Has the Catholic Church under Francis fully retreated from her core Divine mandate to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19) by adopting a cozy kind of doctrinal “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” mindset? This past September 13, the putative leader of the Roman Catholic Church admonished his young listeners in Singapore, “Every religion is a way to arrive at God… There is only one God and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian: they are different paths.” This stunning revelation followed on the heels of his earlier statement to the Grand Imam of Indonesia, “…each cultivating his or her own spirituality and practicing his or her religion, may walk in search of God.”

If the Church, as we truly believe, was established by Christ to be a light to all the nations; not merely one light among many but the light which illumines the darkness, this means that until there is one fold and one shepherd then Christ’s Church on earth has unfinished business. Allegorically speaking, why would God’s building contractor (the Church) set down its toolbox with the house only half finished? Consider how the missionary zeal that was a defining hallmark of the Catholic Church as late as the 1950s has slowly fizzled out during the intervening decades. In fact, it is now Catholics who are now being recruited in vast numbers into Pentecostal and other sects, particularly in Latin America. But this particular dereliction of missionary zeal has been particularly unfortunate for the Jews, our elder brothers in God’s Covenant, who are thereby being denied access to the promise of its fulfillment, which is Christ. It is a false charity to withhold a vital truth from someone simply because it might offend their ears.

Case in point is the Solemn Intercessions which form an integral part of the Good Friday Liturgy. Among those intercessory prayers is one now designated “For the Jewish People.” Pre-1962 Catholics prayed “For the Conversion of the Jews.” Notice that already the operative word “Conversion” has been deleted, apparently because it denotes some implicit threat or form of hostility. But is conversion not required of each and every one of us on some level? Conversion, regardless of our present state, is designed to bring us closer to God, not to threaten our peace of mind. It is a positive value, not a negative one. So why are we afraid to speak of conversion in regard to the Jews, or anyone else for that matter?

Now compare the actual intercessions. In the older liturgy it reads: Let us pray for the faithless Jews, that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ. The new version exudes a whole different sense in which the notion of ‘conversion’ is noticeably absent. Let us pray for the Jewish people, to whom the Lord our God spoke first, that he may grant them to advance in love of his name, and in faithfulness to his Covenant.

Many people had long bristled at that pesky adjective ‘faithless’ in the older prayer, often rendered as ‘perfidious’ but essentially meaning the same thing. Yet recall that God had molded and formed the Jewish people for one specific task, to welcome the Messiah and Redeemer of the world who is Jesus Christ. Some did welcome him but many others refused and thereby chose infidelity. That infidelity manifests as the veil on their hearts which persists to this day among those Jews who do not recognize Christ. And since Christ is the fulfillment of the Covenant, it makes no sense to speak of Jewish faithfulness to his Covenant as the newer version of the prayer insists. Christ personifies and fulfills the Covenant, both the Old and the New. Logically, one cannot be unfaithful to Christ while at the same time claiming fidelity to his Covenant. That is like a person saying, “I’ll be faithful to our marriage vows, just not to you.”

Nevertheless, Pope John XXIII removed the offensive word in 1959 which only created further confusion. Many Jews have in fact converted to Christ and so there is no longer a “veil on their hearts,” but gone is any distinction between such faithful Messianic Christian Jews and their brethren still lacking in faith. So for whose conversion does the Church pray? Under pressure from Judaizing elements within the Church, Pope Paul VI totally reworded the prayer in 1970, removing any reference to the veil on their hearts, blindness, or the light of your truth which is Christ, all mentioned in the older version. Instead the petition asks that the Jewish people “advance in love of his (God’s) name.” But St. Paul makes clear that there is only one name by which man can fully know and adore God, “the name that is above every other name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend.” (Phil. 2:9-10) If the Jewish people are to advance in love of his name, (which is the Holy Name ~ Jesus) this would mean conversion, a scenario which the older prayer eagerly anticipated but which its modern replacement so assiduously wants to avoid.

Today’s Catholic Church, to some degree, seems to have mislaid a central facet of its own identity. For it is the New Israel, grafted onto the old tree, the stem of Jesse, as St. Paul tells the Romans. This was all in the eternal plan of God for whom “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek.” (Rom. 10:12) As God can foresee all things He knew that the Jews, clannish by nature, might never have shared the salvation won by Christ by taking it out into the wider world. And so “God gave them a spirit of deep sleep, eyes that should not see and ears that should not hear, down to this very day.” (Rom. 11:8) Thus, “through their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make them jealous, meaning the Jews, though not forever. “and they also, if they do not remain in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft in again.” (Rom. 11:11; 23) And the ongoing agent of that re-grafting of the Jewish people back onto the tree is the Catholic Church, the New Israel, whose job it is to shepherd its older brother, the Old Israel, back to the New Jerusalem.

This will be the final chapter of the Catholic Church’s mission, her “unfinished business,” which began with Our Lord’s commission to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (Mt. 28:19) The conversion of the Jews to Christ is thereby the final episode which will herald the Second Coming, and so for centuries the Church has prayed and worked unto that end… until quite recently when her whole attitude seemed to change. This new attitude appears content with maintaining the status quo; engaging in ‘dialogue’ and ‘listening’ rather than pressing on with the more arduous work of teaching and making disciples.

This dilution of the Gospel mandate was made evident in the very first paragraph of the Vatican II Declaration Nostra Aetate (Oct. 28, 1965) where we read, “Ever aware of her duty to foster unity and charity among individuals, and even among nations, she (the Church) reflects at the outset on what men have in common and what tends to promote fellowship among them.” No Masonic lodge in the world would ever argue with that expressed sentiment. Having set the tone, this document then advises entering into discussion and collaboration with other religions. There is no mention of proclaiming the Catholic truth to any of those non-Christians be they Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem, or Jew.

In one passage, Nostra Aetate artfully refers to unconverted Jews as “the stock of Abraham,” thus subtly sidestepping St. Paul’s distinction “that it is those who have faith who are children of Abraham” (Gal. 3:29) and again, “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendant, heirs according to the promise.” (Gal. 3:29) Rather than witnessing to the necessity of faith in Christ as a primary condition for salvation, Catholics after the Vatican Council were being advised to employ “discussion and collaboration,” lest “the witness of Catholics should give offense to Jews,” according to the Vatican’s subsequent Guidelines on Religious Relations. (1974)

But how can such temporizing and vacillation be helpful to Jews who are saddled by darkness and caught in the tempestuous swirls of human history? Fr. James Mawdsley observed that “with a touch of divine irony, by denying the divinity of Jesus in favor of a messiah yet to come, Judaism accidentally played midwife to the ferocious force that has kept them off the Temple Mount to this day: Islam.” He argues that “Mohammed, by creatively interpreting the Torah, styled himself as the “second Moses” and thus became the prophet of whom Moses spoke.” (If You Believed Moses, Vol 2, pp.82,83) Nature abhors a vacuum, and the Jewish denial of Christ as true Messiah, left a huge doctrinal hole that Mohammed deftly filled. Islam has since become Judaism’s mortal enemy.

For the pious religious Jews of today, another threat has arisen, Zionism. Few Westerners understand that it is a serious error to patently equate Zionism with Judaism. The reality is that many religious Orthodox Jews are now being exploited by secular political Zionists and have been for decades. Speaking for some two million Orthodox Jews, Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro explains that Judaism is not an ethnicity or a nationality. Rather Jews are “a people who are enjoined by God to fulfill this religion, these religious laws” (namely the Torah). Furthermore, “the true homeland of the Jew is not the Zionist state, the homeland of the Jewish people is the Torah Hakdoshah ~ a spiritual, not a geographical homeland.”

In an extensive interview Rabbi Shapiro offered these insights. “Zionism itself was created as a substitute for Judaism, a replacement for Judaism, and a way to negate Judaism. Jews had no flag. Jews had no national anthem. Jews didn’t even have a national symbol. The Star of David wasn’t a national symbol of Jews. It was a Kabbalistic symbol…

“Nationalism is another name for Zionism, Jewish nationalism. That’s all Zionism is.… The Zionists had to convince the Jews that you are not what you think you are. You are not a people who are enjoined by God to fulfill this religion, these religious laws.The only thing that united us into being a people is our Torah, our faith.… Everybody knew that the Zionists had to change that … They stole Jewish history. They revised all of Jewish history … They stripped, emptied Judaism of religious content, left the husk of whatever they could fit into their nationalism … it was a social engineering project.“

Speaking of Theodor Herzl, the principal founder of Zionism Rabbi Shapiro relates, “And Herzl, who was anti-religious, he didn’t like religious Jews. He said, “No, we need the Holy Land because of marketing purposes. We want the Jews to feel a sense of being Jewish, but not as a religion, as a nationality. We want them to have a sense of this as a familiar place, the place they’ve always longed for, but not as a messianic renewal of the world, as a national homeland.” You see, artificial Jewish flavoring and artificial Jewish coloring.” Zionism, in other words, is an artifice, a usurpation of both Jewish religion and culture. It does not liberate Jews but enslaves them to a secular nationalistic agenda. (To read this fascinating article in full, Orthodox Jewish rabbi explains why Judaism and Zionism are incompatible, go to Life Site News, Nov. 5, 2024

Orthodox Jews, it appears, fully recognize that the Zionist project is not of divine but rather of human origins. For these devout religious Jews the homeland of the Jewish people is the Torah Hakdoshah, a spiritual homeland. This understanding is surprisingly similar to our Catholic understanding of the Church. In Fr. Mawdsley’s words, “The true Holy Land indicated by ancient Israel is the Church: on earth and in Heaven. God’s land cannot be inherited by aggressive injustice and violence, but is reserved for “the meek, for they shall inherit the land.” (Mt. 5:4) He continues, “The Jews have not been without a promised land for two thousand years. It is only a question of whether or not they wish to enter the Church and take possession of that which was promised.” (If You Believed Moses, Vol 2, p. 141)

So what is the Church’s responsibility towards our Jewish brethren? Under the pretext of respecting religious liberty it seems that her current official line is to mute any inconvenient truths that may in the least prick anyone’s conscience. Both Judaism and the Catholic Church have both been greatly influenced over the past century by humanistic secularism. This secular corruption manifests itself in Judaism as political Zionism and in the Church as Modernism, most recently under the banner of “Synodality,” i.e., a democratic rather than hierarchal form of Church government accountable to Tradition. But Christ founded an Apostolic, not a Synodal Church. And those original apostles were all Jews by God’s own design. Thus the Apostolic Church has a deep historical connection with and a real responsibility toward the Jews to pray and work constantly for their conversion to Christ.

The Church has always believed that this mass conversion of the Jews will occur before the end of time. St. Paul speaks plainly of this event: “a hardening has come upon Israel in part, until the full number of the Gentiles comes in, and thus all Israel will be saved.” (Rom. 11:25) Jewish intransigence is meant by God for our benefit, as Paul explains. “In respect to the gospel they are enemies on your account; but in respect to election, they are beloved because of the patriarchs. For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.” (Rom. 11:28-29) Yet Paul understood that the separation of God’s Chosen People from His Church is inevitably something painful, both in his day as it is today in ours. “I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart. For I wish that I myself were accursed and separated from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kin according to the flesh.” (Rom 9:2-3)

Are we then to simply give up any initiative for bringing our elder brothers in the Faith back into the true fold of Abraham which is the Catholic Church? The great joy for Jews converting to Christ is that they, unlike the pagans, do not have to give up any of their traditions or beliefs in order to do so. The Torah, the Psalms, and liturgy are all present and ensconced within the Catholic tradition, though brought to a more perfect fulfillment. The responsibility is upon us as Catholic Christians to encourage and welcome our long separated brothers to return to their true homeland, the authentic New Israel which is the Church.

For the past sixty years under the unfortunate guidance of Nostra Aetate and weak, reticent shepherds we have become too fearful of criticism to extend our hands and prayers to those who most need it. “Then Esau ran to meet his brother, and embraced him: and clasping him fast about the neck, and kissing him, wept.” (Gen 33:4) The Church represents Jacob while Judaism is his brother Esau. And until the two are joyfully reunited in Faith, our Catholic Church will be dogged by this supremely important unfinished business. Perhaps we can start by setting aside every Friday to pray and fast that “God may take the veil from their hearts and that they may also acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.” (former Good Friday prayer For the Conversion of the Jews)

Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.