The New Republic

Attention is drawn, as he would say, to the dissent that William F.
Buckley, Jr. has made against the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops, specifically against its Bishops' Committee for
Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. At last his church has gone
too far. It has renounced the mission to the Jews, and propounded
that the attempt to convert the Jews is "no longer theologically
acceptable", since the Jews, too, "abide in covenant with God".
Buckley will have none of this decency. He hunted down the
heterodoxy in a column last month, in which he endorsed the opinion
of the coordinator of Jewish Ministries for the Southern Baptist
Convention, who affectingly remarked about the abandonment of the
Jews to Judaism that "there can be no more extreme form of
anti-Semitism". With the same philo-Semitic compassion Buckley
avers that "to say to a Jew that Christians are unconcerned about
him is ... less an injunction to acknowledge the covenant of Israel
than an act of condescension and indifference". It is as our friend
that he asks us to let go of what we are. A missionary lunch at the
Grill Room, perhaps?Buckley is the most distinguished anti-anti-Semite in American
Catholicism, and so his enthusiasm for the ancient grounds of
anti-Semitism--for that was precisely the consequence for the Jews
of the supersessionist theology of Paul-- is startling. Even his
language about anti-Semitism is suddenly warped. He writes of Pope
John Paul II's critical attitude toward "that much of church
history that tolerated and encouraged what we would now call
anti-Semitism, considered, back then, evangelical ardor." In much
the same way, I guess, as lynching was considered, back then,
racial ardor. And what we would now call anti-Semitism was called
much worse, back then--it was called, say, contra perfidiam
Judaeorum. (I choose randomly from the vast Latin lexicon for this
hatred.) An affirmation of the Christian mission to the Jews is a
delegitimation of Jewish belief, and a delegitimation of Jewish
belief is downright un-American, for it flies in the face of the
pluralist revolution in religious life that is one of the glories
of America.

I understand that there is no faith that does not insist upon its
exclusive possession of the truth. Judaism, too, awaits the
universal acknowledgment of the God of Judaism. But Judaism, which
is not exactly "unconcerned" about the destiny of humankind, is
content to wait. Impatience is the father of intolerance. I also
understand that there are genuine conversions out of my faith and
into your faith: spiritual motion can be brutal. For this reason I
have never recoiled at the Catholic Church's canonization of Edith
Stein. When she became Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, she
was no longer ours, even if her murder makes us grieve. So let us
take religion seriously, but not stupidly. Buckley grounds his
reluctance to let the Jews be Jews in Romans 10, commenting that
"St. Paul ... used language that either means nothing at all, in
which case nor does any biblical language, or else something beyond
the reach of bishops to ignore, let alone undo." This is the
sophistry of the settled perspective. For the meaning of biblical
language is neither literal nor timeless, as all the great thinkers
in all the great traditions recognized. Also, this Jew cheerfully
recalls the account in Acts 13 of Paul's exasperating first mission
to the Jews: "Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was
necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you:
but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of
everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles". There is a column
in that.

A few months ago Richard John Neuhaus alleged in First Things that I
"make no secret of [my] contempt for Christianity". I know what he
means. But my "contempt" for Christianity is only intellectual, and
I may just as plausibly be accused of "contempt" for Judaism. Let
me explain, even if I will certainly be misunderstood. I believe
that religion is first and foremost a series of propositions about
the universe that are true or false, and that the most pressing
task for the mind in the realm of religion is to establish as best
it can the truth or the falsity of those propositions. Theology is
nothing without philosophy; or more precisely, it is a flight from
difficult thinking, a romance of paradoxes, a wallowing in the
coherence of a system of beliefs instead of a worrying about the
veracity of a system of beliefs. First things, indeed. Now, I have
established to my own satisfaction that the materialist analysis of
existence is a colossal error, and so I call myself religious in
the sense that I find myself on the side of immaterial meanings.
(Rationalism has more in common with religion than it often cares
to admit.) I can defend this notion of religion, but I am perfectly
aware, and sometimes painfully aware, that it is a parched notion
of religion, and that it falls far short of the notion of religion
that the religions impart. I say painfully, because my loyalty to
my own tradition, I mean my intellectual loyalty, is owed to my
conviction that it is the most vast and most sophisticated
exploration of immaterial meanings that I know; but many of the
immaterial meanings that I find in my own tradition strike me as
false, as fantasy, and so I cannot accept them. But I have never
encountered an idea more unacceptable to my frail, sweating mind
than the idea of the Incarnation, of the paternity of God, of the
word made flesh. I have always been grateful that this philosophical
absurdity is not my problem, that I may dismiss it without a tremor
of treason.

So if I am stiff-necked it is because I am stiff-brained. And I
plead guilty to Neuhaus's charge in one further respect. There is
one other stumblingstone. It is the Vatican. There is no place in
my heart for it. This is not merely a reflex of collective memory,
though I see no reason to forget the cruel and insulting history.
As a Jew I do not have only my religion, I also have my honor. My
honor makes me unconcerned, except politically, about the Vatican's
view of the Jews. Let them keep their hallowed archives closed: if
they are opened, I do not expect to learn that all those Jews are
still alive and that Pius XII saved them. But there is also the
larger question of the authority with which I wish to live. For I
do not wish to live without authority, and I do not delude myself
that I am myself all the authority that I need for my life; but
there is no way, no way at all, ever, that the pope, this pope, any
pope, can have spiritual authority for me. He is the leader of the
Catholic Church and no more. He does not move me (except as a hero
in the struggle against communism, but there were many heroes in
that struggle). I rather resent the media's promotion of John Paul
II into a teacher of all the world. He is not my teacher. Is this
"contempt"? I think that it is a respect for real differences. One
can be gracious about the reality of other beliefs even when one
cannot be gracious about the content of other beliefs. The name of
this graciousness is democracy. Anyway, who would not prefer this
"contempt" to that "concern"?

By Leon Wieseltier

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