Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

AP, Vatican Toughens Sainthood Procedure - washingtonpost.com, Feb. 18, 2008

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican is making it tougher to become a saint.New procedures were announced Monday calling for more “rigor” and “sobriety” by bishops when deciding to begin the process of beatification and in determining the required miracles.

Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Vatican’s sainthood office, recently suggested that the Vatican was overwhelmed by causes following the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, who elevated more people to sainthood than all his predecessors combined.

Saraiva Martins said there are more than 2,200 beatification and sainthood causes pending.

Pope Benedict XVI (AP)

ADL slams Vatican over revised prayer for conversion of Jews - Haaretz, February 7, 2008

The Vatican has come under fire from Jewish groups in recent days for changing its Good Friday service to include a prayer urging God to let Jews “recognize Jesus Christ as savior of all men.”

Earlier this week, Pope Benedict ordered changes to a Latin prayer for Jews at traditionalist Good Friday services, deleting a reference to their “blindness” over Christ.

But the Anti-Defamation League has called the changes “cosmetic revisions,” saying that the prayer is still “deeply troubling” because of its call to convert Jews.

Apart from the deletion of the word “blindness,” the new prayer - which has retained the name Prayer for Conversion of the Jews - also excludes a former a phrase that asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

Ian Fisher, Pope’s Rewrite of Latin Prayer Draws Criticism From 2 Sides - New York Times, February 6, 2008

ROME — Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday issued a replacement for a contentious Good Friday prayer in Latin, removing language that many Jewish groups found offensive but still calling for the Jews’ conversion.

However, representatives of Jewish groups as well as traditionalist Catholics quickly condemned the new prayer, though for different reasons. Jewish groups said it was still offensive, and traditionalists said they preferred the version that was replaced.

“It’s disappointing,” said Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, who for 20 years has worked on Jewish-Catholic relations with Benedict as pope and, earlier, when he was a cardinal.

The prayer was a focus of dispute last year when Benedict allowed for greater use of a traditional version of the Latin Mass, called the Tridentine rite. That decree improved ties with Catholic traditionalists, who oppose the sweeping changes to church liturgy made from 1962 through 1965 during the Second Vatican Council.

The prayer is not part of the standard service used by most of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, who celebrate Mass in their local languages.

The new prayer, published only in Latin on Tuesday in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, deletes a reference to Jews’ “blindness” and a call that God “may lift the veil from their hearts.”

Pope nixes reference to Jews’ `blindness` over Jesus in prayer - Haaretz, February 6, 2008

Pope Benedict has ordered changes to a Latin prayer for Jews at Good Friday services by traditionalist Catholics, deleting a reference to their “blindness” over Christ, the Vatican said on Tuesday.The Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano published the new version of the prayer in Latin and said it should be used by the traditionalist minority starting this Good Friday, March 21.

Apart from the deletion of the word “blindness,” the new prayer also removes a phrase that asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

But the new prayer hopes that Jews will recognize Christ.

Le pape atténue les termes de la prière de “conversion des juifs”, Le Monde.fr, February 6, 2008

À la veille du Carême (période de quarante jours de prières et de pénitence avant Pâques), ouvert mercredi 6 février, dit “mercredi des Cendres”, le Vatican a tenté de clore une polémique qui a assombri, ces derniers mois, le climat des relations entre catholiques et juifs, devenu plus fraternel quarante ans après le concile réformateur Vatican II (1962-1965).

Cette polémique était née le 7 juillet 2007, avec la publication du motu proprio (décret) de Benoît XVI libéralisant sous conditions - à titre “extraordinaire” - le rite antérieur à Vatican II, appelé rite “tridentin” (concile de Trente au XVIe siècle). Destiné à satisfaire les fidèles traditionalistes, ce décret du pape avait choqué la communauté juive parce que l’ancien rite de l’Eglise comprend - outre la messe en latin - une prière pour la “conversion des juifs”, traditionnellement récitée dans les églises le Vendredi saint (jour de la crucifixion du Christ).

En 1959, cette prière avait été réformée par le pape Jean XXIII (1958-1963), qui avait supprimé l’emploi de l’adjectif “perfides” pour désigner les juifs. Mais le reste n’avait pas été retouché.

En date du 4 février, une note de la secrétairerie d’Etat du Vatican rectifie à nouveau - partiellement - cette prière. Les passages demandant à Dieu de “soustraire le peuple juif de ses ténèbres” et de “l’aveuglement” ont disparu. Mais la suite, qui invite à prier “afin que Dieu illumine le coeur des juifs et qu’ils connaissent Jésus-Christ, sauveur de tous les hommes”, est maintenue. Elle demande à Dieu de permettre “que tout Israël soit sauvé en faisant entrer la foule des gens dans (son) Eglise”. Cette nouvelle version devra être en usage à compter de l’année 2008 dans toutes les célébrations de la liturgie du Vendredi saint.

Members of the Saint Benedict Center, which has been in a protracted dispute with many of its neighbors, include (clockwise from upper left) Brothers Maximilian Maria and Andre Marie, their superior Francis, and Sisters Marie Therese and Maria Philomena. Andre Marie, whose real name is Louis Villarrubia, condemns “the Jewish tendency to undermine public morals” — one of many reflections of the center’s anti-Semitism. Photography by Dave White

SPLCenter.org: Trouble in Paradise, summer, 2007

In 2004, SBC prior Louis Villarrubia, who goes by the name of Brother Andre Marie, put it like this: “If anti-Semitism means opposing the Jews on religious matters, opposing the Zionist state in Palestine (as St. Pius X did), or opposing the Jewish tendency to undermine public morals (widely acknowledged by Catholic writers before the present age of PC [political correctness]), then we could rightly be considered such.”

That same year, The Boston Globe quoted Brother Anthony Mary, whose real name is Douglas Bersaw, blaming the Jews for the murder of Christ and denying the World War II Holocaust: “There’s a lot of controversy among people who study the so-called Holocaust. There’s a misperception that Hitler had a position to kill all the Jews. It’s all a fraud. Six million people… it didn’t occur.”

In 2005, at a radical conference hosted by a group called St. Joseph’s Forum, Bersaw added that “the perpetual enemy of Christ is the Jewish nation” and said Jews should be dealt with using “blood and terror if it’s required.”

Today, Douglas Bersaw is Richmond’s town moderator.