Abstract
Isaac’s heated exchanges with his reviewers faded in 1949 when the opportunity arose to plead his case to a higher authority. In October of that year, when on vacation in Rome, he met with certain Catholic clergy, including Père Marie-Benoît, then spiritual director of the Grand Institut des Capucins in Rome. Isaac was encouraged to request a billet de l’audience publique with Pius XII at Castel Gandolfo. Isaac’s first reaction was to resist; as a Jew, he had nothing to do with the Pope. P. Marie-Benoît persisted and Isaac relented, deciding the time was right to inform Pope Pius XII that the decision of the Sacred Congregation of the Rites on 10 June 1948 to authorize in the Good Friday prayer for the Jews the translation of perfidis as not perfidy, but unbelief in Christian revelation, had been necessary, but not sufficient. The Good Friday prayer for the Jews had not always been the only prayer for the Jews in the Roman liturgical cycle. “The Church does indeed know its duty; it has never failed to join mercy to reprobation,” Isaac wrote. “‘We must have pity on them [the Jews], fast and pray for them,’ we read in the Didascalia, a liturgical breviary dating to the third century… One must ‘pray for them,’ Saint Justin said, Saint Augustine repeated. But there is prayer and there is prayer.” The prayers for the Jews would be reduced ultimately to one (already known to Gregory of Tours in the sixth century)—the oremus on Good Friday—the day of universal redemption when Catholics are called to pray for the various states and sections of humanity, including heretics and pagans. In this prayer, Catholics prayed pro perfidis Judaeis (for the perfidious Jews) and petitioned God to have mercy on the Judaica perfidia (Jewish perfidy). Since the ninth century, the silent prayer on bended knee between the solemn exhortation and the official prayer, as well as the Amen in response, to the official prayer, had been omitted in the intercession for the Jews (no doubt, offered Maritain in his 1921 lecture at the Semaine des Écrivains Catholiques, out of a “sacred horror of sorts that [the Church] reserves for the perfidy of the Synagogue”. “Better no prayer than a prayer like this,” lamented Isaac. Certain Catholic authors felt the accusation overreached. “In fact, in the Latin of late antiquity, (the time of Gregory the Great) when many of the prayers of our liturgy were composed,” wrote then Augustinian priest Gregory Baum in 1957–58, “perfidia simply meant unbelief or disbelief, and thus the prayer was not meant to accuse the Jews of the despicable moral quality called perfidy in modern language, but merely to attribute to them a lack of faith in Jesus Christ. They are unbelievers; and their unbelief has a peculiar quality distinct from the unbelief of heretics and heathens.”
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Notes
- 1.
Promulgated on 16 August 1948 in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (vol. IX, no. 8, p. 342).
- 2.
Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 364.
- 3.
Jacques Maritain, “A propos de la question juive,” La Vie spirituelle (No. 22: July 1921, 305–10), 310. There is much in Maritain’s first public utterance on the Jewish Question in 1921, delivered in the form of a lecture at the Semaine des Écrivains Catholiques, about which he would be sensitive in later career. Moreover, in 1921, he had yet to formulate the vocabulary that was to be original to him. The lecture was published in both the quasi-official Documentation Catholique (30 July–6 August 1921) and the Dominican review, La Vie spirituelle (No. 22, July 1921). Unlike Maritain’s later pronouncements on the Jewish Question, this first lecture was never to see the light of day in an English translation, nor was it to be included in his collection of essays published in 1965 and again in 1990 under the title, Le mystere d’Israël. Most likely, it was to this first public utterance on the Jewish Question to which Maritain was alluding when he wrote in a footnote in the Avant-Propos of Le mystere d’Israël, “In particular, I have not included a certain number of duplications (hélas, there are numerous instances; how could it be otherwise when it comes to material treating of the same subject and composed at very different epochs, for very different readers and listeners?).”
- 4.
Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 364–65.
- 5.
Baum, The Jews and the Gospel, 9.
- 6.
See Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, trans. Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) 81–125 and Hubert Wolf, “The Good Friday Supplication for the Jews and the Roman Curia (1928–1975): A Case Example for Research Prospects for the Twentieth Century,” The Roman Inquisition, the Index, and the Jews: Contexts, Sources, and Perspectives, ed. Stephan Wendehort (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2004), 235–57.
- 7.
Acta Apostolicae Sedis 20 (1928), 103.
- 8.
Quoted in Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), footnote 24 at 262.
- 9.
Simon, Verus Israël, post-scriptum at 489.
- 10.
Quoted in Toulat, 140–41.
- 11.
Jules Isaac, “Audience Pontificale du 16 Octobre [1949],” L’Amitie judeo-chretienne, no. 3–4 (1949): 7.
- 12.
Quoted in Toulat, 140–41.
- 13.
Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 10.
- 14.
Reproduced in Isaac, “The Christian Roots of Antisemitism,” 12–13.
- 15.
Isaac, “Vingt-Quatres lettres de Jules Isaac à Paul Démann,” 352.
- 16.
Quoted in Kaspi, Jules Isaac, 220.
- 17.
This review was published in the June 1949 issue of Revue de Paris.
- 18.
Quoted in Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt, 27.
- 19.
Ibid., as quoted at 27.
- 20.
Isaac, Genèse de l’antisémitisme, 19.
- 21.
Simon, Verus Israël, 32 of the post-scriptum.
- 22.
Jacques Maritain Center Archives, 430 Geddes Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.
- 23.
Quoted in Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue, 47.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Jacques Maritain Center Archives, 430 Geddes Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.
- 26.
Isaac, Genèse de l’antisémitisme, 145–146.
- 27.
Simon, Les Premiers Chrétiens, 41–2.
- 28.
Herod Agrippa was a grandson of Herod I who in 37 CE was appointed tetrarch of the dominions of Philip and Lysanias (Upper Galilee, Abilene and parts of Lebanon). In 41 CE, his territories were enlarged to include Jerusalem and Judea and he had been granted the title of king. Jerusalem became his capital and the Sadducean high priesthood, his allies (W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 90).
- 29.
W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 91–96.
- 30.
Simon, Les Premiers Chrétiens, 42.
- 31.
Edited by Michael Slusser, trans. Thomas B. Falls, St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press), chapter 47.
- 32.
In correspondence to the author dated 25 June 2008, Fr. Thomas Stransky wrote that the pontiff was formally thanked for this war time activity by Rabbi Abraham L. Feinberg (representing the Canadian Jewish Congress), then rabbi of Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple, during the first recorded meeting on 12 August 1959 of a Jewish leader with Pope John XXIII.
- 33.
The previous council had been summoned by Pius IX in June 1867 in solemn and grand fashion in the presence of 500 bishops who had assembled in Rome from all over the world to assist in the celebrations in commemoration of the martyrdom of St. Peter.
- 34.
Quoted in Henri Daniel-Rops, The Second Vatican Council: The Story Behind the Ecumenical Council of Pope John XXIII, trans. Alastair Guinan (New York: Hawthorn Books Inc., 1962), 119.
- 35.
“Turn Thine eyes of mercy towards the children of the race, once Thy chosen people: of old they called down upon themselves the Blood of the Savior; may it now descend upon them a laver of redemption and of life. [‘His blood be upon us and our children’ (Matt 27:25)].”
- 36.
Paul VI removed mention of conversion and the assertion that the Jews require deliverance “from their darkness” and introduced a reference to the Jews as “the people of Abraham beloved by God.”
- 37.
Quoted in Bialer, 69.
- 38.
Thomas F. Stransky, “The Genesis of Nostra Aetate: An Insider’s Story,” in Nostra Aetate: Origins, Promulgation, Impact on Jewish-Catholic Relations: Proceedings of the International Conference Held in Jerusalem 30 October–1 November 2005, ed. Neville Lamdan and Alberto Melloni (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007), 34–5.
- 39.
Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 8.
- 40.
Ibid., 9.
- 41.
Quoted in Tavard (as an English translation from Acta et documenta concilio aecumenico vaticano II apparando. Series I, Vol. IV, Pars II) at 22.
- 42.
Marx, 434. In 1955, Mayer and Bloch founded the Centre d’Études des Problèmes Actuels (CEPA), an organization in close touch with the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith.
- 43.
Ibid., 434.
- 44.
Quoted in Kaspi, Jules Isaac, 232.
- 45.
Quoted in Toulat, 141.
- 46.
Jules Isaac, “Note sur huit jours à Rome (juin 1960),” Cahiers de l’Association des amis de Jules Isaac, no. 2 (1974): 18.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Isaac’s was not the first attempt to add the Jews to the agenda of a Vatican council. In the closing months of 1869 at the first Vatican Council, the Lémann brothers, Jewish converts to Catholicism, had made “an audacious attempt in appearance, yet nonetheless infinitely touching and noble, to provoke a solemn declaration of sympathy on the part of the Holy Church of Jesus Christ in favour of the rest of Israel, and to call forth prayers everywhere for their return to the integral truth,” in the words of Jacques Maritain. “Tenderly encouraged by Pius IX, they drew up a Postulatum pro Hebraeis which, presented to the Council Fathers, garnered 510 episcopal signatures. All the Council Fathers, adds Mgr. Elie Blanc, would have signed without exception if the two brothers, in obedience to a delicate deference, had not desired to cede the honour of the great majority of signatures to the Postulatum pro Infallibilitate that had garnered 533 signatures. Only the Council’s interruption by the war prevented this postulatum from being discussed and sanctioned by a papal allocution” (Jacques Maritain, “A Propos de la question juive,” La Vie spirituelle 4, no. 22 (1924)).
- 49.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, biliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Stransky, 30.
- 52.
On 8 June 1960, shortly after Bea’s appointment as president of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, Fr. John Oesterreicher, then Director of the Institute of Judeo-Christian Studies, Seton Hall University, New Jersey, on behalf of himself and 13 priestly colleagues scattered throughout the United States, submitted in English to Bea “an appeal…the first advance into an area that had lain neglected for so long, and indeed seemed to be unknown territory for most people.” A Latin version was to follow on 24 June 1960. The signatories of the petition asked that “the Council proclaim that the call of Abraham and the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt were part of the genesis of the Church, so that she can fittingly and rightly be called ‘the Israel of God’ (Gal. 6:16), the Israel renewed and exalted by Christ’s word and blood… the Council give further liturgical expression to the unity of salvation history…[and] finally…that misleading phrases, above all in the lessons of the Office, which distort the true teaching of the Church and her real attitude towards the Jews, should be changed.” (Oesterreicher, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, 10–11.)
- 53.
Stransky, 30, n. 2.
- 54.
Thomas F. Stransky, “The Foundation of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity,” in Vatican II by Those Who Were There, ed. Alberic Stacpoole (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), 70.
- 55.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 56.
Quoted in Kaspi, Jules Isaac, 233.
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Tobias, N.C. (2017). A First Papal Audience. In: Jewish Conscience of the Church. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46925-6_9
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