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Rabbi Adlerstein on Pope Benedict XVI

Recently on Cross-Currents, Yitzchok Adlerstein praised Pope Benedict XVI, f/k/a Joseph Ratzinger, explaining that, in Rabbi Adlerstein's view:

Benedict is among those religious people who "will not water down their religious principles, their strong conviction that the Word of G-d trumps all other arguments. But they are also resistant to sacrificing the voice within that they understand to be G-d given as well, that hearkens to the tzelem Elokim, the image of G-d that they find in all human beings."

Rabbi Adlerstein wrote that "Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a theological conservative, unwilling to let go of what he believed to be G-d given truth merely because social mores had changed." He therefore "feel[s] a certain affinity for Joseph Ratzinger, and I more than suspect that it is reciprocated."

While on a human level Pope Benedict might indeed respect someone for sticking to their religious beliefs, I am very skeptical that, on a theological level, Catholicism has room for "affinity" for Jews who cling to their beliefs.

Cardinal Ratzinger clearly rejected Judaism. As he stated in a lecture, Ratzinger held that in "the Bible ... God places himself against certain expressions of the religiosity and religious culture of Israel ... Israel must constantly be drawn away from elements of its own cultural identity and religious desires; that is, it must leave the worship of its own nationality ... Israel's faith requires a continual selftranscendence, an overcoming of its own culture, in order to open itself and enter into the expansiveness of a truth common to all ... In a sense, when St. Paul departs from the law, a departure based on his encounter with the risen Lord, this fundamental trajectory of the Old Testament is brought to its logical conclusion; it expresses fully the universalization of the faith of Israel, released from the particularity of an ethnic structure."

In his book, God and the World, Ratzinger wrote: "We wait for the instant in which Israel will say yes to Christ, but we know that it has a special mission in history now ... Our Christian conviction is that Christ is also the messiah of Israel. Certainly it is in the hands of God how and when the unification of Jews and Christians into the people of God will take place."

None of this is particularly earth-shattering stuff, but it renders very dubious the notion that Benedict would reciprocate R. Adlerstein's "affinity". If anything, the maintenance of Jewish belief - particularly its rejection of Jesus's divinity - is something that, at most, can be tolerated by Catholicism, with the timing of what is seen as eventual abandonment of Judaism's religious tenets being left to God.

A much better approach for observant Jews toward Catholicism can be found in a piece Shalom Carmy wrote in First Things. Carmy recognized that observant Jews and Catholics can and should work together to the extent they have mutual interests, including in opposing militant secularism, but writes that on a theological level, "the most tolerant Christian ... firmly believes that I would be a lot better off if I accepted the divinity of Jesus; the most tolerant Jew firmly rejects the idea of a human being who is divine."
posted on 5/03/2005