday prayers for “the perfidious Jew – that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts, so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord”.

In 1959 Pope St John XXIII removed the offensive word “perfidious”, while Pope St Paul VI’s 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate formalised the new, softer tone. Now the Church recognised the unique bond that exists between the Catholic Church and the Jewish religion and that God’s covenant with them establishes irrevocable promises. It also rejected the concept of collective guilt and affirmed the shared hope in a Messiah.

In this context, the 1970 Novus Ordo refreshed the Good Friday prayer by emphasising God’s promises to Abraham and faithfulness to the covenant. Pope St John Paul II said the Jews are “our elder brothers in the faith of Abraham” and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI revised the Good Friday prayer further, focusing on the eschatological hope that Israel will be saved.

The Catechism (paras 839–840) echoes Nostra Aetate:

When she delves into her own mystery, the Church, the People of God in the New Covenant, discovers her link with the Jewish People, “the first to hear the Word of God”. The Jewish faith, unlike other non-Christian religions, is already a response to God’s revelation in the Old Covenant. To the Jews “belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ”, “for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable”.

All of this, of course, must be balanced with the uncompromising and exclusive words of Our Lord himself in John chapter 14 where he says: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” and “no one comes to the Father except through me”.

So is it “obviously wrong” to expect all Jews to become Christians, or did the new prefect of the Dicastery for Communication misspeak? To give her the benefit of the doubt, the quote was grabbed from an interview before she was appointed to her new high-profile post. Surely we can grant her the latitude to have spoken perhaps a tad too positively in her wish to embrace our “elder brothers in the faith of Abraham”?

What is obviously wrong is to imagine that somehow all Jews will actually become Christians. Perhaps Ms Alvarado was simply being realistic. They won’t, but should they?

When confronted with the puzzle and paradox of universalism and the destiny of non-Christian people who have faith in God and goodwill, I have always been encouraged by CS Lewis’s vision in the last Chronicle of Narnia.

You may remember that the Narnians are invaded by the perfidious Calormenes who worship the hideous demon Tash. At the climax of the story the warriors of both sides are thrust into the stable where the great lion Aslan awaits.

The good and noble Calormene youth Emeth (which, by the way, means “truth” in Hebrew) is thrown into the stable, and when he meets Aslan he worships him but confesses that he had been seeking Tash all his life. Aslan accepts him with the gracious words: “Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me… No service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”

So should all the Jews become Christians? In this life it may be something we pray for, and their unique status means they will find a welcome home in the Church, but if they do not accept the Lord Jesus as their Messiah here and now, it is a sure hope that all those with goodwill and faith in God will see him as the Way, the Truth and the Life and will recognise him as the Son of David and the Messiah they have always longed for.

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