The Catholic Church officially no longer tries to convert Jews to Christianity, according to Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the Australian who became the third-highest prelate in the Vatican. Addressing a mostly Jewish audience of several hundred at the Holocaust Centre in Elsternwick on Tuesday night, Cardinal Cassidy said the Vatican II council of the 1960s ended the charge of deicide against the Jews over the death of Jesus Christ, but it had taken decades to work through the church. (It was rebutted in a famous Vatican II document Nostra Aetate.)

"Campaigns that target Jews for conversion are no longer theologically acceptable," said the now-retired cardinal, 83, who was president of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity.

The Catholic Church taught that salvation is found only in Christ through the church, but Cardinal Cassidy said it now accepted that the Jews were saved by their (Old Testament) covenant with God.

"There have been many reflections in the past decade, including a deepening Catholic appreciation of the covenant between God and the Jews and their role as witness of God's faithful love," Cardinal Cassidy said.

Forced conversion is still a bitter memory for the world's Jews. In the 15th century Spanish Jews were told to convert to Catholicism or leave, which hundreds of thousands did. According to Rabbi Fred Morgan, that was as traumatic in its day as the destruction of Jerusalem in 66 or the Holocaust today. The Spanish Inquisition was formed to hunt out Jews who pretended to convert.

Rabbi Morgan, chief rabbi at Melbourne's Temple Beth Israel, says the change partly follows greater recognition of human rights after World War II and the Holocaust. "For Christians, it's a theological issue, but for Jews it's a matter of the life and death of our faith," he says.

Rabbi Morgan also spoke to the meeting about the impact of the Holocaust on theology. He said: "Traditional ideas of God died in Auschwitz (the concentration camp where up to 2.5 million Jews were killed in World War II)."

Rabbi Morgan said one school of thought said it was fine for Jews not to believe in God after the Holocaust, but they had to keep their messianic expectation. "The Shoah (Holocaust) - never again. If there's no God, who guarantees it? Us, it's our job."

He said another view held that the re-establishment of Israel was too wonderful an event to be the work of humans alone. "Israel is the place where the Jews have re-entered history and taken on power as a sovereign state," Rabbi Morgan said. "The challenge from God is how Jews use that sovereign power. Israelis have a theological responsibility to make Israel as just and upright as possible."

Please note, this post is not so much about the challenge of suffering for any account of God - an important and fascinating topic I shall address soon - as about interfaith and conversion.

Posted by Barney Zwartz July 26, 2007

http://blogs.theage.com.au/thereligiouswrite/archives/2007/07/_people_who_bel.html