Jewish Reaction
The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) attacked the document, because the text of the Good Friday Prayer for the Jews in the 1962 Missal includes a request to God to "lift the veil" from Jewish hearts and to show mercy, according to one translation, "even to the Jews" (or "also to the Jews"), and refers to "the blindness of that people" (to Christ). In reply to such criticisms, Dr John Newton, editor of Baronius Press, pointed out that the prayer draws heavily on 2 Corinthians chapters 3 and 4, and the invocation for God to "lift the veil from their hearts" is a direct quote from 2 Cor 3:15. Other objections were raised in the mistaken belief that the pre-1960 form of the Prayer for the Jews that was included in the original form of the Tridentine Mass was being restored, a form that spoke of "the faithless Jews" (pro perfidis Iudaeis, which some interpreted as meaning "the perfidious Jews". Pope John XXIII replaced this prayer in 1959, so that it does not appear in the missal permitted by Summorum Pontificum. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) stated in a press release:
- We acknowledge that the Church's liturgy is an internal Catholic matter and this motu proprio from Pope Benedict XVI is based on the permission given by John Paul II in 1988 and thus, on principle, is nothing new. However we are naturally concerned about how wider use of this Tridentine liturgy may impact upon how Jews are perceived and treated. We appreciate that the motu proprio actually limits the use of the Latin Mass in the days prior to Easter, which addresses the reference in the Good Friday liturgy concerning the Jews," Rosen added. "However, it is still not clear that this qualification applies to all situations and we have called on the Vatican to contradict the negative implications that some in the Jewish community and beyond have drawn concerning the motu proprio."
In response to such continued complaints, Pope Benedict XVI in 2008 replaced the prayer in the 1962 Missal with a newly composed prayer that makes no mention of blindness or darkness.
Read more about this topic: Summorum Pontificum, Reactions
Famous quotes containing the words jewish and/or reaction:
“A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.”
—Philip Roth (20th century)
“Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flames to freeze, and ice to boil.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)