Roman Catholics: A Test of Good Will

Still rolling at express-train pace, the third session of the Vatican Council last week debated an issue that for many remains the supreme test of Roman Catholicism's good will toward other faiths and the modern world. Under discussion was the proposed declaration on antiSemitism, and the coffee bars inside St. Peter's were deserted as the 2,500 bishops huddled silently in the aula, listening while speaker after speaker denounced the text as inadequate, meaningless and unjust.

The criticism could have been avoided. Last fall, Augustin Cardinal Bea, venerable head of the Vatican's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, prepared a declaration denying that there was a Scriptural basis for condemning the entire Jewish people as "deicides" because some Jews were involved in the death of Jesus. Jews were generally pleased by Bea's draft, but between sessions it was rewritten by the Council's Coordinating Commission, which added a few sentences of praise for Islam and a vaguely worded hope for Jewish conversion; by implication, it reaffirmed the deicide charge by asserting that Jews of today should not be blamed for what happened in Christ's time. The amendments were welcomed by Catholic bishops from Arab lands and by conservative prelates who accept the Gospels as literal accounts of Jesus' life. But they shocked ecumenical-minded Catholics and appalled Jewish leaders.

Unfaithful to Christ. The council was well aware of the bitter international reaction to the revisions when Cardinal Bea rose to present the amended draft for discussion. Pointing out that Jesus and the Apostles were Jews themselves, Bea argued that the deicide charge had led to pogroms and persecutions. His argument was strongly taken up by U.S. prelates. "I ask, venerable brothers," pleaded Boston's Richard Cardinal Gushing, "whether we ought not to confess humbly before the world that Christians too frequently have not shown themselves as faithful to Christ in their relations with their Jewish brothers." Albert Cardinal Meyer of Chicago noted that even St. Thomas Aquinas had written that the Jews of Jesus' time were not formally guilty of deicide, since they did not know him to be God's son.

Paul-Emile Cardinal Léger of Montreal urged that a stronger declaration was "a necessary act of a renewed church."

In all, 36 prelates contributed to the discussion. Speaking for his fellow Arab Christians. Ignace Cardinal Tappouni of Syria doggedly argued that the declaration was inopportune; his implication was that Moslem rulers in the Middle East would see it as Vatican recognition of Israel, an interpretation that even the revised draft takes pains to dispel. There were smiles and titters when Sicily's Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini rose to charge that it was too kind to the Jews, who instead should be urged to abandon their offensive practices against Christians. By the end of the debate, however, most observers felt that the final declaration would be considerably strengthened—if only because opposition to it was so irrelevant.