CATHOLICS LOOK AT JEWS:

...These two documents stand as the most important and distinctive contribution made by the American church to the Council and hence American Catholics have a special mandate to protect the thrust of both documents...

...Their attitudes towards Jews and Judaism must be confronted head-on if any real progress is to be achieved...

...The Louvain study shows that there were no wholly positive passages about the Pharisees in the textbook materials...

...These include: (1) the reluctance to face the moral implications of the murder of 6,000,000 Jews by Hitler...

...While she is aware that the deicide charge has largely disappeared from mainline Catholic teaching materials, in her eyes it would be foolish to assume the issue has been disposed of entirely...

...When the issue surfaced a few years back, particularly in connection with The Deputy, the overwhelming response of the Catholic community was to bury rather than to probe...

...But in spite of the probable pain, face it we must...

...Yet, as Mrs...

...This was one of the three major sources of prejudice with respect to Jews that emerged from the St...

...Louis University (reported in my recent volume Cate-chetics and Prejudice...

...It places the question of education in the forefront of the church's concern...

...Bishop has stressed in this volume that Catholics learn something about how and why Israel has become central to the self-identity of Jews today...

...Bishop, "pejorative images still prevail widely, particularly in accounts of the Passion...

...The Roman research team detected a tendency in the instructional materials to select passages from the New Testament that lent themselves to an anti-Jewish interpretation while omitting or glossing over sections more positive in tone...

...The Pro Deo researchers, according to Mrs...

...Bishop bear strong resemblance to the portrait of Jews and Judaism that emerges from the St...

...I fully concur...

...I grant there is a difficulty in scientifically assessing the direct connection between such a stage production/ film and the growth of concrete anti-Semitic attitudes among young people...

...Changing textbooks alone is no automatic guarantee that new attitudes will filter down to the student level since there is much less reliance today on textbooks in teaching religion...

...Bishop concludes How Catholics Look at Jews with a general evaluation of the findings and the issues that still await confrontation by the Christian churches...

...The textbook studies can greatly assist individual teachers in this difficult process of personal soul-searching...

...The distorted image of the Pharisees continues to remain one of the most devastating stereotypes of Judaism in our teaching materials, one that urgently cries out for correction...

...The Passion story (apart from its later theological interpretations) should in reality serve as a focal point of unity between Jews and Christians, not as a source of division and separation...

...As we move towards the tenth anniversary of these two documents and the two hundreth anniversary of our nation, a serious examination of both the St...

...We may still call Jesus the Messiah but we are going to have to radically reshape our definition of this term...

...the Jews of Jesus' time are held collectively responsible for the condemnation and death of Jesus...

...Bishop, found that references to Jews in Italian teaching materials were twice as frequent as the mention of Protestants, with four out of five descriptions of Jews and Judaism falling into the negative column...

...But one must admit at the least that the potential is ripe for anti-Semitic attitudes and that our children were being fed a highly distorted picture of Jesus' relationship to the Jewish people of his time...

...While acknowledging significant progress in this area, the statement recognizes that special attention still needs to be given to catechisms and religion textbooks, history books and the mass media...

...owe their origins to the Pharisaic revolution within Second Temple Judaism...

...A complicating factor in dealing with contemporary anti-Semitism according to the Louvain research team is that in an increasingly secular society anti-Semitism has become independent of the religious factor...

...The neglect of the Holocaust by Catholics, both the traditional and the liberal, exposes one of the basic gaps that exists in the current Jewish-Catholic dialogue...

...The Spanish texts provided even a higher visibility for Jews as compared with Protestants, but the negative references were only slightly more frequent than those judged positive in outlook...

...Humble acknowledgement that our past viewpoint was shortsighted is the imperative of the hour for Catholicism...

...Yet denial of equal rights to Jews on racial or social grounds may be legitimated by religious sanctions...

...Bishop's comments on the neglect of the Holocaust in Christian education, I am certain she would join me in repeating the comment of Franklin Littell who has said that from one perspective the Holocaust is something that happened to Christians rather than to the Jews...

...We must recognize that the more traditional accounts of responsibility for the death of Jesus have not totally vanished from popular culture and piety despite the textbook changes...

...It is now known that a great deal of Jesus' teaching was in the best Pharisaic tradition...

...With respect to Mrs...

...Yet on this score we have hardly progressed at all since the St...

...The personal attitudes and backgrounds of the teacher have become pivotal...

...As the Catholic philosopher Friedrich Heer has said in his book God's First Love, our failure to confront the Holocaust is symptomatic of how Catholicism has confronted all other evils, especially war and the potential of a nuclear holocaust...

...Nonetheless the Louvain researchers found considerable improvement in the examined texts if they are compared with those analyzed by Professor Paul Demann in his classic 1952 study...

...Bishop notes, by now more than enough research has been done on the Pharisees to refute the fanciful accusations forever raised against them and to correct the notion of total opposition between them and Jesus...

...However we may eventually come to explain the uniqueness of the Christ Event (something we must maintain if we are to avoid emasculating Christianity), we can no longer simply say that the Jewish notion of the Messianic age, far more important to Judaism than the idea of a personal Messiah, was realized in the Death-Resurrection of Christ...

...Our credibility as a religious people depends on it...

...Louis and European textbook studies can alert Catholics to the dangers inherent in both these current trends and recommit us to the task of creating a truly multi-religious, multi-ethnic nation, one in which we will truly rejoice in sharing our diverse religious and cultural heritages...

...This process is especially necessary, but will also prove especially unnerving for Catholics, in view of our long-standing claim to be the full and totally complete religion...

...All this must be done now even though we cannot as yet express in any complete fashion a new definition of Christianity's role vis-a-vis Judaism and the other world religions...

...As she insists in the opening pages, "The progress made to date, particularly during the last two decades, in the effort toward Christian-Jewish reconciliation and in the attendant reappraisal of Christian teaching regarding the Jews could easily make us feel over-optimistic...

...As for the state of Israel, it is important as Mrs...

...Likewise there is need for a direct repudiation of that type of sweeping, destructive criticism of Israel that really is, as Fr...

...In the Spanish texts this attitude was often joined to the nationalistic claim of Spain's Catholic vocation, resulting in a religio-patriotic hostility towards both Jews and Muslims...

...If a generalized comment can be made, it would be that the European materials revealed a somewhat more negative tone...

...As for the suggestions put forward by Mrs...

...Also of frequent occurrence in the materials was a triumphalistic attitude coupled with an uncritical defense and self-righteous glorification of the Church...

...For here, thirty years after the Holocaust, the reader is again confronted with the traditional assertions which, for nearly two millennia, have conditioned Christians to anti-Semitism...

...We are presently witnessing within Catholicism a trend to "tighten up" the basic explanations of the gospel message...

...While the views of these theologians must certainly be considered provisional, they are beginning a process that will profoundly alter Christianity's self-definition and make possible a more honest relationship to Judaism and to all other non-Christian religions...

...2) the widespread indifference toward the emergence and continued existence of the State of Israel...

...A central issue in the textbook portrayal of the Jews remains their unwillingness to believe in the claims of Christianity...

...Louis textbook studies on American Catholic materials...

...Another value of taking a new, hard look at these studies stems from the freedom now accorded religion teachers in particular in developing classroom programs...

...The recent statement on Jewish-Catholic relations from the Vatican, despite its unfortunate omission of any reference to Israel and its seriously inadequate handling of conversion, is a valuable reaffirmation of the Conciliar thrust...

...Bishop calls for a new kind of New Testament exegesis and hermen-eutic...

...Certainly it will be trying for Catholics to face this serious challenge to the traditional Catholic notion of the Church's basic moral integrity...

...It also needs to be added that even apart from the goal of better inter-religious relations, an improved knowledge of Pharisaism is essential for authentic Christian self-renewal...

...To ignore Israel entirely, as has been the rule in Catholic teaching materials up till now, and as the recent Vatican document continues to do, is simply to paint a mythical Jew for students...

...This attitude is one frequently encountered these days by those of us dealing with the stereotyping of out-groups in instructional materials...

...The gospels record several friendly encounters between Jesus and various Pharisees...

...Louis studies and it was central in the European reports as well...

...Although it is regrettable from one point of view that these studies did not receive a public airing at an earlier date, their delayed publication may prove beneficial in several respects...

...In addition, the growing trend towards evangelism in American Christianity represents a real challenge to the maintenance of the historic spirit of American religious pluralism and the conciliar documents on Religious Liberty and on Judaism...

...In other words a golden opportunity was lost to do something constructive in the realm of popular culture and mass education...

...We in the Catholic community are presently at a very crucial stage in the renewal that began with Vatican Council II...

...Therefore, the Church must squarely face the fact that in trying to combat anti-Semitism it is addressing a desacralized society...

...Nor am I necessarily decrying the style of the production as such...

...Many well-intentioned Catholic teachers see it as a non-problem today...

...A final source of distortion highlighted in How Catholics Look at Jews is one that also stood out in the American studies: the perverted image of the Pharisees...

...This is all the more tragic at a moment when the new scholarly research was available for the asking, research that could have transformed a production of this type into one that would have contributed to the education of the Gentile world about Jesus and the Judaism of his day...

...To this, the Pro Deo and Louvain studies can serve as a corrective...

...Louis and European studies...

...The continuation of such an attitude in our educational programming will certainly widen the gulf between Jews and Catholics in light of the central role the Holocaust has assumed in current Jewish thought...

...Christian students simply cannot get a true picture of what the early Church stood for without some acquaintance with Pharisaism...

...There are some processes currently at work within the Catholic Church and in American religion generally that pose a genuine threat to the spirit of religious pluralism and inter-faith sharing that was one of the hallmarks of Vatican II...

...Positive approaches are, for the most part, limited to events before Jesus' time...

...4) the surviving portrayal of the Jew as a "born money man...

...But total silence about Israel constitutes a grave distortion of contemporary Judaism...

...and (5) the survival of the "ritual murder" charge and of similar cults in Spain and Italy...

...What these theologians are generally saying is that Christianity must re-examine its belief that the Messianic age, the time of fulfillment, took place at the coming of Christ...

...More often than not...

...This process of redefinition still requires much work and research...

...These studies were conducted simultaneously with analyses of American Catholic materials by a research team at St...

...Bishop for continuing the improvement of Judaism's portrait in Catholic education, I would underscore several of her key points...

...Mrs...

...In addition, when Jesus speaks of those who will plot his death, the Pharisees are never mentioned...

...Yet Canon Houtart minces no words in his conclusion that the improvements made thus far do not yet touch the heart of the problem: "The Jews still are a bad example, a mere foil for Christianity...

...For so many of the basic notions of Jesus and the early Christian community about ministry, church, ethics, liturgy, tradition, etc...

...To achieve this, Mrs...

...flow Catholics Look at Jews: inquiries into Italian, Spanish, and French Teaching materials CLAIRE HUCHET BISHOP Paulist Press, $4.50 The French-language materials examined by Canon Houtart and his staff no longer show a deliberate anti-Jewish pattern, but in the words of Mrs...

...We have been truly afraid to probe the significance of this tragedy in our educational programs...

...Their image is still mythical and inaccurate...

...Edward Flannery has pointed out, anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism...

...The pioneering work of writers such as James Parkes, Jules Isaac, A. Roy Eck-ardt, Gregory Baum, Monika Hellwig, Rosemary Ruether and others should be brought to the attention of students in a form appropriate to their age level...

...Claire Huchet Bishop's new volume How Catholics Look at Jews may well cause a shock to Christians and Jews concerned about the eradication of anti-Semitism...

...Another area where the textbook studies reveal the need for substantial rethinking on the part of Catholics has to do with the New Covenant theme...

...And in point of fact many of our present teachers have been trained with the type of material examined in the various textbook studies...

...The results from the European textbook studies outlined by Mrs...

...The European studies which form the basis of this new volume were conducted under the sponsorship of the American Jewish Committee at the papally-chartered Pro Deo University in Rome (texts used in Italy and Spain) and at Louvain University in Belgium under the direction of Canon Fran§ois Houtart (French language materials used in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada...

...While there is nothing wrong with this in principle, it could get out of hand and weaken our commitment to Vatican II's statements on Religious Liberty and on the Church's Relationship to the Jewish People...

...The task of Catholic educators at present is simply to acquaint themselves with the writings in this area, to inculcate in their students the realization that Christianity in and by itself does not contain in their fullness all the ideas necessary for a complete understanding of man's religious dimension, and to help students appreciate that only through interfaith sharing can a person even begin to approach such an understanding...

...3) Christians' traditional view of Judaism as a "soulless legalism," and their failure to recognize its lasting validity and truth...

...Obviously there is room for disagreement with certain Jewish views of Israel or with particular policy decisions of the State...

...A question that arises with respect to both the American and European studies is of what value are they in light of the fact that the examined teaching materials are no longer in widespread use...

...Most Christians still picture the situation as Jesus and them over against the Jews where in actuality it was a case of Jesus, his followers and at least in spirit the bulk of the Jewish population of the period over against the Romans and the leadership of the Jerusalem priesthood...

...What we still have not reached is the situation where the majority of Christians clearly see that a large part of the Jewish population of the day would have endorsed Jesus' struggles against the Romans and the corrupt Temple authorities...

...Jesus Christ Superstar, seen by millions of Christian young people and perhaps more influential on their thinking than a hundred new textbooks, has the Jewish populace shout "Crucify him, crucify him," over and over again...

...No Catholic can truly understand a contemporary Jew without some grasp of the hold Israel has taken on the modern Jewish soul...

...Specifically we must ask how Christianity's message about Christ and the New Covenant can be articulated without implying that Judaism's covenant is outdated or inferior...

...In sum, after looking through How Catholics Look at Jews and comparing it to the American textbook studies, we must admit that Judaism is still severely distorted in Catholic education...