We've heard from the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales that they would like to get rid of the Prayer for the Jews used in the Extraordinary Form Good Friday Liturgy. Archbishop Kevin McDonald (former Archbishop of Southwark), who is in charge of Catholic-Jewish relations, says this about it:
Lionel:
It should be noted at the outset that Archbishop Kevin Mcdonald and the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales do not affirm Vatican Council II (AG 7, LG 14) in agreement with the traditional (Council of Trent) interpretation of the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus(EENS).
2.They reject Feeneyism ( there are no exceptions to the dogma EENS) and support irrational Cushingism ( there are known exceptions to the dogma EENS.This includes the baptism of desire and blood and being saved in invincible ignorance).
3.So the CBCEW proclaim Jesus without the necessity of formal entry into the Catholic Church for salvation. It is Jesus without the Catholic Church.
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“The 1970 prayer which is now used throughout the Church is basically a prayer that the Jewish people would continue to grow in the love of God’s name and in faithfulness of his Covenant, a Covenant which – as St John Paul II made clear in 1980 – has not been revoked. By contrast the prayer produced in 2008 for use in the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy reverted to being a prayer for the conversion of Jews to Christianity.”
Lionel:
This prayer was composed for the conversion of the Jews to the Catholic Faith and not to Christianity in general. At the time it was composed the Church still affirmed the rigorist interpretation of the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus. There was no new theology, with the baptism of desire allegedly referring to explicit cases. So there were no exceptions to the old ecclesiology.All magisterial documents were interpreted according to Feeneyism since Cushingism did not exist in the Catholic Church at that time.
For instance, the Council of Trent mentions the 'the desire therof'.It does not state that this is a reference to a known case.Cushingites like Archbishop Kevin McDonald interpret 'the desire thereof' as referring to known cases. Then they infer that these personally known cases are explicit exceptions to the old ecclesiology.So the baptism of desire/implicit desire is considered an exception to the strict interpretation of the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus at the time of the Council of Trent. With an irrational inference Cushingism is created and then also projected on Trent's use of the phrae 'the desire thereof'.
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The 2008 prayer replaced one expressed in rather strong language, language used by St Paul in 2 Corinthians 11. Pope Benedict thought it best to express its central idea, and even its central image - of light overcoming darkness - in a slightly different way.
Pope Benedict's prayer reads as follows:
Let us also pray for the Jews: that our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Saviour of all men.
Lionel:
Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II were Cushingites.For them Fr. Leonard Feeney was wrong and Cardinal Cushing and the Holy Office 1949 were correct.They interpreted all Church documents with Cushingism( there are known exceptions to the dogma EENS).Pope Pius XII could not say that all Jews in Boston needed to formally convert into the Catholic Church for salvation.Neither could any of the popes later affirm the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus with the old ecclesiology.
Pope Benedict under pressure from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel has said that Jews do not need to convert in the present times.The newspapers in Italy, at that time, reported there was a threat of war from Israel.Cardinal T. Bertone the Secretary of State wrote to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel vaguely saying that we believe in Jesus. He referred to a front page article of Cardinal Kasper in the L'Osservatore Romano which stated Jews do not need convert.
With two rabbis sitting before him in his office at the Rome Vicariate , Cardinal Bagnasco officially stated via the Vicar Generals office, that Jews do not need to convert.
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The Novus Ordo Prayer is this:
Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant.
“The 1970 prayer which is now used throughout the Church is basically a prayer that the Jewish people would continue to grow in the love of God’s name and in faithfulness of his Covenant, a Covenant which – as St John Paul II made clear in 1980 – has not been revoked. By contrast the prayer produced in 2008 for use in the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy reverted to being a prayer for the conversion of Jews to Christianity.”
Lionel:
This prayer was composed for the conversion of the Jews to the Catholic Faith and not to Christianity in general. At the time it was composed the Church still affirmed the rigorist interpretation of the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus. There was no new theology, with the baptism of desire allegedly referring to explicit cases. So there were no exceptions to the old ecclesiology.All magisterial documents were interpreted according to Feeneyism since Cushingism did not exist in the Catholic Church at that time.
For instance, the Council of Trent mentions the 'the desire therof'.It does not state that this is a reference to a known case.Cushingites like Archbishop Kevin McDonald interpret 'the desire thereof' as referring to known cases. Then they infer that these personally known cases are explicit exceptions to the old ecclesiology.So the baptism of desire/implicit desire is considered an exception to the strict interpretation of the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus at the time of the Council of Trent. With an irrational inference Cushingism is created and then also projected on Trent's use of the phrae 'the desire thereof'.
____________________
The 2008 prayer replaced one expressed in rather strong language, language used by St Paul in 2 Corinthians 11. Pope Benedict thought it best to express its central idea, and even its central image - of light overcoming darkness - in a slightly different way.
Pope Benedict's prayer reads as follows:
Let us also pray for the Jews: that our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Saviour of all men.
Lionel:
Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II were Cushingites.For them Fr. Leonard Feeney was wrong and Cardinal Cushing and the Holy Office 1949 were correct.They interpreted all Church documents with Cushingism( there are known exceptions to the dogma EENS).Pope Pius XII could not say that all Jews in Boston needed to formally convert into the Catholic Church for salvation.Neither could any of the popes later affirm the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus with the old ecclesiology.
Pope Benedict under pressure from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel has said that Jews do not need to convert in the present times.The newspapers in Italy, at that time, reported there was a threat of war from Israel.Cardinal T. Bertone the Secretary of State wrote to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel vaguely saying that we believe in Jesus. He referred to a front page article of Cardinal Kasper in the L'Osservatore Romano which stated Jews do not need convert.
With two rabbis sitting before him in his office at the Rome Vicariate , Cardinal Bagnasco officially stated via the Vicar Generals office, that Jews do not need to convert.
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The Novus Ordo Prayer is this:
Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant.
According to Vatican Council II Catholics are 'the new people of God', they are the chosen people (Nostra Aetate 4). Jesus made a new and everlasting Covenant with his Supreme Sacrifice for all, including the Jews.
So what, exactly, is the suggestion? That people of Jewish extraction (or is it just Jews who practice their religion?) are saved by something other than Christ? But that can't be right, at least according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
846 Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.
Lionel:
The line ' they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.' comes from the objective error in the Letter of the Holy Office 1949.It was issued by Cardinal Marchetti Selvaggiani. Cardinal Marchetti in the second half of the Letter(1949) shows he assumed BOD, BOB and I.I referred to 1) explicit cases, personally known and 2) they excluded the baptism of water in the Catholic Church. There was no correction issued by Pope Pius XII.How could any human being see and know such a case in 1949? What is the name and surname of someone saved outside the Church in 1949?
Since it was assumed there were known cases of non Catholics saved in invincible ignorance and without the baptism of water, the distinction was made between knowing and not knowing.This is a new doctrine.It is irrational. Since we humans cannot judge who knows or does not know and is saved or will be saved.We cannot say that someone is in ignorance and so will be saved outside the Church.Ad Gentes 7 in Vatican Council II says ALL need faith and baptism. This was the dogmatic teaching.
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848 "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men."
It should be noted that these passages come immediately after the Catechism's treatment of the Jews, and of Muslims, so they'd not been forgotten. Everyone who is going to be saved, is going to be saved, whether through Baptism or through a 'way known only to God', by reference to Christ's blood which was shed for the whole of mankind.
Lionel:
Yes every one who is going to be saved is going to be saved through baptism in the Catholic Church.The baptism of water and Catholic Faith are needed for salvation. This is the teaching of Vatican Council II (AG 7, LG 14) and the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
BOD, BOB and I.I being personally unknown to us, are irrelevant to the dogma EENS and Vatican Council II's Ad Gentes 7 and Lumen Gentes 14.
So all in 2015 need to convert into the Catholic Church to avoid the fires of Hell. This includes Protestants and Orthodox Christians who do not have Catholic Faith (AG 7, LG 14).
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This is made explicit by Vatican II's Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, Nostra aetate, whose anniversary was the occasion for this discussion by the Bishops' Conference (section 4):
Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation. It is, therefore, the burden of the Church's preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God's all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows.
The idea that Christ did not die for the Jewish people is evidently absurd. (How about Matthew 15:24? 'I was not sent but to the sheep that are lost of the house of Israel'.) The idea that the Jews, before or after the Passion, received the grace of God in any other way than through the 'cross of Christ' would be a fundamental mistake.
Archbishop McDonald refers us to something Pope St John Paul II said in 1980. He must mean a very short speech (a speech- not a very heavyweight exercise of magisterial authority) to the Jewish community of Berlin on 17th November that year. It is not available in English on the Vatican website, but you can read it here. The relevant passage is this:
The first dimension of this dialogue, that is, the meeting between the people of God of the Old Covenant, never revoked by God [cf. Rom. 11:29], and that of the New Covenant, is at the same time a dialogue within our Church, that is to say, between the first and the second part of her Bible.
Lionel:
He was responding to a demand by the influential Jewish Anti Defamation League(ADL).The ADL says the old covenant with the Jews has not been revoked and insists that Catholics proclaim. This is also the position of the Reformed Judaism rabbis.Pope Francis supports them.
What does this reference to the Old Covenant mean? Pope St John Paul refers us to Romans 11:29. (These kinds of references are part of the official text, notwithstanding the square brackets; the same passage of St Paul is cited by Nostra aetate to the same effect.) St Paul tells us this:
For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance.
The context of this verse is all about how the Jews have (mostly) rejected Christ, and have therefore been 'disobedient', but remain 'dear' to God for the sake of the Patriarchs, and St Paul looks forward to their salvation. It is one of the passages which has led to the tradition that the Last Judegement won't happen until 'the conversion of the Jews': that is, it is something which will happen at the end of history.
So, to put all this together, St John Paul II, following Nostra aetate, makes reference to the fact that the Old Covenant still retains its importance, in the sense that God's promise to Israel (of the coming of the Redeemer) has not been taken back, as St Paul expressed it. Archbishop McDonald appears to suggest that there is a tension between this and the aspiration expressed in Pope Benedict's prayer that Jews come to believe in Christ. This is very puzzling, since St Paul himself spent a great deal of time proclaiming the Gospel to Jews, and experienced a great deal of anguish about those who did not accept his message.
In a nutshell: saying, with St Paul, that God does not revoke His promises, cannot contradict praying and working, like St Paul, for the Jews to accept Christ.
Of course this does not mean proselytism (which has become established as meaning encouraging conversions in a bad way, for example by coercion or bribery); it may not mean anything active at all. The Church's evangelisation (the good kind of encouraging conversion) is often carried out simply by the witness of a life of faith- as the old hymn says, By kindly words and virtuous life. The very fact that this kind of evangelisation does not target anyone in particular, means that Jews cannot be excluded from it. From time to time Jewish people do, in fact, come to the Faith: we can't tell them to go away.
The continuing relevance of the Old Covenant for Jews today, from a Catholic point of view, has become a very hot topic, and Pope Benedict himself had a good deal to say about this as a private theologian. That did not stop him, however, from praying that Jews might receive the grace of Christ. It is not as if the grace of Christ is something bad.
We need to be very careful with these old prayers. The original prayer was of great antiquity, and represented a theological perspective from the age of the Fathers of the Church, which has been accepted and honoured by the saints and doctors of every age of the Church since then.
Lionel:
The original prayer was part of the old ecclesiology which is rejected by the contemporary magisterium and the Jewish Left. The new ecclesiology, the new theology, is based on irrational Cushingism. It is based on an objective and factual error, an empirical error.To offer the Traditional Latin Mass today, unlike in the past, the priest has to affirm Cushingism.At the time of the original prayer theology was based on Feeneyism i.e there are no exceptions to all needing to formally enter the Church.Today the mandatum to teach theology, is given by the contemporary magisterium, only to those who reject Feeneyism and support a theology based on being able to see in the flesh, people in Heaven, who are there without the baptism of water in the Catholic Church.Then they have to infer that these 'ghosts' are a rejection of the old ecclesiology.
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Furthermore, the liturgy is a 'theological source': it doesn't have the same authority as Scripture, but like Scripture it does have authority.
Lionel:
The theology at the Novus Ordo and Traditional Latin Mass, is Cushingite. It is irrational, heretical and non traditional.The former auxiliary bishop of Rome,Bishop Matteo Zuppi offered the Traditional Latin Mass at the FSSP church Santissima Trinita in Pellegrino in Rome with the new ecclesiology, with Cushingism. While Fr.Marco Hausmann was briefly not allowed to offer the Traditional Latin Mass in Rome it seems, for members of the Militia Christi , since it was suspected he was affirming the old ecclesiology.
Fr. Hausmann was quoted on this blog saying there are no known exceptions to the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus.Cases of BOD, BOB and I.I are not physically visible to us, he agreed, when I spoke with him outside the church San Giuseppe a Capo le Case, Rome.I was present at the Traditional Latin Mass offered the next week at that church, when Fr. Hausmann was not there. A priest studying at the Gregorian University offered the Mass and I had a chance to speak with him too.
Earlier before his homily, when all was well Fr. Hausmann, announced that Bishop Matteo Zuppi would be coming to visit members of the Militia Christi.
That Sunday when Fr. Hausmann did not offer the TLM or was not allowed to offer the TLM, many traditionalists were present.They were there may be out of concern or to extend their support.Roberto de Mattei and his wife were there and so was Virginia Coda Nunziante who organises the March for Life.
Now Fr. Hausmann interprets Vatican Council II and the Letter of the Holy Office 1949 with Cushingism and so there is no tension.It is the old Mass with the new ecclesiology, the new theology.
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These old prayers can't simply be brushed aside. The theological content, if not all the language, of the old prayer is preserved in Pope Benedict's version.
Lionel:
No it is not ! Pope Benedict affirmed Cushingism when he approved two theological papers of the International Theological Commission.Dominus Iesus and Redemptoris Missio is Cushingite and had the approval of the then Cardinal Ratzinger.
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Its correspondence with documents like the Catechism of the Catholic Church is hardly a coincidence.
Lionel:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church and Vatican Council II are Cushingite. Since they mention BOD, BOB and I.I, which are irrelevant to the old ecclesiology and the dogma EENS.For Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI BOD,BOB and I.I were 1) objectively visible and 2) and excluded the baptism of water in the Catholic Church. So they were mentioned. They were made relevant in Dominus Iesus, Redemptoris Mission, the Balamand Declaration, the theological papers of the ITC etc.
Summorum Pontificum approved the old Mass - but, it was understood, with the new ecclesiology.
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The prayer's theological content is part of the Faith of the Church.
Lionel:
Only partially is it part of the Faith of the Church. It refers to the necessity of belief in Jesus for salvation but then so do the Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Pentecostals and others.It is pro-Luther.
It excludes the necessity of formal entry into the Catholic Church for salvation.This is a break with the Feeneyite saints Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Maximillian Kolbe...
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Incidentally, Nostra aetate is extremely short; I recommend anyone wanting to know what the fuss is about to read the text. All the versions of the Prayer for the Jews from Good Friday are handily given by the Wikipedia article.
Lionel:
No where does Nostra Aetate say that Jews in general do not need to convert into the Catholic Church for salvation.
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