Loading ...
A good friend of the blog wrote to me yesterday as follows:
As I was driving home from St. Joseph, MO this afternoon I decided out of sheer boredom to listen to Catholic Talk 1090 AM. It had been quite a while since I last listened to the station. I love when Archbishop Sheen is on. I sometimes can handle Fr. Corapi. But most everything else smacks of conciliar triumphalism. One of the last times I listened, Catholic Answers Live had Bishop Vasa as a guest.Bishop Vasa told a caller that his dying Jewish father-in-law should refer his questions about Jesus and Christianity to his rabbi rather than attempt to convert his father-in-law.
Anyway, today’s Catholic Answers Live was about Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was the common Catholic Answer’s format. The Jehovah’s Witness convert to Catholicism was hawking a book outlining the tactics, techniques, and procedures for dealing with Jehovah’s Witnesses when they come to your door. She detailed the tact to take; where the main errors in their theology are; and how to go about refuting their errors.
As I was listening to this I wondered why these programs always deal with these relatively fringe religious groups or cults: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, New Agers, etc.
Have you ever heard Catholic Answers, or EWTN, or any neo-Catholic organ giving advice on “How to refute your Orthodox neighbor” or “Three easy steps to covert Jews to the Catholic Faith” or “How to save your family from Evangelical Protestantism”?
Is it just me or have I missed those episodes on the radio/TV and overlooked books with these titles in the neo-Catholic bookstores?
I would guess that something of the issue here is that these groups with fringe theology yet display a sort of evangelical fervor, peddling their heresies door-to-door. Your average ELCA Lutheran hasn’t been by and knocked for a long time! On the other hand, did they ever? The protestant groups, even from the beginning, so quickly fractured that I don’t imagine that most of them came to think that only their particular sect, in some corner of Germany, was going to be saved. Luther thought that Catholics could be saved, for Catholics certainly had the “Word of God”, even though it was buried under all sorts of fanciful accretions. So among the mainline protestant sects, there doesn’t seem to be a great motivation for seeking to convert either other protestants or even Catholics.
Lo and behold, new religions come along, like Mormonism, and like the very “successful” heresy of Mohammedanism, they claim to have the last or the latest or the best revelation of God. If their claims were true, we’d understand their fervor. Since their claims are false, and yet they go about as deceived deceivers, we need tactics and tacts and manuals of refutation. Most protestants, I think, just never got into this business because they didn’t think themselves the recipients of another revelation.
And this says something about the Catholic situation. Not only are we encouraging dying father-in-laws to go to their rabbis, we have little of the evangelical fervor which some of these other groups display. We are in a position legitimately to act in such a way, but this is hard to do when we think, in the words of Pius IX’s Syllabus Errorum, “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church.”
I’m not suggesting Catholics should take up the door-to-door approach, because that method may do more harm than good, but we at least need to re-learn or realize that such effort and zeal is rightly exercised by us when we share the Faith.
Not to be a jerk, but:
Seeing how the Orthodox are wrong on two things:
1) Papal supremacy.
2) Divorce and remarriage.
There are ample discussions on those two subjects; and I suspect a new book outlining those two items is not necessary.
As for the Jews; we are always going to have them until they are converted by a special grace of God as part of the culmination of the end of the world. Until then, the Jews are still God’s chosen people and we must exercise this charity towards them.
Johnboy,
God no longer recognizes “Jews” as a chosen people.
On Good Friday, the Old Covenant ended. The Jews cannot be saved by being Jews, even by being “good” Jews.
On Good Friday, the curtain in the Temple was torn in two. This symbolized the end of God’s covenant.
God was merciful however.
For those Jews who didn’t get the message that the Messiah was executed on the Cross, by their hands, for the sins of the world, God allowed the Temple to be destroyed in 70 AD and obliterated the territorial nation of the Jews.
For those Jews who still didn’t get the message after 70 AD, there is no hope for them, save checking their pride at the door and embracing the Cross.
(The current state of Israel has absolutely nothing to do with the bibical state of Israel. It’s a creation of freemasons and anti-Catholic internationalists.)
Joe Six Pack,
It is comforting to know that you are able to make such magisterial pronouncements on these issues that have puzzled Christians for millennia. Like everyone else, the Jews will only be saved though the sacrifice on Calvary, but the means by which that may occur is as opaque in regards to them as anyone else.
Doctor, I see nothing wrong in what Joe Six Pack wrote. Indeed, the rending of the curtain in the Temple and then not only the destruction of the Temple but of all Jerusalem by the Romans (and foretold by Our Lord) are pretty good indications that a break was made.
God doesn’t have two brides, two “Chosen People” - no bigamy for the Divine Lover. And since it is a dogma of the Faith that the Church is visible, we know His bride, the one, holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Whether God has secret designs for the Jews, I cannot venture to speculate on that topic, but since those designs were not revealed to us, whereas the Sacraments were, it would be a vain presumption on our part to sit back while our Jewish neighbors go unevangelized or are even positively encouraged by us to adhere to their religion, which religion, we should remember, has little enough to do with the cult of the Judeans when Our Lord came into the world.
I am sure the Doctor does not mean to suggest that we shouldn’t evangelize the Jews, that they shouldn’t become Catholics, or that the Church is not the single Bride of Christ. But the exact status of the Jews is a delicate question nonetheless; just look at St. Paul, who had no qualms about telling the Jews that they needed to convert, but who also struggled to understand and explain the exact status of those Jews who had not yet seen Christ’s truth. God has only one Bride, but many promises were made to the Patriarchs on behalf of their descendents, and it is not our place to say exactly how those will be fulfilled.
A lot depends on how Joe’s comments are understood. In one sense, no, nobody is saved by being a good Jew; nothing saves us but Christ’s cross. But whether and to what extent a person could be better disposed to receive salvation through Christ, by being a good Jew, is of course not clearly understood. And again, the Jews are certainly called to “check their pride at the door” because everybody is, including Catholics. But to put it in the way the Joe did makes it sound as though there is something particularly, unusually wrong with Judaism, and that is once again a difficult and complicated question.
What promises were made to the Patriarchs that were not fulfilled in Christ?