Until Vatican II (1965) the Catholic Church carried out missionary activity to convert Jews to Christianity.
In 2015 the Vatican said that “it neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”
This raises the question whether Vatican II changed the Church’s practice with regard to converting Jews.
1. The New Testament
The earliest Christians had a complicated relationship with their contemporary Judaism. Jesus was a Jew, but followers such as Stephen were killed by fellow Jews (Acts 7). Jesus approved of Jewish observance (Matthew 5:17), but his followers modified aspects of that observance (Acts 15:19).
The Early Church considered itself to be “sent” by Jesus to preach a gospel which called for faith in Jesus (John 14:6), and baptism (Mark 16:16). That gospel was to be preached to the whole world, including both Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews).
It is clear that the gospel was indeed preached to Jews. There are at least ten occasions where the Acts of the Apostles show Paul doing so (Acts 13:14; 14:1; 17:1; 17:10; 17:17; 18:4; 18:19; 19:8; 22; 28:17).
As a result of New Testament texts like these, Christians traditionally interpreted the Scriptures as teaching that there should be missionary activity towards Jews.
2. Pre-Vatican II
Ever since the New Testament era, the Church preached the need for missionary activity to every corner of the whole world. In 1926, Pope Pius XI noted that the Pope has a specific accountability with respect to missionary activity:
[The Pope] fails in his special duty and obligations if he does not strive… to win over and to join to Christ all who are still without the Fold [of the Catholic Church]. (Rerum Ecclesiae, 1)
In 1951 Pope Pius XII was even more explicit:
The missionary’s appointed task is to promote… [the Kingdom of the Divine Redeemer] ever more rapidly in district after district till the last man in the most remote corner of the earth has been reached. (Evangelii Praecones, 24)
These comments show that prior to the Second Vatican Council the Church considered itself to have an obligation to preach the gospel to all nations, until the last person was converted to Christianity.
Clearly, the Church’s vision could not be achieved without the conversion of both Jews and non-Jews.
3. Vatican II on Mission
Vatican II (1965) said:
There rests, by divine mandate, the duty of going out into the whole world and preaching the Gospel to every creature. (Dignitatis Humanae, 13)
All [peoples] must be converted to Him,… and… incorporated into Him by baptism into the Church. (Ad Gentes, 7)
The Church has received this solemn mandate of Christ to proclaim the saving truth… and must carry it out to the very ends of the earth. Wherefore she makes the words of the Apostle her own: “Woe to me, if I do not preach the Gospel.” (Lumen Gentium, 17)
These comments reiterate the traditional missionary doctrine of the Church. As such, Vatican II seems to be just repeating older doctrine, that the Church continued to have a duty from God to convert and baptize ALL the peoples of the world.
Although these quotes from Vatican II do not explicitly address the specific case of Judaism, their universal implications cannot be achieved without the conversion of both Jews and non-Jews.
4. Dialogue Instead of Conversion?
Besides its reference to missionary activity, Vatican II also spoke about the importance of dialogue.
The Church… exhorts… that through dialogue and collaboration… [Christians should] recognize, preserve and promote the good things [in non-Catholic faiths]. (Nostra Aetate, 2)
Some view comments like this as suggesting that Vatican II wanted dialogue to become an alternative to conversion.
For example, the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion, founded in 1852, used to have an explicit focus upon praying and working for the conversion of Jews.
However, in the years following Vatican II the Congregation decided that working for the conversion of Jews was no longer appropriate. The Congregation thought that, in the light of Vatican II, it should now be focusing upon dialogue instead (see Celia Deutsch, “Journey to Dialogue,” 2016). The title of a 1994 article sums up the transition in their thought — “The Sisters of Sion: From a Conversionist Stance to a Dialogical Way of Life.”
Their actions raise a question about the interpretation of Vatican II. Does Vatican II’s teachings about dialogue change the meaning of what it said about missionary activity, so that Catholics should now be dialoguing with Jews, rather than trying to convert Jews?
5. Vatican II on Dialogue
Vatican II linked the concepts of dialogue and missionary activity. It said:
The right and methodical exercise of missionary activity requires that… [missionaries] should be scientifically prepared for their task, and especially for dialogue with non-Christian religions and cultures. (Ad Gentes, 34)
A Radical interpretation of texts like this concludes that missionaries should be dialoguing instead of converting.
A more Conservative interpretation sees dialogue as a style of missionary conversion. On that reading, missionaries should try to convert people by “dialoguing with,” instead of “preaching at.” This means that dialogue is a better form of missionary activity because it is a superior pedagogy. It engages people’s minds and creates an understanding of Christianity, rather than older styles of preaching which merely conveyed a knowledge about Christianity.
This model of dialogue, as a tool to create “understanding,” can also be seen in the new Code of Canon law:
Missionaries are to establish a sincere dialogue… so that… avenues are opened enabling [non-Christians]… to understand the message of the gospel. (Code of Canon Law, #787.1)
Dialogue as a style of missionary activity also appears in a 1964 Encyclical of Pope Paul VI:
The duty… received from Christ is that of… “going, therefore, make disciples of all nations…” To this… drive of charity… we will give the name of dialogue, which has in these days come into common usage. (Ecclesiam Suam, 64)
That same model of dialogue also appears in a 1991 Vatican document:
Proclamation and dialogue are… both viewed… as component elements… of the one evangelizing mission of the Church. They are both oriented towards the communication of salvific truth. (Dialogue and Proclamation, 2)
Texts like these suggest that a radical contrasting of dialogue and conversion is a mistaken interpretation of Vatican II. Dialogue was intended to be a style of converting people, which complemented traditional missionary preaching, not an alternative to missionary activity.
6. Pope Paul VI’s Teaching
This interpretation is reinforced by the words of Pope Paul VI. He was the pope who attended most of Vatican II, and it was according to his authoritative interpretation of the Council, that its teachings were approved and promulgated.
Writing in 1975, ten years after Vatican II, Pope Paul VI said:
“We wish to confirm once more that the task of evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the Church.” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 14)
Should sensitivity to other faiths limit missionary activity? Pope Paul VI thought not:
We wish to point out,… that neither respect and esteem for these [other] religions… is an invitation to the Church to withhold from these non-Christians the proclamation of Jesus Christ. (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 53)
Explaining why conversion was so important, Pope Paul VI had said in 1964:
Honesty compels us to declare openly… that the Christian religion is the one and only true religion, and it is our hope that it will be acknowledged as such by all who look for God and worship Him. (Ecclesiam Suam, 107)
These texts cover the period from 1964 to 1975. They show a continuity with the pre-Vatican II teaching, that the role of the Church is to convert ALL peoples.
Clearly Pope Paul VI does not believe that the Church’s traditional doctrine of missionary conversion has been changed by Vatican II into “dialogue.” Nor does he think that Vatican II has said anything that would make converting Jews to be no longer appropriate. This suggests that the Pope who authorized Vatican II did so, with no intension of changing the Church’s traditional teachings about the appropriateness of converting Jews to Christianity.
7. Judaism as an Exception
However, in 2015 the Vatican said that in the light of the Shoah, (Holocaust):
It is easy to understand that the so–called ‘mission to the Jews’ is a very delicate and sensitive matter for Jews because, in their eyes, it involves the very existence of the Jewish people. (“The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable,” 40)
Going on, the document said:
The Church is therefore obliged to view evangelization to Jews… in a different manner from that to people of other religions… [T]his means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews. (“The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable,” 40)
Similar ideas can be found amongst other Christians. In 2016 a German Church described a mission to the Jews as “theological antisemitism.” And there is a growing expectancy amongst Jews themselves that Christians will renounce missionary activity towards Jews. For example, in 2019 Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis criticized the Anglican Church for its failure to explicitly repudiate its missionary work aimed at converting Jews (Jewish News, Nov 2019).
The 2015 Vatican document has been interpreted in similar ways. It was even reported in the press as stating that “Catholics should not try to convert Jews” (Reuters, Dec 10, 2015). That interpretation seems to be shared by some senior Church leaders, such as Cardinal Schönborn (“Judaism’s Way to Salvation,” 2008) and Cardinal Bertone (Letter to Mr Oded Wiener, 2008).
But there are two reasons to be cautious at that interpretation.
Firstly, “The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable” states very clearly that it is a “non-magisterial” document. So it does not have the authority to change the teaching of Scripture, the statements of Vatican II, or the teaching of previous popes who taught the desirability of converting Jews to Christianity.
Secondly, although Vatican II did not change the Church’s teaching about the desirability of converting “all” peoples to Christianity, it did recognize that there can be pragmatic reasons for temporarily pausing missionary activity. The Council stated:
Besides, circumstances are sometimes such that, for the time being, there is no possibility of expounding the Gospel directly and forthwith. (Ad Gentes, 6)
So, even if “The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable” does (non-authoritatively?) call for a cessation in missionary activity towards Jews, the most plausible interpretation is that it is calling for a temporary pragmatic pause, “for the time being,” rather than trying to change the Church’s deeper doctrine or praxis, which remains orientated towards the desirability of converting all peoples to Christianity.
8. Conclusion
Prior to Vatican II, Scripture and papal teaching called for the conversion of Jews to Christianity. The most plausible interpretation of Vatican II is that it continues the prior Church teaching.
This means that the most plausible interpretation of the 2015 document which calls for a cessation of missionary activity to Jews, is that it is calling for a temporary pause in missionary activity.
Otherwise, the 2015 document would be inconsistent with the Church’s wider doctrines. For example in 2000 the Vatican said:
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. (Dominus Iesus, 22)
If those “outside of the Church” are indeed in a gravely deficient (spiritual) situation, then the Church’s theology would seem to imply that those outside of the Church NEED missionaries, and they NEED the opportunity for a conversion to join the Church.
If we bear in mind that the Church has not renounced Supersessionism (see “Did Vatican II Change the Doctrine of Supersessionism?”), and it has not renounced the claim that there is no salvation outside the Church (see “Did Vatican II Change the Doctrine, ‘No Salvation Outside the Church’?”). And its Good Friday prayers for the Jews have arguably not renounced their original intentions towards conversion (see “Good Friday Prayers for the Jews: Why the Controversy?”), then it would be illogical and theologically incoherent for the Church to suddenly assert that there should not be a mission to convert Jews.
Unless the Church changes a significant amount of background doctrine, all the Church can logically change in terms of a mission to the Jews, is to call for a pause in missionary activity. However, in a context where Vatican II quoted Scripture as saying “Woe to me, if I do not preach the Gospel” (Lumen Gentium, 17), it raises an obvious question. How long can a temporary pragmatic pause be, until it risks becoming a woeful failure of responsibility to carry out what Vatican II acknowledged as the “divine mandate… of going out into the whole world and preaching the Gospel to every creature” (Dignitatis Humanae, 13)?
23 thoughts on “Did Vatican II End Missionary Activity to Convert Jews?”
Dear Rory,
I very much appreciate how you use the official texts to trace a very important “conversion” within the Catholic view of Jews and Judaism.
I, for one, have had graced encounters with Jews who allowed me to hear their "anguish" in the face of conversion efforts associated with the name of Jesus. Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz speaks forthrightly for hundreds of thousands of Jews when he says, quite categorically, that the name of Jesus of Nazareth has to be struck from the list of potential candidates for moshiach. His reasons are clear and uncompromising:
• This Jesus is the one who validated the hatred and oppression of his own people.
• He is the Jesus who stands for crusades, inquisitions, ritual murder charges, and forced conversions.
• He is the Jesus who did not protest the Holocaust. That Jesus may not hate his kinfolk in his heart, but he has stood idly by while his kinfolk bleed.[i]
One can still hear the reverberations of anger between the lines. Jews like Rabbi Borowitz, consequently, can barely stomach the hypocrisy of pious Christians who naively applaud Jesus as the Messiah. Jews like Rabbi Borowitz shake their heads and tremble in rage whenever they encounter zealous Christians contorting the Hebrew Scriptures into saying that the moshiach had to undergo a barbaric death in order to coax God into forgiving sins.
Such a scheme of things perverts the Jewish image of a just and merciful Father that is plainly written in their sacred texts. It also demonstrates how ignorant Christians can be of the Jewish experience of receiving God’s love and forgiveness. The shame is not that Christians experience the loving forgiveness of the God of Israel through Jesus; the shame is that so many Christians believe that no one can legitimately have such an experience WITHOUT praising the name of Jesus.
Christians urgently need dialogue so that they can discover that Jews (for the most part) have already discovered the Father (preached by Jesus) who leaps forward to embrace his long-lost son. Christians urgently need dialogue so as to register the trauma associated with Catholic efforts toward conversion.
When Jesus returns, do you think that he will want to spend the Sabbath with Christians who think of him as the Son of God tortured so that the Father could forgive our sins?
Peace and joy in our Shared Father,
Aaron
Thank you Aaron, you make some pertinent points. Yes some Christians have behaved wrongly towards Jews, and yes some Christians have misused and abused Christianity (and Christ’s name) to promote wrongful agendas of persecution and self-aggrandisement. But would it be fair to conclude that Jesus is the cause of others misusing his name, or that abusive interpretations of Christianity are relevant to determining the broader question of Jesus’ status as messiah ?
And yes some Christians have held fairly barbaric views about how the crucifixion of Jesus redeemed humanity. But it is worth noting that the doctrine of the atonement has never been formally defined within Christianity. So there is an enormous range of different views amongst Christians. As a result some Christians are equally horrified at what other Christians are saying about how the Roman torturing and murdering of Jesus could be salvific. The issues are complicated and so perhaps this would be a topic worth exploring in a future essay (?).
Let’s cut to the chase. There is only one thing that matters: Eternal salvation – Heaven or Hell. If we don’t work for the conversion of Jews- indeed of every person-we are effectively saying “go to Hell,” the most heinous form of hatred. In 2015 the ideologues in the Church chose hatred.
The year was 1858. A young woman in Bologna confessed to her parish priest that six years earlier she had worked illegally as a maid for a Jewish family named Mortara. While serving in the household, the one-year-old son of the Mortaras fell ill. The pious teenage girl, thinking that the Jewish boy might die without baptism, took it upon herself to secretly baptize him. Later, the boy recovered. Upon hearing this story from the woman in the confessional, her parish priest insisted that he had to inform the church authorities.
After considering all aspects of the case, the clerical authorities concluded that little Mortara was effectively a Christian by virtue of his baptism. They further concluded that his parents, being Jews, were entirely unfit to foster his Christian identity. Accordingly, the police, acting under clerical orders, seized the seven-year-old Edgardo from his home and sequestered him in the Vatican. He was placed under the care of a group of nuns. In due course, Pius IX took a fond interest in the boy. In fact, he won him over with presents and gradually gained a place in his heart such that Edgardo began addressing him as "uncle." With time, Edgardo even became a priest, and Pius IX assigned to him the special mission of reaching out to "the fallen race of Jews" so that they too, like him, might come to know the grace and mercy of Christ.The pleas of the Mortaras for the return of their son fell on deaf ears. Those who supported the return of Edgardo to his parents argued that parents had the natural right to raise their own children in their own religion. Pius IX, given his growing personal interest in this case, argued that spiritual rights took precedence over natural rights and that Edgardo's baptism effectively released him from the constraints of his Jewish parents. All over Europe, even some notable Catholics raised objections:
But Pius was impervious to argument. When a Catholic wrote a respectful letter suggesting that Edgardo should be returned, the Pope scribbled on the bottom of the letter, "aberrations of a Catholic . . . doesn't know his catechism." When his own Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, suggested that Pius might be alienating other countries by such a high-handed use of power, the Pope answered that he did not care who was against him: "I have the blessed Virgin on my side." He told the Catholic ambassador from France that the Mortaras had brought their trouble on themselves by illegally employing a Christian as their servant.
The Unsavory History of Forced Conversions
The actions of the parish priest, the police, and the pope in 1858 were not entirely unexpected. Catholics were always encouraged to perform emergency baptism in cases where unbaptized children were "in danger of death." Once performed, however, the child was considered regenerated by Christ's Spirit and, once this fact was made known to the authorities, the child was taken from his/her Jewish home and placed in a pious Christian home in order to insure a proper Catholic nurturing. This was common practice. In Rome itself, during the years 1814-1818, scholars have been able to discovered no less than sixty instances wherein children were forcibly separation from their Jewish parents following such emergency baptisms. Again, in 1864, six years after the uproar that accompanied the abduction of Edgardo, "a nine-year-old Jewish boy, Giuseppe Coen, was baptized without his parents' permission in Rome and sequestered from them." The Mortara case, consequently, was just the tip of a giant iceberg.
Thank you Aaron, the issues raised by the Nineteenth Century Mortara case, recurred in the aftermath of World War II, where it was found that some Jewish children had been baptised by Catholics, who had taken them in. After the war, some Catholics tried to appeal to the principles of the Mortara case and wanted to refuse to return the children to their Jewish relatives (eg the ‘Finaly Affair’). But most Church leaders recognised that the previous century’s ‘Mortara approach’ was not appropriate. The issues are complex and there are individual cases which are still a matter of significant dispute. Nevertheless, I think that it is also the case that a significant degree of evolution can be seen in Catholic thinking, between the Nineteenth Century Mortara and the Twentieth Century Finaly cases.
The Church when it was running the Papal States forced the Jewish people to undergo Catholic instruction during their Sabbath, all while enacting incredibly harsh restrictions on them. This is detailed in the papal bull Cum nimis absurdum (which starts “Since it is completely senseless and inappropriate to be in a situation where Christian piety allows the Jews (whose guilt-all of their own doing-has condemned them to eternal slavery) access to our society and even to live among us;”)
I think it’s safe to say the Jewish people may question if the Church has their best interests at heart.
Yes, it is certainly the case that historically Catholics have behaved badly towards Jews. It is also the case that the concept of religious conversion has been misused and abused to generate historical wrongs. However, the question that remains is whether the wrongness is intrinsic to the concept(s) of trying to convert, or whether it arose because of contextual factors surrounding the actual implementations of the concept, on each occasion when there was wrongness (?).
Yes…and no.
It is true that the institutional Church lacks an organized effort at evangelizing and converting Jews to Catholic Christianity. Heretics who think it unnecessary aside, the big elephant in the room is the Holocaust and the centuries-long antisemitism the Church either fostered or tolerated – with various exceptions.
The Jews have internalized their persecution deeply. It stands to their reason why they should join a Church that, in their minds, wanted to kill them and/or their identity not that long ago. The Gospel doesn’t grow roots into such a terrain because the soil is DEAD. We killed it.
On the other hand, Jews are welcome to become Catholics as individuals, as the respond to grace. Now, thanks to the climate inaugurated by the Council, we have structures such as the Association of Hebrew Catholics, ready to receive them while helping them maintain their Jewish identity as Catholic Christians.
And that’s a good thing.
Yes the holocaust is the culmination of centuries of antisemitism, and Vatican II made a long overdue correction to the unacceptable attitudes and expressions which contributed to it. The existence of associations and relationships to create and discuss ideas between Christians and Jews is a particularly welcome further development.
An aspect of building long term relationships and partnerships is creating a mutual trust based on clarity and honesty about what partners are saying, and about the logical implications of their verbal commitments. One of the questions raised by the article is whether modern Catholics are being sufficiently clear and (logically) coherent towards modern Jews, in order to build long term relationships on solid foundations.
Rory is a judo expert. His reactions to disagreeing commenters turn the question back to the commenter and reveal new depths.
Dear Rory,
I have a conversion story to share with you.
Just before Covid my wife and I were in Portugal during the Jewish High Holidays.On Yom Kippur,the Day of Atonement we attended a Conservative service ( the Conservative community allows women to lead services ,unlike the Orthodox ,which is a strictly men only affair ).
The prayers were led by a women who was a descendant of the Marranos , the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism after 1492. When she researched her family history at age 30 ,she discovered her Jewish heritage .She then contacted the rabbi of a Conservative synagogue in London ,who invited her come and study with his community. She learnt Hebrew and underwent a full Jewish conversion. On her return to Lisbon five years later ( Jewish conversions take time ) she became the lay leader of her community. When we spoke to her after the services ,she glowed with pride that she had reclaimed her ancient heritage and reconnected with her people.
Thanks Jock, that’s a good example of religious freedom in action ! Hopefully one of the things that all faiths will one day be able to agree upon is the wrongness of force in matters of faith, whether it be compelling or preventing.
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Dear Rory,
Thank you for your clarification of the Church’s position on the conversion of the Jews.As a Jew I appreciate the Church’s concern for my spiritual welfare . However we have our own eternal contract ( Brit ,in Hebrew ) with God which takes care of all our own spiritual needs.The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ,the famous British Chief Rabbi ,put it this way :
The concept of original sin does’nt really exist in Judaism.So, we’ve always believed that there’s actually nothing at all original about sin and we all suffer from it .
We have this great day,Yom Kippur ,when we repent,confess,apologise ,and we try and make good our wrongs .We don’t really need the death of Jesus to, as it were , neutralise the sin of Adam and Eve because we don’t see that sin as being transferred across the nations.
Although the Almighty chose us from all the nations to receive the Torah, on Mt. Sinai , it is a Jewish teaching that the righteous all nations shall have a share in the World to Come .
A saner and more logical viewpoint.
Nothing is more damaging to a child than being taught that he was sinful from birth. You can dance around it, pretty it up by saying it’s not “actual” sin, but he will always feel guilt-ridden. How can he not? . . . Yesterday I was at my grandson’s baptism. He’s five months old. As he was slapping his chubby fingers onto my cell phone and trying to chew on the corner, I thought: he does not have sin, not in the original sin sense, not in any sense.
Sin cannot be transferred across generations. Especially toxic is the idea (pointed out by Jock) that it can be transferred across nations. The Church hates to explicitly overrule itself (even when it in fact is) so the best we can hope for is that this “original sin” idea, which was actually concocted to scare people into going to church, will be redefined into irrelevance.
The eternal contract is fulfilled in Jesus Christ as attested by the fact and power of His resurrection.
I don’t think there’s much need to look too deeply as to original sin. Unless you are living in paradise, you have been impacted by the sin of Adam and Eve.
All the best.
Yes I think its helpful to recognise that at its heart the disagreement between Christianity and Judaism is a disagreement about claims which involve matters of fact and interpretations, as well as consequent logical entailments. This involves (for Christians) attitudes to sharing the good news of the gospel, as well as interpretations of ‘sharing’ which have caused significant historical wrongs.
Whether, and to what extent, those issues are caused, or influenced by Original Sin is a good question. Arguably the Christian missionary activity evident in the Acts of the Apostles existed prior to an explicit preaching of Original sin.
There are also different ways of thinking about original sin. I jotted a few thoughts on this in a previous piece –
https://catholicstand.com/original-sin-clarifying-ideas-and-avoiding-misconceptions/
It was Babylonians, then Romans, and then Christians. Jews just want to be left alone, in their Palestine, so that they can live as Jews.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=mel+brooks+inquisition&bshm=bshqp/1#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:d78fda2c,vid:NUMkcBctE7c
Yes, that is one way of looking at matters. But the reasons why disagreements about the state of Israel still occur, is that there are also other ways of looking at matters. Hopefully one day a way will be found to bridge the differences of perspective so that peace can prevail.
Jesus approved of Jewish observance (Matthew 5:17), but his followers modified aspects of that observance (Acts 15:19).
I didn’t take anything seriously after this sentence, it being brutally paradoxical and literally screaming out observations about an emperor without clothes. It’s seems all backwards. The credits for any missionary feats performed goes to Luther, the 30 K Christian denominations abounding and the incredible amount of influence and inroads eastern theology and the Koran have had on the shrinking influence of the CC. Theoretically, you can’t evangelize the whole world because every second tens of thousands of non Catholic or Christian are being born, so the ‘mission’ is continually chasing its tail in a futile attempt at catching it. What is happening on a sub conscious plane is a melding of the most transcendental knowledge that is intrinsic to each faith system esp the Judaic / Christian link. Looking at the big picture, this utterly obvious religious phenomena is on full display – and the end result is that all will be one.
Yes I think its true that evangelisation will never be able to be ticked off as a completed job. But is that really a problem which has only existed from the Reformation? And wouldn’t self-evangelisation remain just as important even if the whole world followed one religion. We can see this in the old 1917 code of canon law which mandated that every 10 years there should be parish and diocesan ‘missions’ by Catholics to Catholics. That principle remains in the New Code.
While this is a well written and very thorough article (intellectually), it seems to lack the depth of both the Spirit and of the heart…
The factual statements, encyclicals, quotes, and history presented supporting (the past) “Missionary Activity to Convert Jews” leaves out the most important teaching of all – which is the command given by Jesus, Himself, to: “love one another as I have loved you…” (John 13: 34)
The “intellect” is quite limited with its ability to love. At most it can allow for a decision of the will, against contradictory feelings, but unless it is directed to do so, it can (and often does) become lost in rigidness. Jesus never intended that we try to change or force (convert) people to accept Him but rather (only) that we love them! If they know that we are Christians by our love, they will then be attracted to Jesus and WANT to draw close to Him.
I, personally, have known many Jews who love God immensely, as Jews. We, as Christians, (profess to) love the very SAME God that they do! It is not our task to decide whose love is more real or better. God alone knows each and every heart.
By forcing our personal views about God upon another, we could essentially drive them away from God rather than closer to Him. God alone does the converting. Our job is simply to love them, even if we must put aside our intellectual understanding in order to do so!
Thank you John, you make some very good points. An intellectual disagreement should never cause moral judgements about others. It is an all too human failing to assume that those who disagree with our own opinions must be mad or bad. So, yes, there are good people who are Christians and Jews. Religious disagreements should never be reduced to the prejudice of blanket condemnations and criticisms.
But perhaps there is also sometimes a risk of falling into the opposite prejudice of assuming that good people must have right ideas. Perhaps good people can love their neighbours whilst also having intellectual disagreements (?).