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Testifying before Congress about religious liberty last February, William Lori, archbishop of Baltimore, proffered an analogy.
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1. He presides in supreme concealment:
who can bide in Shaddai’s shadow!
2. Yet I will say of the Lord, my refuge,
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Woody Allen is a writer, a comedian, and the maker of over seventy films. He recently spoke with Fr. Robert E. Lauder about the function of humor, film, and “the overwhelming bleakness of the universe.”
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History & Mystery: John C. Cavadini reviews the second volume of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth
Ratzinger at Vatican II, by John Wilkins
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Recently, a friend sent a color postcard from Poland, showing Pope Benedict XVI waving to a crowd and proclaiming: “The church looks upon the past with serenity, and does not fear for the future.” There was something wrong with the picture.
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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Martin E. Marty, Philip Kennedy, Robert P. Imbelli
On September 5, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released the declaration Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church
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How is Benedict XVI, long a defender of orthodoxy and famous critic of the “dictatorship of relativism,” likely to approach interreligious dialogue? Does he see religious pluralism and tolerance as little more than an enticement to...
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John Connelly, Justus George Lawler
Justus George Lawler
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What exactly are the Jews? The question baffles the layperson and the scholar alike. If we define them as adherents to a religion, then how can there be Jews who are secular (as most in America are)? And why all the signs of ethnicity—the resistance...
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Last summer I visited Lorrach, Germany, a southern Black Forest city from which my father, his parents, and brother fled in order to escape the Nazis in 1938. I spent several hours in the City Hall one day with a helpful archivist who located...
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By any standard, the almost forty-five years since the Second Vatican Council issued the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra aetate) have witnessed unparalleled growth a
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The uproar following Benedict XVI’s decision to lift the excommunication of bishops in the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X—one of whom is a notorious Holocaust denier—was predictable enough, except, it seems, to the pope himself.
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Commonweal devotes the first issue of each new year to a discussion of ecumenical or interreligious questions. This year we feature the contributions of two distinguished Jewish scholars, Michael Marrus and Eugene Borowitz.
Both men have long...
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"The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely...
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Recent months have seen remarkable events and developments in the legacy of Katyn, the village in the woods of western Russia where, in April 1940, Stalin’s secret police shot some twenty-two thousand Polish military officers. Those killings have...
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Taking their inspiration from the Qur’an, Muslims refer to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and a harder-to-define faith community, the Sabians, as “People of the Book.” These monotheistic neighbors of Muhammad (c.
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When she first moved into our neighborhood in Flushing, New York, in November 1954, with her husband and two young sons, Irena quickly became known as the woman who would never answer the bell if the person at the door was in uniform. I distinctly...
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A front-page story in the Sunday, October 17 New York Times alerted readers to the arrest of thirteen Iranian Jews accused of spying for Israel. The prospect of show trials designed to inflame anti-Israel feeling among Iran’s fundamentalist Muslim...
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Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, to be released nationwide on Ash Wednesday, is expected to become the most successful “biblical” film ever made. Advance sales, especially among Evangelical groups cultivated by director,...
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More than forty years ago, I was present at what I believe was the first formal Jewish-Catholic colloquy ever held in the United States. Sponsored by the American Benedictine Academy, it took place at the oldest Benedictine monastery in America,...
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One of the most embarrassing experiences of my life occurred at a colloquium in London organized by the Sisters of Sion.
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It has been almost forty-one years since Nostra aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, transformed relations between Catholics and Jews, e
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It sometimes seems that the controversy over Pope Pius XII and his role during the Holocaust has lasted several lifetimes.
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It was early morning, and bunches of school kids stood by their mailboxes in the cool autumn air, waiting for the school bus. Just one bus plied these arrow-straight country roads, picking up students at one- and two-mile intervals—students not only...
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On March 11, Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome, called for the Vatican to condemn Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ as anti-Semitic. According to the Zenit news agency, papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Vails responded, "the film...
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Those who knew Sr. Rose Thering, OP, as a fellow nun, a friend, colleague, teacher, or activist, mourn her death and celebrate her courage. Although she lived a long and productive life-dying May 6 at the age of eighty-five-her passing leaves a...
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John T. Pawlikowski, Judith Banki
John T. Pawlikowski
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Eleven years in the writing, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” released last month by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, will not and should not satisfy those on any side of the tortuous debat
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I am bound by history, duty, and by my personal journey to face again a very well-known subject. As with the stories of Passover, slavery and the ten plagues, and the liberation that followed forty years of purification in the desert-repeated and...
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The celebration of Jubilee 2000 reached beyond the boundaries of the Catholic community, leading to dramatic steps toward reconciliation with other religious communities. In particular, Pope John Paul II focused his efforts on putting an end to...
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Poland was forced to take a new look at its World War II past last year after the publication of a book about a horrific massacre in one village. I looked back as well. The book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland...
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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s recent lengthy article in the New Republic (January 21), "What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust," has already generated a vigorous response in the same journal from Andrew...
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In the January 21 issue of the New Republic, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Knopf), offered a sizable chunk of his new book, A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church during the Holocaust and Today. While I...
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One of the most remarkable historical developments in modern Catholicism is the transformation of the church’s relationship with Judaism.
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The past, a historian once ironically remarked, is unpredictable. Certainly, much of what happened in World War II falls into that category, including the saga of Pope Pius XII. Some historians view the record of his long papacy (1939–58) and...
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Last August in Los Angeles, I saw an early, rough edit of Mel Gibson’s controversial new film, The Passion of the Christ. Reviled as anti-Semitic by some who have not even seen it, I judged the version I saw free from explicit anti-Semitism, for...
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A year ago, Catholic-Jewish relations were roiled by yet another revelation concerning the church’s indifference to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust. In the December 28, 2004, issue of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera,...
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Pope Benedict’s XVI’s recent visit to Auschwitz, during which he conspicuously failed to voice repentance for the Catholic Church’s nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic teaching, has been welcomed in certain Catholic quarters as a rejection of “...
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Every week for the past five years, there have been news stories of U.S. soldiers being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan; stories of Israeli Jews either attacking or being attacked by Palestinians; reports of sectarian Sunni Muslims in Baghdad...
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What is the fate-“grace,” some would say-that brings a fourteen-year-old named Aaron, grandson of a Polish rabbi and the son of humble French shopkeepers, to embrace Christianity with such profundity that he will one day die as the...
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My wife was raised Catholic and converted to Judaism six months before our wedding. Her conversion was not one of convenience or social pressure—she flirted with Orthodoxy and Conservatism until I steered her to Reform Judaism. She attends temple...
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When François Mauriac wrote the preface to Night, Elie Wiesel’s account of his survival at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the French Catholic Nobel laureate described his attempt to provide a religious response to a much younger Jewish writer who had...
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In his four-year pontificate, Benedict XVI has managed several major and costly missteps, particularly in his relationships with Muslims and Jews. Fortunately, he has proved personally adept at making necessary and well-received amends, however...
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Social commentators lament the lonely individualism of Americans, and pinpoint the loss of community as a source of malaise. We detach ourselves all too soon and completely from our roots, cocooning our lives within 24/7 jobs and the sort of...
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I respect Peter Quinn’s work, but along with Dimitri Cavalli (Letters, May 7), I must object to his treatment of the proposed canonization of Pius XII (“Why the Rush?” March 12).
