CATHOLICS AND Jews: The New Relationship Since Vatican IIwill be the subject of a lecture by Rev Dr John McDade SJ at St Mary's Church on Haddington Road, Dublin, at 8pm on Thursday next, November 13th.
Principal of Heythrop College in London, Dr McDade is expected to address inherited Christian teaching about Judaism which, at one point, in the words of wartime rabbi Jules Isaac, was based on "the teaching of contempt".
This in turn was derived from a belief that Judaism was an ossified, legalistic religion which no longer had any significance in God's purposes since the coming of Christ.
This "theology of supersession" held that everything Jewish was superseded by the Christian dispensation.
Dr McDade's lecture is open to the public, free of charge.
When Vatican II was called, however, Jules Isaac approached Pope John XXIII and asked him to remove this teaching.
What neither could have suspected was the rapidity with which a new teaching about Judaism would come to the centre of Catholicism.
The central figure here was Pope John Paul II whose contact with Polish Jews before during and after the second World War made him aware of their suffering in Christian Europe.
In 2000, he stood before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and inserted into a crevice in that wall, on behalf of the whole church, a prayer for forgiveness for the church's sins against Jews.
