Bishops revise U.S. Catechism's section on Jewish covenant with God

From the USSCB site:

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The U.S. bishops have voted to ask the Vatican to approve a small change in the U.S. Catholic Catechism for Adults to clarify church teaching on God's covenant with the Jewish people.

The proposed change -- which would replace one sentence in the catechism -- was discussed by the bishops in executive session at their June meeting in Orlando, Fla., but did not receive the needed two-thirds majority of all members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at that time.

After mail balloting, the final vote of 231-14, with one abstention, was announced Aug. 5 in a letter to bishops from Msgr. David Malloy, USCCB general secretary.

The change, which must be confirmed by the Vatican Congregation for Clergy, would remove from the catechism a sentence that reads: "Thus the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them."

Replacing it would be this sentence: "To the Jewish people, whom God first chose to hear his word, 'belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ'" (Rom 9:4-5; cf. CCC, No. 839). ...

Father Massa said the status of the Jewish covenant has been "a very fertile area for theological investigation" in recent years, although church teaching has been clear on two related points:

• The Jewish people "are in a  real relationship with God based on a covenant that has never been  revoked."
• "All covenants with Israel  find fulfillment in Christ, who is the savior of all."

Father Massa added that the current wording in the catechism "was not flat-out wrong" but "was ambiguous and needed to be qualified." But because the catechism is an educational tool and not a theological textbook, the bishops decided not to expand that section to provide a fuller consideration of the issue, he said.

Read the entire article.

You might recall that back in August 2002 the Bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs (BCEIA), a sub-committee of the USCCB, released a very controversial document titled, "Reflections on Covenant and Mission," which generated a lot of discussion since it appeared to say that the Old Covenant was just as valid today as it was before Christ and the New Covenant. My musings on that document, written while editor of Envoy magazine, can be read here. And here is a 1993 Homiletic & Pastoral Review article by Martin Barrack, a convert from Judaism, about the same document.

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links/Articles:              

• Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ | Preface to Honey From the Rock | Roy Schoeman
• "Jews Demand Signs" | An Interview with Roy Schoeman, editor of Honey From the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ
• Judaism Fulfilled | An Interview with Roy H. Schoeman
• The Jews and the Second Coming | Roy H. Schoeman
• Eugenio Zolli's Path to Rome | Stephen Sparrow

Comments

[Charles in Toon Town]

There seems to be a fundamental error in the article; The catchism currently says "To the Jewish people, whom God first chose to hear his word, 'belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ'", so they must be proposing to change that sentence to say that "the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them." This blunder made me very confused as I read the article. Crazy bishops.

[Ed Peters]

So, who is responsible for the line being in there in the first place?

[ELC]

Fr. Massa must have been referring to some sentence other than the one quoted, since I don't see anything whatever ambiguous about it. Which, of course, is the real problem with it.

[Mark Brumley]

Presently, the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults states, "Thus the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them" (p. 131).

The proposed revision states, "To the Jewish people, whom God first chose to hear his word, 'belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ'(Rom 9:4-5; cf. CCC, No. 839)".

The change seems to me to be an improvement, but I would prefer a clearer statement of the relationship between the Mosaic Covenant and the New Covenant. For example, a statement that made the two points that Father Massa made.

I think the statement that the Mosaic Covenant is eternally valid for the Jewish people is ambiguous. There is a sense in which it is true and a sense in which it is false. It is true that what God has given, he has given. He gave that covenant, ultimately, to bring people to Christ. It remains "eternally valid" in that regard--it continues to anticipate and point to Jesus Christ.

However, the statement can also be read as implying a two-track system of salvation, one for Jews (the Mosaic Law) and one for Gentiles (Jesus Christ). That notion is the problem. The Church has always held that all salvation comes from what God has done in Christ. The Mosaic Covenant was and remains salvific only because it is part of God's redemptive plan in Christ, not independent of it.

[Manuel G. Daugherty Razetto]

The Catholic Bishops ought to remember that The Gospel Teachings have an approach of Inclusiveness, whereas the Mosaic Law demands exclusiveness. One could almost say that the Gospels abrogated some of the Mosaic Teachings. Jesus Himself told us the Difference between what we had been told, as humans, before, but He was bringing something New, The Verb, the Logos.