Jesuit Fr. Thomas Rausch On The Latin Mass

“Hardly an expression of mutual respect”
Published: August 1, 2007 in The Tidings
Motu proprio “not motivated in the slightest by anything having to do with Catholic-Jewish relations,” rabbi

Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio permitting more widespread celebration of the Tridentine Mass is not, despite the claims of certain Jewish groups, “proof of the Pope’s evil intent toward the Jews,” wrote Rabbi David Rosen in an article published in the July 22 Tidings, the newspaper of the Los Angeles archdiocese. Despite the “problematic aspect” of the Latin liturgy, the Church, Rosen assured readers, continues to reject attempts to convert the Jews.

Several Jewish commentators have taken issue with the Tridentine Rite’s Good Friday Service because it includes a prayer that asks that God may take “the veil” from the hearts of the Jewish people “and that they may also acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.” It asks “that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from their darkness.” Pope Paul VI changed the prayer, removing references to darkness and merely asking that the Jews “arrive at the fullness of redemption.”

Rosen, however, said the pope’s permission of the Tridentine Mass, with the Good Friday prayer for the Jews, “was not motivated in the slightest by anything having to do with Catholic-Jewish relations, but rather by what is called ‘renascent traditionalism’ within the Vatican.”

But even “renascent traditionalism” is not a big problem, according to Rosen. “Few issues,” he said, unite Catholics “across internal ideological divides today as much as a positive attitude” towards Catholic-Jewish relations. Characteristic of these relations is that “the Catholic Church has rejected proselytism,” and, since Vatican II, “has abandoned any institutional ‘mission to the Jews.’” Rosen cited no Church documents that support this claim.

Rosen said, though, “that a prayer for Jews to accept the Christian faith – which we see as a betrayal of our own – is hardly an expression of mutual respect.”

Loyola-Marymount University of Los Angeles professor, Jesuit Fr. Thomas Rausch, it seems, would agree. Writing in the July 20 Tidings, he said the old Good Friday prayer, though “quoting St. Paul about the veil covering their hearts... does not reflect the Church’s current attitude toward the Jews. They are not seen as excluded from God’s grace or living in darkness.” It is “in no way the case,” said Rausch, that Benedict’s “initiative... denies that the Jews can be saved as Jews.”

The Christian doctrine “that God’s universal salvific will is offered and accomplished once for all in the mystery of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God,” assured Rausch, does not deny “the dignity of others or their religions,” nor does it “suggest that one has to become a Christian in order to be saved. God works in mysterious ways, even among those who do not know Christ or the Gospel.”

Rausch cites Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, which says God provides divine help for salvation to those outside the Catholic Church. Rausch does not mention the same document states that those who, “knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.”

The Talmud (here)
The Association of Hebrew Catholics (here)
"Salvation is from the Jews" by Roy Schoeman (here)
Original article (here)