NEW 'GOOD FRIDAY'
UMBRAGE FROM THE JEWS
The last thing anyone expected yesterday, Good Friday, was that the Jews - at least, their usual outspoken, hypersensitive and media-savvy representatives - would find cause for new umbrage at the Church and, of course, the Pope. All the more surprising because not one of them had earlier brought up the Good Friday prayer for the Jews on the one day of the year when the Catholic Church uses it.
But then the preacher of the Pontifical Household, Capuchin friar Raniero Cantalamessa, ended his Good Friday homily at St. Peter's Basilica yesterday by quoting a letter from a Jewish friend of his.
I recently received a letter from a Jewish friend, and with his permission, I will share part of it. He wrote: "I have been following with distaste the violent and concentric attacks against the Church, the Pope and all the faithful, from the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passage from personal responsibility and culpability to make it collective, remind me of the most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.
Therefore, I wish to express to you personally, to the Pope and the entire Church my personal solidarity as a jew if dialog, and of all those in the Jewish world (and there are many) who share these sentiments of brotherhood.
Our Passover and your Easter doubtless have manY differences, but both are observed in the messianic hope that surely unites us in the love of our common Father. Therefore I wish you and all Catholics a happy Easter.
Immediately, Cantalamessa's statement received the full Regensburg treatment from the English-speaking media, who almost unanimously attributed the Jewish friend's statement to Cantalamessa himself. Just as they had wrongheadedly attributed Manuel II Paleologue's anti-Mohammed statement to Benedict XVI.
But to me, the most surprising reaction was from
the now-familiar array of prickly Jewish voices who are protesting the comparison of the anti-Christian hostility to anti-Semitism.
That is like saying that hostility to Christianity is not that big a deal compared to hostility to the Jews - and here they play the predictable Holocaust card:
You can't compare them because anti-Christian persecution has not resulted in the killing of six million.
Hatred is hatred, no matter who it is directed against. And the man burned alive in Pakistan recently because he is Christian and the Nigerian villagers hacked to death by rival Muslim tribes are just as worthy to be mourned as the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Hitler's crime against the Jews does not give them exclusive rights to outrage - or suffering.
Moreover, the protests all ascribe the comment to Fr. Cantalamessa rather than to his Jewish friend who wrote it and allowed him to quote it. On the most sorrowful day of the Christian year, in the heart of Christendom's most important basilica, surely no one can accuse the good friar of making up the letter!
I won't even get into the predictable MSM projection of
Fr. Cantalamessa's friend's words onto the Pope simply because the words 'were said in his presence" (and if he had not been there, they would ascribe it to him anyway because Cantalamessa is the preacher of the Pontifical Household).
The Vatican spokesman Fr. Lombardi was forced to release a statement saying on Vatican Radio:
To compare the attacks on the Pope over the pedophile scandal to anti-Semitism is not the line followed by the Holy See. Fr. Cantalamessa was simply conveying the solidarity with the Pope expressed by a Jewish friend in the light of the latter's personal experience of the pain that has been suffered by his people. However, it is a quotation that can lead to misunderstandings.
I personally think Fr. Lombardi's statement was too defensive - in the sense that the orchestrated and concerted attacks against the Church and the Pope
are expressions of vicious anti-Christianity.
Isn't portraying the Church as nothing more than a pedophile brothel run by conniving lying prelates, as the media do now, far worse than the age-old mistrust of the Jews in Europe as power-hungry and corrupt financial manipulators????
And if the secular ideology so hotly promoted by the MSM has not yet killed six million Christians - give them a little more time with their unbridled abortions and eventual euthanasia, and they may soon have as many victims!
P.S. It will be argued that Fr. Cantalamessa should have known he would provoke a reaction - just as they said of the Pope at Regensburg - and that perhaps he should have resisted the temptation, no matter how apropos the message was. But the good father is no impetuous and imprudent young priest wanting to call attention to himself, so I trust he made a considered judgment in deciding to use the statement. Much the same way Benedict XVI did in Regensburg.
P.P.S. A brief interview with the Chief Rabbi of Rome about this new contretemps is surprisingly not as acerbic and indignant as he habitually is, and is worth translating:
Rabbi Di Segni:
'Improper to say such things
on Good Friday"
Interview by GIACOMO GALEAZZI
Translated from
April 3, 2010
VATICAN CITY - "It is an inappropriate comparison and in bad taste".
The comparison made by the preacher of the Pontifical Household [What's wrong with you, Galeazzi? You're Italian so you have no excuse! Cantalamessa was quoting a Jewish friend - it wasn't his comparison!] between the attacks against the Church for the sexual abuses committed by some priests, to anti-Semite persecution has stunned and pained the chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccarddo Di Segni who last January defied the incomprehension of some in the Jewish world to welcome Benedict XVI to the Synagogue of Rome, after burning controversy over the beatification process under way for Pius XII, the Good Friday prayer for
the conversion of the Jews ['for the Jews', not for their conversion, not here and now], and the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson.
"It is repugnant, obscene and above all, offensive to the victims of abuse as well as to the Holocaust victims," said the leader of the German Jews, Stephan Kramer
[who has a record of even more insolent and unreaonable Pavlov-dog reflexes than any of the Italian Jews].
"I have not seen St. Peter's burn nor have there been eruptions of violence against priests. The Vatican is trying to transform persecutors into victims".
[AAAARRRRRGGHHHHHHHH!!! None of the kneejerk jerks I have read today appear to have looked at the statement read by Cantalamessa from his friend's letter, which said, very carefully: The use of stereotypes, the passage from personal responsibility and culpability to make it collective, remind me of the most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism."
Nowhere does the letter-writer equate the attacks against the Church and the Pope to the physical persecution of Jews, much less the Holocaust! He singles out the two characteristics of the curent attacks against the Chursh that remind him of anti-Semitism. Can anyone deny that those are characteristic of the current attacks? Which I do not hesitate to call anti-Christian, and which, as I pointed out earlier, is far worse than the underlying European mistrust of the Jews that saw its worst expression in Nazism (who amplified that mistrust into a most contemptible racial denigration).]
American rabbi Gary Greenebaum, head of the American Jewish Committee, deplored 'the unfortunate use of such language' because " collective violence against the Jews resulted in the deaths of six million persons, whereas the collective violence that Fr. Cantalamessa refers to
has not led to any killings or destruction".
[Not in physical or material terms, so far, but in terms of defamation and character assasination of a Pope no less, the current campaign is of an order of moral violence as vile as the defamatory campaigns the Nazis used against the Jews!]
Rabbi Di Segni, were you expecting this new storm?
What happened at St. Peter's was a comparison that was out of place. It is a descent in style that is even more obvious if you consider that no one in the Jewish community has so far said anything about the sexual abuses committed on minors by priests and religious.
Yet even before Fr. Cantalamessa's homily, there were already rumblings of attack against the Church by the Jewish lobby. Also, some Catholic circles have claimed that the Italian press is controlled by the Jews. It doesn't pay to respond to such absurdities.
What does this have to do with the new prayer for the conversion of Jews that Benedict XVI has inserted into the Missal? [Well shame on you, Galeazzi, to ask a question sa confused and misleading as that when you are a Vaticanista! First, look at the 'new prayer' again and tell me where it is a prayer for conversion - as if the Pope and Cardinal Kasper have not already explained that enough; 2) Benedict XVI did not 'insert' the prayer - it has been there since the 16th century; he revised it to use the language of Paul in the Letter to the Romans, which was always acceptable to Jews because it clearly has an eschatologic sense; and 3) the new prayer updates specifically the 1962 version of the traditional Roman Missal approved by John XXIII.]
Father Cantalamessa's improper words
[THEY ARE NOT HIS WORDS!!!!] were not said on any which day, but on Good Friday - which is the darkest day in the history of Jewish-Christian relations. The prayer for our conversion remains unresolved - it is a problem that has merely been suspended because of a political truce. It also saddens us to listen to a prayer in Latin to bring light into our hearts, using the now-dead language of that empire which twice destroyed Jerusalem. Compounded by an error even.
What error?
Fr. Cantalamessa said that this year, by a 'rare coincidence', the Christian Easter falls on the same week as the Jewish Passover. When, in fact, even temporally, the Christian Easter derives from thew Jewish passover, so it is not at all unusual that the times coincide.
[Yes, but Passover week and Holy Week do not always coincide because Jewish reckoning is by the lunar calendar.]
Nonetheless, Cantalamessa is an admirable orator and a prolific writer
[who is certainly not ignorant of the relationship between the Jewish Passover and Easter!]
There is no reason to make a case against him for the words he said. As far as I am concerned, it/s part of the normal turbulences in the relationship between the Catholic Church and Judaism.
Abuses by the clergy against children are a problem of the Catholic Church, and we will not intervene nor make unlikely comparisons.
We know full well that no one will ever refer back again to what Fr. Cantalamessa actually read as a statement from his Jewish friend. The formula now established is: "Cantalamessa compared the attacks against the Pope and the Church for sexual abuses by priests to the anti-Semite persecution that led to the Holocaust". And that's the myth that will live on in the tainted, corrupted and perverted annals of the media.
We are borne along, as on an unending conveyor belt to hell, from one careless, thoughtless (but just as often deliberate) error by the media to another!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/04/2010 00:54]