The implication presumably being that the publishers of the document are serious Catholic leaders?

The Vatican seems to think otherwise in other areas of current interest:

http://bettnet.dyndns.org/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1029349257,49588,

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It’s a problem, isn’t it? It seems to me the Church is too centralized for its own good (see http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/000516.html ), and the Pope seems to agree, but it’s hard to turn that around because people don’t become serious simply because you try to treat them as such.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops does NOT, according to the well-established rules of the Catholic Church, have the right to establish Catholic doctrine.

In what sense is the Church *too* centralized. Papal authority is the reason that RC orthodoxy survives in the First World.

WW

Centralization can take the form of a dictatorship in which all substantive decisions are made from the center, or it can take the form of Christendom in which the Pope is there to help resolve fundamental issues that the distributed manifold body has not managed to solve for itself. An imperfect American analogy might be the supreme court as opposed to a combined congress/executive: nobody expects the supreme court to go fire all the state governors, even if they are wayward. But to the modern egalitarian mind there is little difference between a monarch and a dictator.

The modern notion that authority is either centrally dictatorial or radically democratic is part of the problem. Most moderns lack the basic capacity to even conceive of Christendom: all that remains of it in the modern mind is a vague recollection of checks-and-balances as reflected in the old republic.

To WW: I agree with your second sentence, I just think it’s horrible that so much depends in everyday practice on the center.

To JK: I agree with your second clause, and wish the situation were otherwise. Of course, there are some number of loyal, orthodox bishops, a few potential leaders among them, most waiting to be led. You recently alluded to the possibility of an American Plenary Council in the foreseeable future. If it happens, it would have some potential for making local bishops parties to documents which uphold authentic Church teachings. Wouldn’t it be harder for latitudinarian American bishops to distance themselves form their own council’s documents than from encyclicals and monitory letters from Cardinals Ratzinger and Estevez?

WW

I see two sides of this. On one side, God did reveal himself to Israel, and therefore there has always been something a bit unreasonable in Christians expecting the Jews as a people simply to give up their divinely revealed religion and become Christians. On the other side, St. Paul is correct that the Christian revelation perfects and transcends the Israelite revelation, that Christians are the heirs of Abraham’s covenant with God, and that all men, including Jews, should be invited to become Christians. For the U.S. Catholic bishops to say that Jews have no need of Christ and that Jewish persons (most of whom are non-believers in any case) should not be evangelized is to say that the Christian religion itself is unnecessary. Why shouldn’t everyone simply become a Jew instead? That would seem to be almost the explicit preference of author James Carroll, who in his book Constantine’s Sword condemns everything about Christianity that is distinct from Judaism as denigrating of Jews, and therefore as leading to Auschwitz.

their divinely revealed religion

The original point of theological contention between Christians and Jews is that Christians regard Christianity itself as the true interpretation of the religion originally revealed to the Jews, and regard rabbinic/Talmudic Judaism (i.e. Judaism as practiced by the Jews since ca. 100 AD) as a misinterpretation of the original revelation. Jews of course regard this as nonsense; if they didn’t they’d be Christians.

The problem with the bishops’ statement is that it identifies “Judaism as presently practiced” with “the religion revealed to Moses and the prophets”, and posits both Judaism (as so defined) and Christianity as valid religions. They are, of course, entitled to their theological opinion. But if this view of Judaism is correct, then Christianity is false. I trust that is not what they (as Christian bishops) meant to say.

This pronunciamento - from clerics who are not in a position to propound doctrine for the Roman Catholic Church - is one of the worst yet of the many bitter fruits of Vatican II’s “aggiornamento.”

To say the Biblical covenant between God and the Jews (as the children of Abraham) is valid is to state the obvious. God’s covenant with his people Israel predates Christianity; there could be no Christianity before God came among us as Jesus Christ. What is just as obvious is that Christ’s coming among us as our Savior both renewed God’s covenant with Israel and extended that new covenant to all men. The new covenant does not exclude Jews: the God/Man who brought it for all men was, in his humanity, a Jew. We Christians believe He is the Messiah of the Jews. For Christians to refuse to say so to Jews is to deny our own faith.

The new covenant supersedes the old, which is not to say - and Catholic doctrine has never taught - that the old covenant with Israel was retroactively invalidated with the coming of the new. One of the most pernicious things about the USCCB’s bizarre missive is the implication that that may have been Catholic belief. From a Christian point of view (and from what this convert to Roman Catholicism understands to be the Catholic view), the rejection by most - not all - Jews of the Christian faith is an error of religion. It is, again from the Christian point of view, a religious error for anyone to reject Christian belief. It is no insult to say so. Jews believe my understanding of Jesus Christ is, to put it gently, misguided. I take no offense.

Maybe the most harmful aspect of the USCCB document is the singling out of the Jews as somehow different from all other people. I can think of no reason grounded in Catholic doctrine for doing so today. In the Old Testament, the Hebrews are God’s chosen people, whatever their human faults. They watch and wait for the coming of the Messiah, surrounded by a world that is ignorant of God’s truth. With the coming of Christ, Christians believe the longed-for Messiah has arrived and that God’s truth is announced to and for all men. Unless I misunderstand Christianity, at that point the theological distinctiveness of the Jews ends: all are now God’s chosen, if only we accept His Son as our Savior. If that is so, why single out any people as off-limits to proselytising?

If it is because the Jews somehow are free of the need to know and accept Jesus Christ as Savior, that is a denial of Christianity. If it is because the Jews are unworthy of the message of salvation, that is the basest anti-Semitism. If it is out of fear of powerful Jewish lobbies, that is merely craven. If it is out of a desire to apologize for sins real or imagined, one hardly does that by withholding the best the Church has to offer: the news of salvation.

This shows Newchurch at its very worst: so eager not to give offense to any non-Christian that the Church’s teachings are denied or confused. In addition to the sinful refusal to offer the news of God’s blessings to the Jews, whom He loves as much as any of his children, there is the confusion this sort of ad hoc attempt to be relevant and modern creates in Christian minds. How much confidence will Catholics have in the doctrines of a Church that seems to value those doctrines so little?

I hope readers will forgive the church-lady tenor of these comments, but I don’t know how else to express the concepts. What this sad episode shows above all is the terrible destruction modernism has wrought in the Church and what a long, hard road Catholic restoration is going to be. HRS