Abstract
The record is silent from mid-June 1960 until mid-September 1960. Bea took his annual summer retreat to reflect upon Isaac’s concerns, the same Augustin Bea who 40 years earlier, before Hitler’s rise to power, before the sea change in the Catholic theological vocabulary regarding Jews and Judaism, had unselfconsciously summed up his understanding of the Jews and Judaism in an article published in Stimmen der Zeit.
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Notes
- 1.
Augustin Bea, “Antisemitismus, Rassentheorie Und Altes Testament,” Stimmen der Zeit 100 (1921): 182–83.
- 2.
Quoted in Stransky, “The Genesis of Nostra Aetate: An Insider’s Story,” 32.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Jules Isaac, “Lettre de Jules Isaac à Mgr Charles de Provenchères,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France, no. 7 (2004): 389–90.
- 5.
Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 17–18.
- 6.
As recounted by Gregory Baum to the author.
- 7.
Baum, The Jews and the Gospel.
- 8.
As recounted by Gregory Baum to the author.
- 9.
Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 18.
- 10.
Cardinal Bea wanted Council Father representation on the subcommission, according to testimony of Fr. Thomas Stransky, as recounted to the author at a meeting in New York City on (Good) Friday 3 April 2015. Rudloff was abbot of the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem and the Benedictine Priory in Weston, Vermont. Alfred Felix von Rudloff, the youngest of eight children, was born on 31 January 1902 in Duren, a then thriving Prussian industrial city. In the aftermath of World War I, Rudloff entered the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Joseph in Gerleve, not far from Munster, where he had spent his youth. In 1928, Fr. Leo (the name he had taken) completed his theological studies at the Benedictine College of Sant’Anselmo in Rome, earning his doctorate with a thesis on Saint John of the Cross and the Rule of Benedict. Before leaving Sant’Anselmo, he was ordained to the priesthood. His time was divided between Jerusalem, where it was his dream to establish a Benedictine presence, and Weston Priory in Vermont, which he had founded. In between, he would spend time in Rome and visiting relatives in Germany. In correspondence to the author dated 7 October 2015, Gregory Baum recalled his impressions of von Rudloff.
“He was a monk, dedicated to the renewal of monastic life, which he wanted to have a reconciling impact on today’s deeply divided society. He saw this as an international concern, and he lived himself an international life. He was a thoroughly good person. His work at Vatican Council II was a minor event in von Rudloff’s life. He was not a passionate intellectual worried about the meaning of texts and developing theological theories. His contributions to Jewish-Christian relations were his friendships, his respect and sympathy for Jews, and his affectionate support of the State of Israel. It would not surprise me that his search for contact and friendship with Jews was in part the reaction of a German, deeply troubled by what had happened in his country.”
- 11.
In an address marking the 50th anniversary of Oesterreicher’s ordination, Rudloff deferred to Oesterreicher as the principal author of the conciliar statement on the Jews, styling himself as but a “hod carrier or bricklayer” (Br. John Hammond, Benedictine Legacy of Peace: The Life of Abbot Leo A. Rudloff (Weston, VT: Weston Priory, 2005), p. 184).
- 12.
Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 18.
- 13.
Stransky, “The Genesis of Nostra Aetate: An Insider’s Story,” 32–3.
- 14.
Ibid., 36.
- 15.
As recounted by Thomas Stransky to the author.
- 16.
Connelly, 178–180.
- 17.
Published in 1952 (with the approval of Msgr. de Provenchères, Archbishop of Aix and then president of the Episcopal Committee for the Catechism).
- 18.
A.-M. Henry in his edited locus classicus on Nostra aetate titled, Les Relations de l’Eglise avec les Religions non Chrétiennes: Déclaration “Nostra aetate” published in 1966, would choose to reproduce as an annex (along with successive drafts of the conciliar statement on the Jews) the Ten Points of Seelisberg.
- 19.
Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 12.
- 20.
In 1958, Fr. Anton Ramselaar, theological adviser to founder of the Dutch Catholic Church for Israel, Miriam Rookmaaker van Leer (a convert from Protestantism), further to prodding by Ottilie Schwarz, a Viennese convert, convoked an international symposium in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. Participants included France’s Paul Demann, Germany’s Karl Thieme and Gertrude Luckner, Israel-based Abbot Leo Rudloff and Fr. Jean-Roger Hene, British Irene Marinoff and by then American John Oesterreicher.
- 21.
Quoted in Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 18.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid., 22.
- 24.
Tavard, At p. 23, Tavard remembers this fourth meeting as having taken place in Roca di Papa, near Rome.
- 25.
Jules Isaac, “Quarante-Cinq Lettres de Jules Isaac à Claire Huchet Bishop,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France, no. 7–8 (2002): 416.
- 26.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliotheque Mejanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 27.
Isaac, “Quarante-Cinq Lettres de Jules Isaac à Claire Huchet Bishop,” 417–18.
- 28.
Gregory Baum, The Oil Has Not Run Dry: The Story of My Theological Pathway (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 6.
- 29.
Coincidentally, three Second Vatican Council figures had attended the same Kaiser-Friedrich Gymnasium in Berlin: Gregory Baum, Carl Riegner, general secretary of the Geneva-based World Jewish Congress and a WJC representative at the Council and Ernst Ludwig Erlich, a colleague of Jules Isaac and a founder of the German Christian-Jewish Understanding Association, who attended the Council as a representative of the International B’nai Brith for Western Europe.
- 30.
On 15 November 1938, five days after Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, a delegation of British Jewish and Quaker leaders appealed in person to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain, requesting, inter alia, that the British government permit the temporary admission of unaccompanied Jewish children, without their parents. The British Cabinet debated the issue the next day and subsequently introduced a bill providing that the government would waive certain immigration requirements with a view to admitting into Great Britain unaccompanied children ranging from infants up to the age of 17, under certain conditions.
- 31.
Baum, The Oil Has Not Run Dry, 10.
- 32.
As recollected by Fr. Thomas Stransky.
- 33.
Baum, The Jews and the Gospel, 1.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ruether, 2.
- 36.
Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, Church and Jewish People: New Considerations (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992), 40.
- 37.
Baum, The Jews and the Gospel, 17.
- 38.
Ibid., 217–18 and 226.
- 39.
Ibid., note 15 at p. 271.
- 40.
Ibid., note 14 at p. 271.
- 41.
Ibid., 63.
- 42.
Ibid., 4.
- 43.
Ibid., 5.
- 44.
Correspondence to the author dated 14 January 2008. As for the Resurrection, it “is an event beyond history, not a miracle:” Baum writes, drawing upon St. Thomas. “It transcends earthly human existence, entering upon the sphere of the divine.” (Baum, The Oil Has Not Run Dry, 63).
- 45.
Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 33.
- 46.
At this session, Mgr. Johannes Willebrands, Secretary of the SPCU, and Mgr. Francis Davis, Birmingham, England, were added to the subcommission for Jewish Questions.
- 47.
In correspondence to the author dated 26 February 2011, Gregory Baum has written that the document appended to Jews and Catholics together (ed. Michael Attridge, Ottawa: Novalis, 2007) is “in my opinion,...not a proposal produced by the Secretariat. This must have been a proposal which a learned theologian produced and then sent to the Secretariat as a supporting document. According to my memory, the proposal we produced was shorter. It had a three-point structure – the Jews prior to the coming of Jesus, the Jews at the time of Jesus, and the Jews after the time of Jesus. As I remember, we did not quote the church fathers, nor did we come up with recommendations. I am convinced that this is not a proposal produced by the Secretariat. Michael Attridge found it in the Oesterreicher archives, but it was likely a proposal sent to the Secretariat and kept in Oesterreicher’s files. Tom Stransky had to deal with the documents of the entire Secretariat, so he may not remember the early submission de Judaeis. But the series of recommendations in the proposal is likely to suggest to him that this is not a document produced by the Secretariat.”
- 48.
Quoted in Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 40.
- 49.
Ibid., 41.
- 50.
Correspondence to the author dated 29 March 2010.
- 51.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 52.
Stransky, “The Genesis of Nostra Aetate: An Insider’s Story,” 41.
- 53.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 54.
Stransky, “The Genesis of Nostra Aetate: An Insider’s Story,” as quoted at 42.
- 55.
Ibid., 43.
- 56.
For Bea’s memorandum and John XXIII’ s response, see Acta Synod., II, pars V, 485.
- 57.
Isaac, “Survol,” 233.
- 58.
André Zaoui was the rabbi of the liberal synagogue, Union liberale israelite de France (rue Copernic) from 1946 to 1969.
- 59.
Quoted in Ruff: 4.
- 60.
By way of contrast, a funeral mass for Isaac’s younger son, eminent portrait painter Jean-Claude Janet, was held on 5 September 2008 in the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Paris. Jean-Claude married Catholic sculptor Janine Fréjaville, but he himself never converted to Catholicism. He passed away in Paris on 28 August 2008. Isaac’s elder son, Protestant Daniel Isaac, Classicist, administrator general of the Naval Ministry, Croix de Guerre, Legion d’Honneur (Commandeur), passed away on11 April 2005.
- 61.
Ruff.
- 62.
Quoted in ibid., 5.
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Tobias, N.C. (2017). Quaestiones de Iudaeis. In: Jewish Conscience of the Church. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46925-6_11
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