Rabbi Wolicki Looks At Traddy Catholics

Lately I've been following US-born Israeli Orthodox Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, because he puts me onto new trains of thought that take off from issues that have been sitting at the back of my head for a while. In the video embedded above, he offers some insights into traddy Catholics that I'd been wondering about myself -- now, he has no opinion on the Latin mass; he's into Hebrew. He doesn't care if you receive the sacrament kneeling or standing, in the hand or on the tongue; the sacraments aren't his thing.

But he brings up a strain of opinion that he attributes not to Catholic leadership, but more exclusively to traditionalist Catholics:

What you're hearing more and more are claims that the Jews of today aren't really the Jews, that the state of Israel has no significance, and of course, from those same circles and in the same conversations, attacks on Christian Zionism and calling it a kind of heresy. And this is a very serious issue, and it points to something very deep going on here, because it's not really about politics. There was something about Christian theology that is being argued about, debated about, that's what this is really about, and I'm gonna unpack that here.

I'm an outsider, I'm a Jew, I'm a rabbi, but I have spent many years involved in Jewish-Christian relations, and I would like to share with you my take on what's going on with Christian theology, specifically Catholic theology today, about the Jews, cuz it explains a lot of what is going on. You see, for most of Chnristian history, going back to Augustine of Hippo, this is over 1500 years ago, there was a very specific way of understanding the Jewish people, which became the mainstream accepted doctrine of the church.

Augustine famously taught that the Jews were meant to survive, but in a very particular condition. In his magnum opus City of God, he writes that the Jews, like Cain, were marked. He writes this in Book 15, Chapter Seven. OK? What he basically says there, I'm not gonna read you the whole passage, he says, quote, Cain was marked, so that no one should kill him, and thus, that people, meaning the Jews, had been marked, not slain, but dispersed.

. . . So Augustine explains that the Jews are dispersed through the lands, and thus by their own scriptures are a testimony to us. In other words, the Jews were to exist, but scattered, powerless, and serving as witnesses to Christian truth. And elsewhere in City of God, Book 18, Chapter 46, he comes back to this topic, and there he frames it around a verse in Psalms, and here's what he writes there: "A prophecy about this thibng was sent before in the Psalms, which they also read. And he quotes a verse, this is Psalm 59, verse 11 or 12, depending on if you're going with a Jewish or Christian translation,

My God, His mercy shall prevent me.
My God has shown me concerning mine enemies,
That You shall not slay them, lest they should at last forget Your law:
Disperse them in Your might.

. . . What Augustine posited was that the Jewish people are to exist perpetually in exile, scattered and powerless wherever Christians are, so that they could serve as a testimony to the punishment that comes upon a people for rejecting Jesus. . . . This framework held for well over a thousand years. It explains a world in which the Jews are in exile, the Jews have no sovereignty, and they're scattered everywhere, dependent on everyone else. That's Augustine's model, and it is called "witness theology".

But here's the problem. That model only works if the Jews are scattered and powerless. And today, they're not. Today, the Jewish people are back in our land, we've been ingathered from the four corners of the Earth, we are sovereign, and we have power. So in other words, the reality on the ground no longer fits Augustine's theology, and this creates a problem for traditionalist Catholics who look at Augustine's theology as the axiomatic, unassailable truth.

Here I think Rabbi Wolicki is probably giving traddies a little too much credit: I simply can't imagine that Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, or their fellow-traveling Episcopalian Tucker Carlson knows that Augustine even wrote City of God, much less ever read a word of it. Still, for those more familiar with Augustine, this is a telling point. But the rabbi goes on,

Now, the official Catholic Church, its actual leadership, has been grappling with this question for decades. And that's what's led to numerous pronouncements, starting with the Second Vatican Council in 1965, but it has accelerated in recent years, they're dealing with this problem. Let me take a step back and explain the problem very simply again. In the work of theology, we're trying to understand God. Augustine himself referred to theology as faith seeking understanding, not achieving understanding, but seeking it.

And what a theologian does is they look at the word of God, they look at everything God said in scripture, and they then look at the world and try to make sense of it and explain God. And Augustine looked at a world where the Jews were powerless and weak and scattered in exile, for centuries already, and they were going to remain that wayh for centuries after him, and he was grappling with the question, what to do with the Jews. So he posited that the Jews had lost their covenant of ever returning to their land. . .

Now, the Vatican has been adjusting their theology to the new reality. You see this very clearly in the Vatican's 2015 document, which was issued on the 50th anniversary of Vatican II. . . . This is a quote from that document, from 2015:

"From the Christian confession that there can be only one path to salvation, it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God's salvation. God has never revoked his convenant, "for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. (Romans 11:29)"

In this post last month, I traced this view to Lumen Gentium, "which taught that the Jewish people 'remain most dear to God, for God does not repent of the gifts he makes nor of the calls he issues.'" I should reiterate that I have little choice but to be a Vatican II Catholic. I was converted to the post-Vatican II Church after 30 years as an Episcopalian, whose 1979 Book of Common Prayer was itself heavily influenced by the Vatican II mass, with its three-year lectionary and alternate forms of worship.

But what I've transcibed here isn't quite half of Rabbi Wolicki's argument, which goes on to insist that the reeestablishment of Israel is an eschatological question. If nothing intervenes, I'll talk more about this tomorrow.