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?