New ice age between Catholics and Jews
Cathcon translation of
"Eiszeit zwischen Katholiken und Juden"
Potsdam Rabbi Walter Homolka jas reiterated his criticism of the new Good Friday intercession of the Catholic Church. The relations with the Jewish community were "by this unfriendly act put through this sudden ordeal such has not been the case for decades," said Homolka in the Berlin Protestant weekly newspaper "The Church". He spoke of an ice age between Catholics and Jews. In the Vatican, the recently formulated Jewish intercession for Good Friday church services in the extraordinary Latin rite states that the Jews should recognise Jesus Christ as saviour of all peoples. Homolka sees this as a call to conversion. Therefore, he as well as the Jewish social scientist, Micha Brumlik has cancelled his participation in the Catholic Congress, to be held from 21 to 25 May in Osnabruck. The Round Table "Jews and Christians" of the Central Committee of German Catholics said Pope Benedict XVI should withdraw the intercession. Homolka is also a member of the Round Table.
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Comments
Although I have a deep understanding for the ongoing fear of the Jewish people that something like the Holocaust might happen again (and I think it might indeed, even though not necessarily in Germany) and for the fact that a German pope is hard to swallow for them, I am always amazed how the world (including, but not limited to, the Jews) are quick to jump at any misdemeanour, real or perceived, historical or recent, of the Catholic Church, while Luther's appalling antisemitism, that deeply shaped Protestant Germany's collective mind, remains largely unnoticed. (For everybody who is interested in that specific topic, I strongly recommend John Weiss' "Ideology of Death".)
I have seen lists of historic Catholic (as opposed to Protestant) misdeeds (real or perceived) that included events which had happened BEFORE THE REFORMATION.
In such a world it was and is only too easy to smear the name of Pope Pius XII who was, in fact, a friend of the Jews, and turn him into evil incarnate. In such a world it was easy, too, to marginalise the stubborn defiance of the Catholics of Germany to the Nazi ideology and to relegate the Catholic resistance to oblivion in favour of (depending on political position) The military or the resistance from the left.
Why is that? If I have to try a guess I'd say that is because the Catholic Church is the only power that still stands in the way of a total secularisation of the West.
I may be wrong.