2006-05-04-jewish-catholic

SAN DIEGO, Calif.—On a day when a federal district court judge ruled that the City of San Diego must remove a large Christian cross from public land atop Mount Soledad, a rabbi and a priest who are nationally known theologians held a dialogue at the University of San Diego dealing with issues that the two religions confront. The public meeting was held in the John B. Kroc Center for Peace and Justice, named for the late philanthropic widow of Ray Kroc, the founder of the worldwide McDonald's hamburger chain.

Rabbi Gary M. Bretton-Granatoor, interfaith affairs director for the Anti-Defamation League, and Rev. Dr. Francis V. Tiso, associate director for ecumenical and interreligious affairs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, on Wednesday evening, May 3, discussed such issues as whether in Catholic belief salvation is available to Jews, how popular culture lags behind the understanding of interfaith scholars, and whether the American constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state retards religious expression. Patrick Drinan, dean of the USD's School of Arts & Science, served as moderator.

The cross controversy
Earlier in the day, U.S. Dist. Court Judge Gordon S. Thompson Jr. ordered the financially-strapped City of San Diego to remove the large cross from the mountaintop where it has stood since the 1950s, or pay a fine of $5,000 per day after a 90-day compliance period. The decision is the latest development in a controversy that began in 1989 when Philip Paulson filed a suit saying the presence of the large, landmark cross on the city-owned mountain top violated his beliefs as an atheist. News of Thompson's decision prompted San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders to urge the City Council and the City Attorney's office to pursue any possible appeals.

Bretton-Granatoor, who is based in New York, and Tiso, based in Washington D.C., said they did not want to interject themselves into a local dispute, but were willing to comment in general on controversies concerning the display of religious symbols on public land.

Tiso, the first to respond to the question, said “if you do to much of this, it is a message to society that religious symbolism, and even religious values, has to go .. inside the house, and that this is an individual matter , a private matter. Therefore it undermines the sense of corporate belonging; it undermines the commitment to history; it undermines the willingness of communities to stand up for ethical values . So there is a great risk in this.

”I would not be offended by a menorah on top of a mountain,” Tiso added. “I would not be offended by a Muslim, or Hindu, or Sikh temple in neighborhood…Those of us who have traveled, even if they didn’t do religious dialogue as a profession, but just traveling around the world, become a little more knowledgeable, more tolerant, more aware – so these things don’t bother me. In fact I’m proud that someone took a stand and said ‘this is a symbol of something and God blessed those symbols.’ We risk much by sending out messages that say, ‘gee, we don’t want to have too much public display of religion and that kind of thing,” because it is … in my opinion, a darkness, a strangulation, that is not helpful to anybody.”

Bretton-Granatoor noted the presence in the room of Morris Casuto, the San Diego regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, and said on the particular San Diego case he would defer to Casuto. In fact, the local ADL chapter has taken a position opposing the continued presence of the cross on public land. In framing his response, Bretton-Granatoor said he was not speaking for the ADL, but, rather, as a rabbi.

“I have an overarching concern about the issue of coercion in our environment,” the rabbi said. “I think the issue of pluralism, and religious freedom, is one of the great contributions that the United States has made to the world, and to humanity at large. We are a beacon of light when pluralism is practiced properly. When pluralism is violated is when coercion is introduced into it, when somebody uses power that is granted to them either by community, station, age, authority, to foist their opinion on another – whether it is a teacher in a classroom, or a military captain with recruits, or in any of those particular situations where somebody has been forcing a religious belief on another person. That to me is an anathema to what the United States is all about and should be fought at every corner.

”On the other hand, I think that we ought to be grown ups, and I think that there has been a backlash for fear that line has been crossed that forces all of us to almost neutralize the very religious differences that we celebrate…. Public displays of religious symbols still prick at us, because we know what happens when you add power to that. One day soon we should be able to create the kind of American pluralism that allows us to freely display symbols and not feel that that is a threat to somebody. But as long as someone feels threatened we need to be sensitive to that. Because we Jews especially know what it is like to be coerced, and we know where it leads….”

Public prayer
The rabbi also said he regrets that at public forums religious leaders are asked to modify their prayers so as not to offend anyone. He said if a priest wants to pray “in the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit” it should be understood as the priest simply expressing his prayer in the manner in which he is accustomed and not as an attempt to force his religion on someone else.

”I envision a day, soon and in our day hopefully, where Francis, when asked to pray in front of a mixed assembly, will be allowed to pray as is natural for him, just as if I were asked to pray I don’t have to create some sort of namby-pamby vanilla version of something that I hold in my heart to be true, and that my tradition teaches me.”

Catholic Immigrants
A Jewish woman from Mexico asked why priests in Latin America still teach that the Jews killed Jesus-- more than 40 years after the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate, a document emphatically stating that Jews did not bear the responsibility for his death. It is not uncommon, she said, for Mexicans to associate Jews with Judas. “They depict us as the devil and sometimes they burn him,” she said.

Bretton-Granatoor responded that the ADL recently surveyed immigrants to the United States concerning their perceptions of Jews and found that “Latinos carried the highest percentage of anti-Jewish stereotypes, most of which they carried here from the church. Why is that? The answer unfortunately is really simple and really scary . When Nostra Aetate was promulgated, it was written in Latin, translated into Italian, English, French; later on there were German translations and others. It took seven years, until 1972, before an authorized Spanish translation of Nostra Aetate was released…

“If I received on my desk notice major change came about seven years ago, I would take that and throw it out, I wouldn’t pay any attention to it. And in point of fact, that was what happened. By the time it was finally disseminated, it really made little impression on the Spanish-speaking church, and you can go to the young Spanish priests who are still being trained in what I would consider the pre Vatican II, anti-Judaism . It is still there.” He added that ADL is now working with the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina to develop teaching materials rectifying this situation.

Tiso said another dimension of the problem is that biblical texts are “not just analyzed by linguistic experts. Texts are copied, decorated, dramatized, processions are derived from them, plays are written and so on.

”Texts enter into the culture in a rich variety of ways and very often the fine points are screened out, and mythological elements sometimes are highlighted. Judas was not a devil, Judas was a human being with all the risks of that, but for dramatic purposes you put a couple of horns on his head…. When it becomes a big cultural thing and all the subtlety is washed out, to make a dramatic point, then you have to ask yourself a question about consequences. What are the social consequences of over-simplifying over-dramatizing, and this is the problem of Mel Gibson’s Passion movie.”

The priest said immigrant communities from other countries must become acclimated not only to the pluralism of the United States, but to understanding the role that has been played in America by the Jews.

”The experience of the Jewish community in the United States is a very particular one, the experience of liberty since the 1650s before the enlightenment in Europe, and the growth of the Jewish community and its multitude of institutions, the tremendous contributions – America today is unimaginable without the Jewish people,” he said.

”I have been telling people of the Arab Christian community that you are in a tension-relationship with the Jewish community but you have to realize what they have done to give back to America. Hospitals, universities, chairs of universities, opera, the constant other contributions of Jewish foundations to scholarship and so on. So other communities have to think ‘well, what is my place in this society and in this culture? I have freedom, I have opportunity; how can I give back culturally?’ It is going to be a long process.”

Jews and salvation
As the two religious leaders engaged in their dialogue, it was clear that particularly when they were disagreeing with each other, they were careful to frame their words in a conciliatory manner. This became apparent as the two discussed Catholic beliefs concerning salvation.

The rabbi said that there was a lot of misunderstanding in the Jewish world in 2000 when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—who today is Pope Benedict XVI—issued a statement that seemed to be saying that the only way to salvation is through the Catholic Church.

Rather than this doctrine being aimed at the Jews, Bretton-Granatoor said, Ratzinger really was focusing on doctrinal differences within Christianity. He said that the Vatican at the time had one department for Interfaith Relations and a separate Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews.

”There are other faiths and then there are Jews,” the rabbi suggested. “For us (Jews) that is a good thing, not a bad thing. It puts us on a different plane. It says that the Catholic church has an inextricable link with the Jewish community and we (the church) have a moral obligation (also) to make peace with other religious traditions" Ratzinger’s doctrine “has nothing to do with us...” the rabbi said.

The priest carefully framed his disagreement with the rabbi’s assessment. “There is this idea in Jewish religious practice of living the Torah in this life, so that the redemptive process is focused on the corporate body of Israel living its faith in accordance with the Torah. Christian salvation emphasizes eschatology—life after death, the state of the soul after death and ultimately the final resurrection … So once you’ve got that clear you can understand a couple of things, like why this discussion is often like apples and oranges – we also talk about living the faith in this life, the ethical demands of being a Christian, but we do place this great emphasis on salvation.

“Salvation is one,” Tiso added. “You can’t have a Buddhist salvation, a Jewish salvation, a Hindu salvation, a Catholic salvation, etc., etc., as if to say by your spiritual practice you set up your transcendence in advance. Transcendence—the state of eternal salvation – is something that God gives us. We believe that a key aspect of that has been revealed to us by Christ… If you read the New Testament you can see the diversity of words and images in describing all that.

”But the salvation of the Jewish people through their faithfulness to their covenant is the difficult theological point here. Are they saved by that, in the sense that God’s grace comes to them through that, or are they saved, as are all human beings, by the death and resurrection of Christ? I think it would still be well to remember the Catholic doctrine and not disassociate ourselves from that because we don’t say that the Jews are saved by their covenant and everyone else was saved by Jesus, because, after all, Jesus went to the Jews first. So if you cut the two different ways of salvation completely off from one another, you end up being unfaithful to Jesus’ primary mission, and…you would kind of undermine the very humanity of the Jewish people. It is not salvation through the church, it is salvation through Christ—meaning that Christ, a Jew, comes into the world to reveal to humanity what it is truly to be human.

”As we expand our horizons through dialoguing … it is still possible for a Catholic to say that humanity as consecrated, defined and elevated by Jesus is universal humanity, including everybody—nobody is outside that mysterious touch of God into the human condition.”

The dialogue occurred not only in the lecture hall of the Catholic university, but also in the rotunda of the Kroc Center where members of Hillel, a Jewish student organization on the USD campus, staffed an information table carrying literature of interest to both faiths.