En erkebiskop skapte mye oppstyr helt på slutten av bispesynoden for Midt-Østen, som nylig gikk av stabelen i Vatkanet. Denne artikkelen i First Things tar opp skaden som skjedde, og er overrasket over at ikke noen har prøvd å korrigere uttalelsen. (Men aller siste nytt er at erkebiskop Bustros selv har presisert hva han mente – se her.)
The Archbishop for Greek Melkites in the United States, Cyril Salim Bustros, declared at the end of the synod that the biblical concept of a promised land for the Jews “cannot be used as a basis to justify the return of the Jews to Israel” because the original promise made by God to the children of Israel “was nullified by Christ. There is no longer a chosen people.”
Bustros seemed to be trying to reverse the positive momentum in Jewish-Catholic relations of the last forty years. Though speaking for himself and not the Vatican, he was reverting to the first days of the Vatican’s relations to modern Israel that Rome might rather forget. On May 14, 1948, the semi-official Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, declared, “Modern Israel is not the heir to biblical Israel. The Holy Land and its sacred sites belong only to Christianity: the true Israel.”
The attitude to Israel changed over the next fifteen years as the church began to refine its understanding of the Jewish people. In the years following the Holocaust both Catholics and Protestants realized they had failed to recognize the radically Jewish character of Jesus, Paul, and Christianity itself. ….. “These three chapters (Rom. 9-11) emphatically forbid us to speak of the church as having once and for all taken the place of the Jewish people.” …
Partly stimulated by this new scholarly discussion of the Jewish covenant Paul calls “irrevocable” (Rom 11.27-29), the Second Vatican Council proclaimed in Nostra Aetate that “the Jews still remain most dear to God because of their fathers, for He does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the call He issues.” Pope Paul VI famously declared the Jews “our fathers in the faith” in a trip to the Holy Land in 1964. John Paul II spoke of the Jews “as our elder brothers in the faith,” and insisted in Crossing the Threshold of Hope that “this extraordinary people continues to bear signs of its divine election.”
…. Pope Benedict has also affirmed this continuing Jewish covenant. In Many Religions—One Covenant, he writes that Jesus’ mission was to transform the history of Israel into the history of all, but “without the abolishment of the special mission of Israel.” Jews are still “the Chosen People,” but now because of Jesus the nations “become People of God with Israel through adherence to the will of God and through acceptance of the Davidic kingdom.” …