Seaghán Ó MurchúWell, nobody as of early Aug. 2024 is on these threads…Certainly an escalating period (partly same as it ever was, partly not?) of tension between the Catholic Church and the state of Israel, Jewish claims to its territory, and the conflation of anti-semitism within the “accepted” (as deployed in the USSR, so now throughout the world) charge of “anti-Zionist” as a term that complicates, eludes, defuses, and parses this tough issue. I get it about the fears that Jewish people have about conversion. I am surprised as an aside that the case of Edgar Mortara in 19c Italy wasn’t mentioned in the lesson, as the blood libel referred to continues in propaganda, if not in Christian-majority society. The link also shows a Damascus “fake news” scandal in 1840 in Christian Syria I’d never heard of…
Edith Stein’s decision puts Jews in difficulty; I recall when she was canonized by John Paul II, and the symbolism around this papal proclamation carries implications that Catholics seem, in my observation, to have been less than sensitive towards. But as in the fascinating case of “Brother Daniel” a Catholic friar born in 1922, raised Jewish in Poland, and so claimed in 1963 the right to return as a citizen to Israel, out of such choices comes complexity.
