Clergy and Educators
The Tridentine Good Friday Prayer:
A Digest of the Controversy
by Benjamin WeinerThe cause of Catholic-Jewish dialogue has been enduring a new challenge recently. The tension began last summer, when Pope Benedict XVI announced an easing of restrictions surrounding the celebration of the Tridentine Mass, known familiarly as the Latin Rite. Local priests can now approve requests by parishioners for the performance of the rite as found in the 1962 Roman Missal, the last approved Latin Mass prior to the inno-vations of the Second Vatican Council. The pope's declaration means this Mass is now more readily avail-able to the faithful than it has been at any other time since then.
The controversy arose out of a section of the Good Friday liturgy. A list of special prayers offered on this occasion, the Friday of the Holy Week leading up to Easter, traditionally included one called "A Prayer for the Conversion of the Jews." A translation of the 1962 ver-sion reads as follows:
Let us pray also for the Jews: that almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us pray. Let us kneel. Arise. Almighty and eternal God, who dost also not exclude from thy mercy the Jews: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
This text already contained a significant emendation. All previous wordings had included the adjective "perfidious" as a modifier for "Jews" in the first line: Let us pray also for the perfidious Jews. Though the Latin perfidis actu-ally means "faithless" or "unbelieving" and does not necessarily denote treachery, as does the English word "perfidious," the term was nonetheless deemed worthy of excision.
This alteration, however, was cosmetic compared to what would follow. The subsequent decade witnessed the changes of Vatican II, including the declaration Nostra Aetate (1965), which laid the groundwork for a dramatic reconfiguration of the relationship between the Church and the Jewish people. Space was opened in Catholic theology for a consideration of Judaism not as the fossilized faith of a race that was stubborn, blind, and accursed, but as a living and salvific covenant. The version of the Good Friday prayer inserted into the official liturgy in 1970, and known by a different name, reflected this sea change:
Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant. (Prayer in silence. Then the priest says:) Almighty and eternal God, long ago you gave your promise to Abra-ham and his posterity. Listen to your Church as we pray that the people you first made your own may arrive at the fullness of redemption. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. [1973 ICEL translation]
Though the phrase "the fullness of redemption" leaves plenty of wiggle room for a conversionary eschatology, this language, lacking a present-day focus, was not deemed a significant hinderance to either partner in the interfaith dialogue that would flourish in the next few decades.
But Benedict's new allowance for the old rite, com-plete with the "Prayer for the Conversion of the Jews," has raised anxiety on both sides. Immediately following the announcement, Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Com-mittee, voiced their concern. They were joined in their protest by sympathetic voices from within the Catholic world. Reintroduction of the Good Friday liturgy, it was said, could damage the trust and good will that have taken hold in the forty years since Nostra Aetate. The Vatican responded with an indication that the language of the prayer would in fact be altered in keeping with more tolerant principles. But when the adapted version, still bearing the traditional title, was released earlier this month it only fanned the flames. "Let us pray also for the Jews," it read,
That our Lord and God may enlighten their hearts, that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ as the savior of all men. Let us pray. Let us kneel. Let us stand. Almighty, ever living God, who wills that all men would be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, graciously grant that all Israel may be saved when the fullness of the nations enter into Your Church. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen. [This is an unofficial translation. To date, no official translation of the Latin has been issued.]
References to "blindness" and "veiled hearts" were gone, but the prayer still soundly affirmed the objectionable belief that the Jews should come to salvation through an acceptance of Jesus Christ. At the same time, tradi-tionalist Catholics, who have long rejected the changes of the Second Vatican Council, were unhappy with the compromised wording. And those Catholics who have drawn sustenance from their post-Nostra Aetate dia-logue with Judaism were left wondering what this development said about the Vatican's investment in fur-thering the conversation. Writing in The Tablet (London) only two days after the prayer went public, Eugene Fisher, the U.S. Bishop's director for Catholic-Jewish relations, declared:
It is urgent that the Pope should clarify as soon as possible that his amendment to the Good Friday liturgy in the Tridentine Rite is not meant to call in question any of that progress. Otherwise one of the most sig-nificant achievements of the Second Vatican Council is at risk.
In the past month, as intense conversation about these events has unfolded, the veins of argumentation have become clearer.
Jewish voices have expressed positions ranging from caution to confusion to a sense of outright betrayal, often characterized by an anxiety about the real world implications of a conversionary liturgy, and a sense that interfaith dialogue is futile if one partner is praying for the essential disappearance of the other. Abraham Foxman, the U.S. national director of the ADL, issued a statement in which he wrote, "While we appreciate that some of the deprecatory language has been removed ... we are deeply troubled and disappointed that the framework and intention to petition God for Jews to accept Jesus as Lord was kept intact." American rabbis drafted a resolution of protest. The Italian rabbinate, declaring that the Vatican had "moved the hands of the clock back 43 years," decided to suspend dialogue. A letter was sent to Cardinal Walter Kasper, the president of the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, by the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), which has served as the Vatican's chief Jewish dialogue partner. It included this paragraph:
We are concerned that the mutual respect that we have managed to build together over the last decades may be negatively impacted by the formula of the new text. In order to prevent such, we urge the Church to deepen its exploration of the full implications of Nostra Aetate's affirmation of the eternal validity of the Divine Covenant with the Jewish People so that the under-standing of the nature and basis for our relationship may be better comprehended and advanced to the benefit of both our communities and our ability to bene-fit all humankind.
Kasper himself had already added fuel to the fire with a statement he made in response to the Jewish criticism of the prayer. "We think that reasonably this prayer cannot be an obstacle to dialogue because it reflects the faith of the Church," he said, "and, furthermore, Jews have prayers in their liturgical texts that we Catholics don't like." This prompted cries from the Jewish side that it was inappropriate to equate the Catholic prayer for conversion, which shared a foundation with a history of temporal persecution of the Jews, with Jewish eschatological liturgy.
There have been moderating voices. Rabbi Irwin Kula, the president of CLAL, The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, based in New York, said bluntly, "The Catholic Church, unlike some religions in the world, has come through its murderous period and is neither violent nor dangerous, so Jews should chill out." Rabbi Gary Greenbaum, the director for Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, urged his constituency to see the bigger picture. "I think the Jewish community needs to always keep things in context," he said. "This is a pope who has a very strong sense of his own beliefs and his own philosophy and I know that he has made positive statements about Jews."
One particularly nuanced Jewish response came from a blog entry by David Berger, an Orthodox rabbi and pro-fessor of Medieval Jewish history at Yeshiva University. "Deciding how to respond to such matters is not an easy task," he wrote,
On the one hand, I do not find fault with Catholics who believe that Jews will recognize the truth of Christianity at the end of days. I have argued on a number of occasions that there is nothing unethical about such a position any more than it is unethical for Jews to recite the High Holiday prayers for the universal recognition of the God of Israel by nations who will forsake their cur-rent beliefs.
But Berger also wondered what message the liturgical revival conveyed about the shifting winds of Church the-ology with respect to the Jews:
At the same time, this prayer for the ultimate conver-sion of the Jews was written by Pope Benedict, who in his earlier life as Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in the Church document Dominus Iesus that a key purpose of inter-faith dialogue is mission, which includes the message that conversion is necessary to attain full communion with God. Some interpreters of Dominus Iesus main-tained that none of its key assertions apply to Jews because the Jewish people is already with God and requires no further change in its religion. I argued else-where that this interpretation is insupportable, and the Pope's involvement in preparing the new Latin text underscores this argument.
Ultimately, he encouraged a delicate and pragmatic reply, which recognized the limits of dialogue to bring about fundamental changes in Church doctrine even as it advocated on behalf of the apprehensions of the Jew-ish people:
Jews should stop deceiving themselves that the avant-garde Christian position that Jews will not convert even at the End of Days is the mainstream teaching of the Church. They should also stop trying to persuade Catholics to embrace this position, which is almost impossible to square with the traditional Christian belief in the second coming of Jesus. At the same time, I do not think that it is inappropriate to express measured disappointment at a shift in the status quo in the direction of more frequent liturgical expression of the expectation of Jewish conversion. This is not because of the belief itself, but because concern with a long history of efforts to proselytize Jews, not to speak of a history of persecution, argues against raising the profile of this Christian expectation.
On the Catholic side, official justification of the prayer has borne out Berger's suggestion that it speaks to a fundamental point of doctrine, with a scope much larger than the Jewish question. Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Sklba, who is the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs, said that "central to the concerns of the Holy Father is the clear articulation that salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ and his Church. It is a faith that must never be imposed but always freely chosen." Cardinal Kasper, while acknowledging the right-ness of the Pope's removal of the "blindness" language, which, he admitted, was "a little offensive," explained:
The Holy Father wanted to remove this point, but he also wanted to underline the specific difference that exists between us and Judaism. This difference cannot be hidden. The Holy Father wanted to say, yes, Jesus Christ is the savior of all men, even the Jews. He says this in his prayer.
The Cardinal described the Pope's emendation of the lit-urgy as replacing the "language of contempt" with a statement of the real difference between the religions. "True dialogue," he said, "must always accept the iden-tity of the other." He added, however, that "if this prayer, today, speaks of the conversion of the Jews, that doesn't mean we intend to carry out a mission." Rather, he said, it expresses "an eschatological hope."
Apologists, in the more colloquial sense, have been quick to point out that the revived Good Friday prayer will only be heard by a miniscule subset of the Catholic world. "The Good Friday liturgy in the Tridentine form is and will be a bit of an exotic rarity in Catholic worship," wrote Fisher in his Tablet article. Of the small per-centage of the faithful who seek out this liturgy, only a handful will even understand prayers not offered in the vernacular, the ritual appealing more to a sense of mys-tery than comprehension. The vast majority of Catholics will attend churches where the "ordinary" post-Vatican Two rite is performed. The controversy is therefore not a matter of practice, but of principle.
But there has also been pushback against the Jewish protest, from both sides of the spectrum. Some tradi-tionalists resent what they view as a placation in response to external meddling, "the precedent that the old Mass can be bowdlerized in response to external pressure," as John Allen summarized the position in a piece in the National Catholic Report. But dialoging Catholics are also concerned that an excessive response will exacerbate the problem, creating a media frenzy that will itself derail the interfaith conversation. "This liturgical text is ... a pastoral concession to a community on the fringe of the Catholic Church," wrote Jean-Marie Allafort, attempting to put the issue in perspective in an article appearing in the Spero News entitled "Polemics Surrounding the Prayer for the Jews: Must We Halt the Dialogue?,"
It does not in any way imply a change of attitude, either on the level of theology or on the level of dia-logue. Who better than the Jews to understand that the [overall] tradition is what is fundamental, and that a liturgical phrase, even an ill-conceived one, cannot erase more than 40 years of dialogue between the people of Israel and Catholics?
Critics have been urged to recognize that Catholicism is not monolithic. "In certain Jewish milieus, people some-times tend to think of the Catholic Church as a pyramid," wrote Allafort, "forgetting that there exist theological schools and currents of thought which are very diverse." Knee-jerk reaction should therefore be put aside in favor of coordination with the more liberal voices within the Church.
This points to one of the most interesting aspects of the controversy. In some sense, it is not so much a Christian-Jewish conflict ("Pope Benedict XVI really does care about positive Catholic-Jewish relations -- that I know for a fact," said Rabbi David Rosen of the IJCIC) as a flashpoint in an internal struggle for the soul of the Church. Call it Nostra Aetate (1965) versus Dominus Iesus (2000): the liberalizing trend of the Second Vati-can Council, which could recognize other paths to salvation, against the conservative retrenchment that has picked up steam with the appointment of Benedict, who has declared war on relativism and affirmed, in bold Latin type, that Jesus is the way. Catholics who have embraced the changes of Vatican II therefore object to the reintroduction of the older liturgy not because it antagonizes the Jews, but because it contradicts what they hold to be the highest official teaching of the Church, as promulgated by the Second Vatican Council. John Allen cites an e-mail from Father John Pawlikowski of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, "a longtime stalwart of Jewish/Catholic relations," which encapsu-lates the way the Tridentine issue enervates the larger schism:
Even though only a small number of Catholics may pray the new version of the prayer, it creates a situation of the church seemingly speaking with two voices (the 1970 prayer and the new prayer) that do not dovetail easily. Which represents the more authentic theology of the Catholic Church with regard to the Jewish people? This situation compromises Catholic integrity ... The media needs to stop presenting the discussion of the prayer as a ‘Vatican vs. the Jews’ issue. There are many of us, including cardinals and bishops, who have spoken on this issue for many months from the Catholic side. Our voices should not be ignored.
Finally, it should be noted that listserv conversation on the Tridentine affair has unearthed an interesting his-torical parallel. In 1964, as the Second Vatican Council sat in deliberation on the wording of Nostra Aetate, debating the parameters of the revolution, two of the spiritual lions of the 20th century weighed in. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel sent this statement to Cardinal Bea: "A message that regards the Jew as a candidate for conversion and proclaims the destiny of Judaism to disappear will be abhorred by Jews all over the world and is bound to foster reciprocal distrust as well as bitter-ness and resentment."
The note found its way into the hands of Thomas Merton, who, on September 10, wrote in his journal:
Abraham Heschel has sent a memo on the new Jewish chapter. It is incredibly bad. All the sense has been taken out of it, all the originality, all the light, and it has become a stuffy and pointless piece of formalism, with the incredibly stupid addition that the Church is looking forward with hope to the union of the Jews to herself. As a humble theological and eschatological desire, yes, maybe; but that was not what was meant. It is this lack of eschatological and spiritual sense, this unaware-ness of the real need for profound change that makes such statements pitiable. Total lack of prophetic insight and even elementary compunction.
Links:
"Latin Mass Cause for Concern," Abraham H. Foxman, 7/11/07:
http://www.adl.org/ADL_Opinions/Interfaith/ JTA_071107.htm"Response To The Publication Of Pope Benedict XVI's Revision Of The 1962 Good Friday Prayer For The Jewish People," Statement of Most Reverend Richard J. Sklba, 2/08:
http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2008/08-016.shtml"Prayer for Conversion of Jews Remains Troubling Despite Vatican Changes," ADL Press Release, 2/5/08:
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/VaticanJewish_96/ 5220_96.htm"Pope's Rewrite of Latin Prayer Draws Criticism From 2 Sides," Ian Fisher, 2/6/08:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/ people/f/ian_fisher/index.html?inline=nyt-per"Italian prominent rabbis denounce new Good Friday prayer as ‘step backwards,’" Daniel Mosseri, 2/6/08:
http://www.ejpress.org/article/24004"Conservative Rabbis to Vote on Resolution Criticizing Pope's Revision of Prayer," Neela Banerjee, 2/9/08:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/ people/b/neela_banerjee/index.html?inline=nyt-per"Resolution On Prayer Is Approved," by Neela Banerjee, 2/14/08:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501EFDD1131F937A25751C0A96E9C8B63"Enough Tridentine Mass Hysteria," Irwin Kula, 2/20/08:
http://www.forward.com/articles/12731/"Jews Debate Anti-Gentile Prayers," Menachem Wecker, National Catholic Reporter, 3/21/08:
http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2008a/ 032108/032108s.htm"German Jews Find ‘Prayer for the Jews’ Offensive," AFF Berline, 2/22/08:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/ 2008/03/22/2003406636"Don't Tell Catholics What They Believe," John T. Pawlikowski, Jerusalem Post op. ed., 3/4/08:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1204546400498&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull"Vatican Clarifies: No Change in Position on Jews: Says Prayer for 1962 Missal Does Not Modify ‘Nostra Aetate,’" Zenit: The World Seen from Rome, 4/4/08:
http://zenit.org/article-22204?l=english"Pope’s Man to Face Fury Over ‘Convert’ Text," by Simon Rocker, The Jewish Chronicle (London), 4/4/08:
http://www.thejc.com/home.aspx?ParentId=m11&SecId=11&AId=59135&ATypeId=1Italian Petition expressing concern over the Good Friday Prayer:
http://www.teologhe.org/index.php?Benjamin Weiner is the first ICJS seminary intern. Click here to read more about Ben.
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