* the Catholic Church and the Jews … is Ratzinger leading the way back to pre-Vatican II doctrine which blamed all Jews in all times (including the present) for the murder of Christ and called for the conversion of all Jews to the Catholic religion? … there is evidence to suggest exactly that

Joseph Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict XVI)

Rabbi Benjamin Weiner posts (4/27/10) …

• As the Holy See continues to respond to the latest uproar over pedophilic priests the matter has become strangely entwined with another of the Church’s persistent headaches: the Jewish question.
• First, on Good Friday, the Pope’s personal preacher offered a homily in which sustained criticism of the Vatican’s failure to stanch a hemorrhaging of child sexual abuse was equated with the persecution of Jews.
• a couple of days later on the Catholic Web site Pontifex, Giacomo Babini, emeritus bishop of Grosseto, is alleged to have suggested that the “powerful and refined” nature of the assault on the Pope’s character indicated it was part of a concerted “Zionist attack.”
• “Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers.”
• This comes precisely at a time when “the official line and mainstream thought of the Catholic Church,” particularly with regard to the Jewish people, is a matter of some ambiguity.
• Since the late 1960s, until quite recently, the mainstream of the Church had been undergoing a radical reconfiguration of its attitude toward Judaism.
• This was the legacy of the liberalizing Second Vatican Council (1965) and its Nostra Aetate declaration, which exonerated the Jews of collective guilt in the murder of Jesus Christ and acknowledged that they might be adherents of a living, rather than fossilized, faith.
• But in the five years of his papacy, which were sufficiently foreshadowed by the ideological stance of his prior career as a high-ranking cardinal, Benedict has endeavored to reestablish a firm conservative line in the Vatican.
  • His widening of the availability of the Latin Rite, a nod to liturgical traditionalism, reintroduced the “Prayer for the Conversion of the Jews” into the available Good Friday cannon, albeit in a rewritten form that dropped the adjective “perfidious.”
• Perhaps most aggravating to Jewish-Catholic relations is the seemingly implacable march of Pope Pius XII toward sainthood. Benedict green-lighted the Holocaust-era pontiff for consideration last December, based in part on the argument that Pius’ failure to publicly condemn the Nazi slaughter belied extensive clandestine work on behalf of individual Jews. Many historians counter that any evaluation of this claim is impossible without access to a raft of documentation that the Vatican has yet to release.
• the Catholic Church itself is one of the all-time leading instigators and purveyors of anti-Jewish sentiment, though this circumstance has been blessedly altered over the past half century.
• The Pope often seems to be steering Church doctrine away from Nostra Aetate—an affirmation of the validity of other religious traditions—and back toward a vision of the son as the only path to the father.

Benjamin Weiner writes on arts, culture, politics, and religion for a variety of publications. An ordained rabbi, he is the spiritual leader of Mishkan Ha’am: The Westchester-Riverdale Reconstructionist Group, in New York.

Read the entire article at … http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/religionandtheology/2503/in_crisis,_catholic_church_plays_‘the_jew’