Rabbi Giuseppe Laras presents evidence of the Vatican’s disquieting shift towards overt anti-Semitism, as led by Pope Francis. He notes this — not just in many of the Pope’s troubling statements — but in the program guide for the fall conference of the Italian Biblical Association (ABI) where it is explicitly stated.

Though little reported, Catholic priests in the Balkans were active participants in the Holocaust, colluding with Nazi affiliated Islamic leaders. Thus Rabbi Laras is simply witnessing a continuation of a contempt towards the Jewish people that found genocidal expression during World War II, when Catholic Priests ran half the concentration camps in Fascist Croatia. This loathing also extended to Orthodox Christian Serbs who were slaughtered in these same camps by the hundreds of thousands. The Roma minority was also targeted for extermination.

Perhaps the Vatican is also currying favor with its globally ordained Muslim overlords in the hopes of positioning itself, the Catholic church, as a tolerated, subject dhimmi Christian minority in an increasingly Islamized Europe. Certainly the Pope is demonstrating that common ground can be found in a shared hatred of the Jews, just as it was during World War II.

13 mar

Catholic and Papal Anti-Judaism. Rabbi Laras Sounds the Alarm

di Sandro Magistor

“Israel, people of a jealous God. Consistencies and ambiguities of an elitist religion.” Already from this conference title wafts an air that is by no means friendly for Jews and Judaism.

But if one goes to read the original text of presentation, there is even worse to be found: “thinking of oneself as a people belonging in an elitist way to a unique divinity has determined a sense of the superiority of one’s own religion.” Which leads to “intolerance,” “fundamentalism,” “absolutism” not only toward other peoples but also in self-destruction, because “one has to wonder to what extent the divine jealousy may or may not incinerate the chosen’s freedom of choice.”

And yet these were the initial title and presentation of a conference that the Italian Biblical Association has scheduled from September 11-16 in Venice.

The statutes of the ABI are approved by the Italian episcopal conference, and its members include about 800 professors and scholars of the Sacred Scriptures, Catholic and not. Among the speakers at the conference in September is the leading biblicist at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Belgian Jesuit Jean-Louis Ska, a specialist in the Pentateuch, which in Hebrew is the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. No invitation to speak, however, has been extended to any Jewish scholar.

But the rabbis could not remain silent. And they have made themselves heard with a letter to the ABI signed by one of their most authoritative representatives, Giuseppe Laras, the news of which was first covered by Giulio Meotti in “Il Foglio” on March 10.

An extensive extract from the letter is reproduced further below. But first a couple of notifications are in order.

When Rabbi Laras writes of a “Marcionism” that is now emerging with ever greater insistence, he is referring to the school of thought that from the second-century Greek theologian Marcion until our day contrasts the jealous, legalistic, warlike God of the Old Testament with the good, merciful, peaceful God of the New Testament, and therefore, as a result, the Jewish followers of the former with the Christian followers of the latter.

Not only that. Laras – still remembered for his dialogues with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini – makes reference to Pope Francis as one who perpetuates this contrast.

And in effect it is not the first time that authoritative representatives of Italian Judaism – like the chief rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni – have criticized Francis for the distorted use of the term “pharisee” or of the comparison with Moses to cast discredit on his adversaries.

This is what Francis did, for example, in the concluding address of the synod of bishops, when he lashed out against “the closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church’s teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases.” Not caring that he was contradicting himself, because one innovation that the pope wanted to introduce into the practice of the Church was the restoration of divorce, allowed by none other than Moses and instead prohibited by Jesus.

But now it’s Rabbi Laras’s turn.

Dear friends,

[. . .] I have read, together with my esteemed fellow rabbis and with Prof. David Meghnagi, cultural commissioner of the UCEI [Union of Italian Jewish Communities], the event guide for the ABI [Italian Biblical Association] conference scheduled for September 2017.

I am, and this is a euphemism, very indignant and embittered! [. . .]

Of course – independently of everything, including possible future apologies, rethinkings, and retractions – what emerges conspicuously are a few disquieting facts, which many of us have felt in the air for quite some time and about which there should be profound introspection on the Catholic side:

1. an undercurrent – with the text a bit more manifest now – of resentment, intolerance, and annoyance on the Christian side toward Judaism;

2. a substantial distrust of the Bible and a subsequent minimization of the Jewish biblical roots of Christianity;

3. a more or less latent “Marcionism” now presented in pseudo-scientific form, which today focuses insistently on ethics and politics;

4. the embracing of Islam, which is all the stronger as the Christian side is more critical toward Judaism, now including even the Bible and biblical theology;

5. the resumption of the old polarization between the morality and theology of the Hebrew Bible and of pharisaism, and Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospels.

I know very well that the official documents of the Catholic Church are thought to have reached points of no return. What a shame that they should be contradicted on a daily basis by the homilies of the pontiff, who employs precisely the old, inveterate structure and its expressions, dissolving the contents of the aforementioned documents.

One need think only of the law of “an eye for an eye” recently evoked by the pope carelessly and mistakenly, in which instead, through it, interpreting it for millennia, also at the time of Jesus, Judaism replaced retaliation with reparation, making the guilty party pay what would now be called damages, for both physical and psychological harm. And all of this many centuries before the highly civilized (Christian?) Europe would address these issues. Was the argument of what is called the law of “an eye for an eye” not perhaps through the centuries a warhorse of anti-Judaism on the Christian side, with a clearly defined story of its own?

I observe with the highest displeasure and concern that this ABI program is substantially a defeat for the presuppositions and contents of Jewish-Christian dialogue, which for some time now has been reduced, sadly, to fluff and hot air.

Personally, I note with dismay that men like [Carlo Maria] Martini and their magisterium in relation to Israel in the bosom of the Catholic Church have evidently been a meteor that has not been accepted, no matter how much may be said about them.

Finally, it is saddening (and very much so!) that those who raise objections, perplexities, concerns, and indignation about programs and titles that are so made (or even only proposed) must always be Jews, reduced to the thankless and highly unpleasant task of having to act as “dialogue policemen,” and not instead in the first place authoritative Christian voices that right away and much sooner should assert themselves with a bold and frank “no.”

A cordial shalom,

Rav Prof. Giuseppe Laras

Rabbi Laras’s letter to the ABI is supplemented with “considerations” that subject to intensive criticism various passages of the conference program.

And the following are the conclusions.

Whether the matter corresponds to a well-delineated strategy or is a question of the application of ephemeral thoughts that multiply in the air, we find ourselves facing a potential toxic fusion of two resurgent forms of anti-Semitism, promoted by the Catholic Church or by significant portions of it:

1. the cause of the instability in the Middle East and therefore in the world is seen as being Israel (political blame);

2. the remote cause of the fundamentalism and absolutism of monotheism is seen as being the Torah, with repercussions even for poor Islam (archetypal, symbolic, ethical, and religious blame).

Therefore we are execrable, expendable, and sacrificeable. This would allow a hypothesis of pacification between Christianity and Islam, and the identification of the common problem, or rather not. And this time a noble stepfather is found in the Bible, and a herald in none other than the biblicists.

This strategy [. . .] combined with sugarcoated atheism would seem to be consistent with the widespread current understanding of Jesus of Nazareth:

– for quite some time they have stopped speaking about the “Jesus of the Christian faith” (or Trinity, twofold nature, etc.), because this is very far from the contemporary sensibility;

– they avoid speaking about the historical Jesus (Martini and Ratzinger in different ways, neither of them accepted), because they would inevitably have to talk about the Jewish Jesus, and in political terms this is problematic for them today;

– they talk about Jesus as a “teacher of morality,” obviously in conflict with the Jews of their time and their morality: “ethical Marcionism” (and the reduction of faith to ethics is precisely a form of atheism).

As of March 10, the ABI has removed from its official website the original presentation text of the conference, the program of which nonetheless remains confirmed.

And afterward it toned down the title, which has become: “People of a ‘jealous God’ (cf. Ex 34:14): consistencies and ambivalences of the religion of ancient Israel.”

(English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.)