✣ Vatican rejects mission to Jews
What happened? The Vatican launched a new document on Catholic-Jewish relations which says that Catholics are called to witness to their faith in Jesus before all people, including Jews, but that the Catholic Church “neither conducts nor supports” any institutional missionary initiative directed at Jews. Called The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable, it said evangelisation towards Jews was seen in a “different manner” to evangelisation directed at other non-Christians. What the media are saying Most media outlets took the line “Vatican says Catholics should not try to convert Jews”, with the Times of Israel reporting that it “also unequivocally stated that the Catholic Church should not actively seek to convert Jews to Christianity, and called for the Church to work to eliminate anti-Semitism”. There was a slightly different take on the liberal American website Slate: “The idea that salvation – eternal life in heaven – can be available to those who did not declare a belief in Jesus’s divinity during their lifetimes is one that Catholics are open to. How exactly does that work, given that the belief that Jesus is the Messiah has been the defining characteristic of the Catholic church's idea of salvation for millennia?” In the words of the document itself, it’s a mystery. What the vaticanisti are saying John Allen, writing at Crux, said the document introduced nothing new but still “showed how far we’ve come”. Once, he said, “to call Jewish/Catholic relations ‘strained’ would have been putting things mildly ... there was little formal theological exchange [and] feelings on both sides were dominated by the weight of history”. The blog Rorate Caeli pointed out that “To our knowledge, this document contains the most explicit rejection so far by the Vatican of any attempt to convert Jews to Catholicism, even as it affirms the ‘universal and therefore also exclusive mediation of salvation through Jesus Christ’. It also contains an extended attack on supersessionism [the idea that Christianity has replaced Judaism] which is explicitly named as a target of the document."
