Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Jude Bloom <jude AT somnopolis.org>]

Hello Friends

Let me emphasize a point from outside of the church -- Vatican II is regarded by every Jewish thinker I have known as a seminal turning point for Jews as well -- in the sense of the Catholic Church's relations with and regarding of Jews, and the effects this had on the rest of the Christian world.

I've just found a document on the web which speaks to this, although I can't vouch for anything about the document or the writer -- a paper by John T. Pawlikowski presented to a Catholic Theological Society in 1999.


http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:HCUY4ap0R14J:www.actjewish.org.au/Pawlikowski.pdf+jews+vatican+II&hl=en&ie=UTF-8


In an address to the CTSA meeting in Chicago in 1986 Gregory Baum argued that "the 
Church's recognition of the spiritual status of the Jewish religion is the most dramatic example 
of doctrinal turn-about in the age-old magisterium ordinaritun." (1) Christine Athans has ably 
demonstrated how profoundly and how centrally Christian theology, beginning with the second 
century, was infected with a viewpoint which saw the Church as replacing "old" Israel in the 
covenantal relationship with God, leaving the Jews to a marginal and miserable status which 
could be overcome only through conversion to Christianity.  NOSTRA AETATE changed all 
that in one brief chapter (#4). Jews were now to be seen as integral to the ongoing divine 
covenant.  Jesus and early Christianity were portrayed as deeply rooted in a constructive sense 
in the religiosity of Second Temple Judaism (particularly its Pharisaic branch). Jews were not 
be held collectively accountable for the death of Jesus. Vatican II did not "forgive" Jews of the 
so-called crime of deicide as some newspapers claimed; it totally exonerated them of this 
historic charge.  In so doing, it completely undercut the basis of the classical Christian theology 
of Jewish covenantal displacement which was rooted in this deicide charge. 


This would seem to argue that Vatican II did introduce significant theological "changes" or "clarifications."  Regardless, I know that in the Jewish world it is widely regarded as having done so.


~ Jude