[Updated 3:57 pm, 11.05.05]
Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.Isaiah 60, verses 1-14
For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.
Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side.
Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.
The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Mid'i-an and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall show forth the praises of the LORD.
All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the rams of Nebai'oth shall minister unto thee: they shall come up with acceptance on mine altar, and I will glorify the house of my glory.
Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?
Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, unto the name of the LORD thy God, and to the Holy One of Israel, because he hath glorified thee.
And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favor have I had mercy on thee.
Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee the forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.
For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.
The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious.
The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee, The city of the LORD, The Zion of the Holy One of Israel.
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"DOMINUS IESUS"
OF JESUS CHRIST AND THE CHURCH
One cannot attribute to these, however, a divine origin or an ex opere operato salvific efficacy, which is proper to the Christian sacraments. Furthermore, it cannot be overlooked that other rituals, insofar as they depend on superstitions or other errors (cf. 1 Cor 10:20-21), constitute an obstacle to salvation.Joseph Card. Ratzinger, Prefect - August 6, 2000
With the coming of the Saviour Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31).
This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism "characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that 'one religion is as good as another'".
If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.
However, "all the children of the Church should nevertheless remember that their exalted condition results, not from their own merits, but from the grace of Christ. If they fail to respond in thought, word, and deed to that grace, not only shall they not be saved, but they shall be more severely judged". One understands then that, following the Lord's command and as a requirement of her love for all people, the Church "proclaims and is in duty bound to proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life (Jn 14:6). In him, in whom God reconciled all things to himself (cf. 2 Cor 5:18-19), men find the fullness of their religious life".
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Indeed, God 'desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth' (1 Tim 2:4); that is, God wills the salvation of everyone through the knowledge of the truth. Salvation is found in the truth. Those who obey the promptings of the Spirit of truth are already on the way of salvation. But the Church, to whom this truth has been entrusted, must go out to meet their desire, so as to bring them the truth. Because she believes in God's universal plan of salvation, the Church must be missionary. Inter-religious dialogue, therefore, as part of her evangelizing mission, is just one of the actions of the Church in her mission ad gentes. Equality, which is a presupposition of inter-religious dialogue, refers to the equal personal dignity of the parties in dialogue, not to doctrinal content, nor even less to the position of Jesus Christ - who is God himself made man - in relation to the founders of the other religions. Indeed, the Church, guided by charity and respect for freedom, must be primarily committed to proclaiming to all people the truth definitively revealed by the Lord, and to announcing the necessity of conversion to Jesus Christ and of adherence to the Church through Baptism and the other sacraments, in order to participate fully in communion with God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Thus, the certainty of the universal salvific will of God does not diminish, but rather increases the duty and urgency of the proclamation of salvation and of conversion to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Doctrinal documents, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
The Roman Curia, Vatican
The Vatican's top biblical scholars recently issued a report that for the first time in nearly 2,000 years apparently validates as legitimate the Jewish wait for the Messiah.
A 210-page document titled "The Jewish People and the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible," by the Pontifical Biblical Commission and authorized by the Vatican's top theologian, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, reportedly states that "the Jewish messianic wait is not in vain."
It reportedly says Jews and Christians share their wait for the Messiah, although Jews are waiting for the first coming and Christians for the second.
The new document also reportedly contains an apology to the Jewish people for anti-Semitic passages contained in the New Testament, and also stresses the continuing importance of the Torah for Christians.
The book comes to light as anti-Semitism appears to be increasing around the world from Christian and Muslim sources.
Eric J. Greenberg/Jewish Week 25.01.02
"His election is confirmation of the cardinals on the issue of continuity," Rabbi David Rosen told The Jerusalem Post Tuesday. "There's not a single issue in which the new pope will not be in complete accord with his predecessor. After all, his predecessor appointed him to the most important theological post in the Catholic Church.David Brinn/Jerusalem Post online 19.Apr.05
"This continuity will be reflected in Catholic-Jewish relations. He has a deep commitment to this issue. And his own national background makes him sensitive to the dangers of anti-Semitism and the importance of Jewish-Catholic reconciliation," said Rosen, the international director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.
"He was also supportive of the establishment of full relations between the Holy See and Israel, and he cares deeply about the welfare of the State of Israel," added Rosen.
Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, called Ratzinger the architect of the policy that John Paul II fulfilled with regard to relations with the Jews.
"He is the architect of the ideological policy to recognize, to have full relations with Israel," Singer said.
In one indication of his respect for Judaism, Ratzinger authorized in 2002 the publication of a report that stated that "the Jewish messianic wait is not in vain." That document also expressed regret that certain passages in the Christian Bible condemning individual Jews have been used to justify anti-Semitism.
The 210-page document, titled "The Jewish People and the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible," says Jews and Christians share their wait for the Messiah, although Jews are waiting for the first coming and Christians for the second.
Ratzinger's grasp of Judaism is reflected by this passage from that document.ibid.
"I think we could say that two things are essential to Israel's faith. The first is the Torah, commitment to God's will, and thus the establishment of his dominion, his kingdom, in this world. The second is the prospect of hope, the expectation of the Messiah - the expectation, indeed the certainty, that God himself will enter into this history and create justice, which we can only approximate very imperfectly. The three dimensions of time are thus connected: obedience to God's will bears on an already spoken word that now exists in history and at each new moment has to be made present again in obedience. This obedience, which makes present a bit of God's justice in time, is oriented toward a future when God will gather up the fragments of time and usher them as a whole into his justice."
Joaquin Navarro-Valls was the official Vatican spokesman during the last days of John Paul II and after the election of Benedict XVI, but many of the news articles from Rome quoted the former Archbishop of Paris - Jean Marie Card. Lustiger, in their final paragraphs, rather than Navarro-Valls.
Lustiger, who is a French Jew whose mother and father were killed in the death camp at Auschwitz, was hidden in a convent in France when his parents were deported, disguised as a Catholic boy while Ratzinger was trying to avoid attending meetings of the Hitler Youth in Germany; he converted to Catholicism, became a priest, and rose through the ranks to become Archbishop of Paris - a position from which he recently retired - and was one of a handful of names mentioned as possible successors to John Paul II.
Lustiger had this to say about the founder of Opus Dei, after the announcement of Blessed Josemaria Escriva's canonization:
"Josemaria Escriva is one of those timeless figures who, in some way, shows the attentive observer what the Spirit is carrying out in the Church. The precise task that Providence entrusted to Blessed Josemaria coincides with one of these messages: to put into practice the call of all Christians to holiness."Opus Dei is right up there with Masonry and the Tri-Lateral Commission as a purported conspiracy of the elect against the preterite. Rigorous Intuition is a good place to start looking into that corner of the room.
"...the expectation of the Messiah - the expectation, indeed the certainty, that God himself will enter into this history and create justice, which we can only approximate very imperfectly. The three dimensions of time are thus connected: obedience to God's will bears on an already spoken word that now exists in history and at each new moment has to be made present again in obedience. This obedience, which makes present a bit of God's justice in time, is oriented toward a future when God will gather up the fragments of time and usher them as a whole into his justice."
Erev Moshiach - the Eve of Redemption
Many people are talking about the end of days, the coming of Moshiach, the Messianic Era. But for most people, even those well-informed about the subject, there is a great lack of clarity.
The truth is found in the holy books of the Torah (Bible) and amidst the secrets of the kabbalists, where it remains obscured from the eyes of even learned scholars.
Yet the greatest of Jewish mystics, the revered sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (author of the holy Zohar) tells us in that when the Messianic era approaches, these mysteries will be revealed even to little children. We are rapidly approaching that era - and can we see Rabbi Shimon's words being fulfilled. Read for yourself the ASTONISHING statements of a young Jewish child which describe the redemption forseen by the ancient Jewish prophets.
You are invited to what we are confident is a glimpse of the long-awaited and soon to be realized redemption of the Jewish people and, through them, the entire human race and all of Creation.
NOTE: To protect his privacy we refer to the boy as "Eli", though this is not his real name.
[...]It would be a gross misrepresentation to imply that these are the views of Jews generally, or that any one perspective can be said to belong to Jews generally. There are serious Jewish
Achdus (Unity) - Jews will cease to be individuals. While remaining in separate bodies, all Jews (including those who are not observant, but not the "tricker Jews" - see below) will feel as one with each other and with "all Jews who will ever be born and who were already born and who are alive now." All of us will know what is about to unfold. "We will ask other people 'do you feel me inside you?' If they say 'yes', they're a good guy. If they say 'no', they're a good non-Jew. If they don't say anything, they're a bad guy and we'll have to kill them in the war." Every Jew will know everything that every other Jew knows. We will have our own opinions, but we will know the opinions of everyone else. Eli says he thinks this will take place at dawn on the Tuesday of 7 Sivan (2nd day of Shavuos 5765/June 14 2005)
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there are going to be simultaneous earthquakes ("everyday, everywhere") that shake the entire world, except the Land of Israel. All the highest skyscrapers will fall down. Eli thinks this will take place in Elul 5765 (September 2005) and continue for two months, through the end of Tishrei 5766 (October 2005)
Jews will not be nervous or scared from the earthquake, and will not be hurt. Among gentiles, only "not-nice guys" will be scared, only "not-nice guys" will be hurt.
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The rainbow (mentioned in the Zohar) will tell the bad gentiles to run away because Moshiach is here. Bad gentiles will run away in fear, but we will "comfort them" to bring them out of hiding so that we can kill them once and for all ("otherwise they would still bother us and tease us.")
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The great shofar of Moshiach will be the last thing, after we return to our places.
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8) What should I do while I wait for Moshiach?
Most important is - DON'T JUST WAIT PASSIVELY. The coming of Moshiach "is dependent on our actions and [divine] service" (Tanya, ch. 37). As the Rambam says, all it takes is one mitzvah to tilt the scale of merit of the entire world. For Jews, the call of the hour includes:
Constant growth - meaning steady improvement in the quality and quantity of our observance of Torah and mitzvos. This applies to all Jews - those not presently Torah observant as well as those who are.
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Whatever your present level of observance, take a step towards increasing your observance of G-d's commandments, because they are the divinely-given way of connecting to the Almighty.
Increasing our learning of the Inner Torah (the secrets of Torah primarily as revealed in the teachings of Chassidus) which is the way we "open our eyes" to the messianic reality and bring the redemption closer;
Exhibiting true Ahavas Yisroel (love of our fellow Jew), regardless of their politics, level of observance, etc. The Baal Shem Tov said that G-d loves every Jew like the love of a father for his only son - and there is no love of G-d without love of the Jewish people. While the Jewish people are in separate bodies, our souls are truly one (see Tanya, ch. 32);
Explaining to others that the Land of Israel is G-d's gift to the Jewish people in perpetuity. No leader - Jew or gentile - has the right to give any portion of it others. To attempt do so places the Jewish people (and thus the entire world) in great spiritual danger. Additionaly, the military risks involved in such actions should be obvious to all...
"movements, groups and organizations whose ideology regarding Zionism and the so-called 'State of Israel' is that of the unadulterated Torah position that any form of Zionism is heresy and that the existence of the so-called 'State of Israel' is illegitimate."That doesn't mean they're taken seriously, in a political sense. In the same way Christians like Wendell Berry aren't taken seriously - they're ignored because of the absence of any immediate ability to harm or impede the larger groups who use their nominally shared beliefs as a shield.
In much the same way the innocence of millions of Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust is used as a shield by murderers who are themselves Jews; or the way the sacrifice of Jesus and the compassion and martyrdom of his early followers is used as a shield, by grasping selfish men who control institutions that were once Christian churches.
But that's the present.
We aren't going to stop the madness by following along behind it, documenting its crimes and hypocrisies. Not by that alone, as essential as it is.
"Eli" predicts the end is here. Fundamentalists are gorging themselves on dreams of fire and salvation. The glaciers are melting. The US is still burning nearly 400 million gallons of gasoline every day.
A lot of what seems pressing now will look like a temporary phase later on. A transition. And that's where the morality smears into utility. That's how men like Ratzinger and Lustinger and Negroponte and Cheney can be the men they are and still look in the mirror.
It shifts, and fades, and becomes something else.
America, the whole thing, North and South, as it is now was founded by treachery and murder no different except in its larger scale from the so-called "savagery" of its original inhabitants, yet at some point any good that happens on either of those continents has to come from that - in spite of it, yes, but from it, out of it.
So Ratzinger serves something he believes is higher than flawed humanity, and redemptive of his compromising. The ends, sanctifying the means.
That isn't as alien to Christianity as it first seems. The elevation of a crime to the primal radiance of redemptive sacrifice is the mystery at the center of Christian faith. The murder, or the unjustified execution of Jesus, is turned into the one act that will redeem the lost souls of the human race. So the means, the suffering and death of the holiest human being that ever lived - the intentional criminal torture and killing of that perfect being - is transformed into a necessity, something that had to happen so that the rest of us could gain eternal life. The ends absolutely justifying the means - so thoroughly justifying them that the dynamic of it is invisible in the midst of all the blood and glory.
Martyrdom is the elevation of something wrong into something holy, at least as it's been dogmatized by the Christian church.
And there are martyrs we don't know about, if you'll permit me a small tangent; there are martyrs whose refusal to compromise in the time and place they were forced to choose meant they would never be known for having done that; courageous men and women who went into it alone, and were gone; and that's what makes the remembering we can do more than just an accusation.
That's what makes the mothers of los desaparecidos more than just grieving women - in their witness they've shaped what we are.
Ratzinger on Liberation Theology:
In this connection I would like to mention the interpretation of death and resurrection given by one of the leading liberation theologians. First of all he once again opposes "universalist" conceptions by asserting that resurrection is in the first place a hope for those who are crucified, who make up the majority of men: all the millions who are subjected to a slow crucifixion by structural injustice. But faith also participates in Jesus' lordship over history by setting up the Kingdom, that is, by fighting for justice and integral liberation, by transforming unjust structures into more human ones. This lordship over history is exercised by repeating in history the gesture by which God raised Jesus, i.e., by giving life to those who are crucified in history. Man has taken over God's gesture - this manifests the whole transformation of the biblical message in an almost tragic way, when one thinks how this attempted imitation of God has worked out in practice and continues to do so.
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One can understand, therefore, that this new interpretation of Christianity should have exercised an increasing fascination over theologians, priests and religious, particularly against the background of Third World problems. To say "no" to it must seem to them to be a flight from reality as well as a denial of reason and morality. On the other hand, if one considers how radical this reinterpretation of Christianity is, it is all the more pressing to find the right answer to the challenge which it presents. We shall only survive this crisis if we succeed in making the logic of faith visible in an equally compelling manner and in presenting it as a logic of reality, i.e., manifesting the concrete force of a better answer attested in lived experience. Since it is so, since thought and experience, interpretation and realization, are equally called for, it is a task for the whole Church. Theology alone is insufficient, Church authority alone is insufficient. Since the phenomenon of liberation theology indicates a lack of conversion in the Church, a lack of radical faith, only an increase in conversion and faith can arouse and elicit those theological insights and those decisions on the part of the shepherds which will give an answer to the magnitude of the question.
Ratzinger slammed the door in the faces of the poor of Latin America in his official capacity as a Cardinal of the Catholic Church. And somewhere in his heart he makes that justifiable by what he believes will come out of all this, eventually.
He saw the threat to the church of the legal, and public relations, reaction to the endemic pathology of pedophilia in the Catholic priesthood, and he slammed the door in the faces of its known victims. As an official representative of God.
It's morality as an evolutionary gambit, a strategy to ensure the survival of his institution.
Seeing the implicit threat in a valiant dedication to the welfare of peasants that transcends dogma, he insists on choosing the supremacy of dogma. A dogma whose emphasis has shifted away from the compassionate words and actions of Christ in the Gospels, to the intolerant eschatology of the Old Testament and Revelations and the business advice of the Epistles.
A simple answer to the reasonable statements he presents to defend his choices is the question - where was the church while the "Liberation Theologists", and the priests and nuns who were not Marxist idealogues but Christian idealists, were on the front lines being murdered for their compassion?
Preserving itself among the the coalescing Leviathans of economic rage and power. Waiting its turn in the dance. The coming-together of the pieces of the whole more important than the unpleasantness necessary to make it happen.
The binding together, out of many - one. A higher purpose. Justification.
