Rabbi Lerner Condemns Return to Latin Mass

Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun and national chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, one of the largest membership organizations of the revived Religious Left in the U.S., issued a sharp critique of the decision by the Pope to give permission to local priests to re-introduce the Latin Mass.

"While I share with many Catholics the concern that this is only the first step in the process of dismantling the powerful commitment of Vatican II towards moving the Church bask toward the social justice, peace and love-oriented teachings of Jesus, as a Jew I am particularly concerned about the re-legitimation of praying for the conversion of the Jews.

"Jews have good reason for fear. From the moment that the Church took power over the Roman empire in the 4th century C.E., it has used that power consistently to demean Judaism and to oppress Jews. It frequently used its huge influence in Europe to convince state power to murder, torture, or simply expel the Jewish people from country after country. The Inquisition was only the most visible of the systematic attempts to coerce the Jewish people into conversion or expulsion. It was only the triumph of the secular order through the French Revolution in Europe and the American Revolution that its secular power began to decrease, though it continued to teach hatred of Jews in its churches. The legacy of that hatred was all-too-manifest in the Concordat that Pope Pius XII made with Hitler, and the failure of the Church to call upon its priests and laity to offer protection and assistance to Jews who were being hunted down and murdered in the millions. It was this disgraceful legacy that Pope John XXIII sought to rectify in part by eliminating the teacher of hatred that was a central ingredient to the Latin Mass. After meeting with my teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Pope John XXIII was convinced that the call for conversion of the Jews was a central element in the process of demeaning Judaism, and so he sought to eliminate that teaching from the life of the Church, and instead to introduce the notion that Judaism should be thought of as a sister religion, not one that must be overcome and obliterated. But there was one critical failure of Vatican II: it did not order the Church to explicitly teach its members and priests about the role that the Church had played in developing massive anti-Semitism throughout its history. As a result, it provided no way for its priests and members to understand why anti-Semitism was so prevalent in Europe, what had fostered it, and why it was so easily accessible to dictators like Hitler and Stalin as they sought to win popular support by providing a secular version of the anti-Semitism that Christianity had propagated for 16 centuries.

"Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the division of the Church that had directed the Inquisition before he became Pope Benedict XVI, has taken a powerful step toward the re-introduction of the process of demeaning Jews. You cannot respect another religion if you teach that those who are part of it must convert to your own religion. Interfaith respect is based on acceptance of the notion that people who do not become part of your own religion nevertheless deserve respect, and their religious commitments cannot be treated as something which must be overcome and left behind. While such notions of mutual respect are not honored recently in the practice of the U.S. government which currently believes it has the right to murder people in other countries and invade and topple their governments if they do not share the religion of capitalism and democracy, those of us who are spiritual progressives believe that this approach to the world is barbaric. So just as we oppose these policies in our own government, we join in supporting the many Catholics who are part of the Network of Spiritual Progressives who are dismayed and outraged at this latest assault on interfaith cooperation by the Pope, recognizing it as a first step on a slippery slope toward the restoration of anti-Semitism in the Church as well as the restoration of authoritarian and feudal ways of thinking that they had hoped would be relegated to the garbage bins of history. was to facilitate this return to anti-Semitism, we see this move as wildly insensitive and further proof of the need of the Church to systematically teach its priests and its members about the disgraceful role it played in fostering anti-Semitism through the centuries, and how the teachings of hatred, and the need to convert the Jews, played into that anti-Semitism."