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Jews Attack The Vatican Again - Demand That "Anti-Semitic" Nun Not Be Beatified

Thread ID: 14160 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2004-06-12

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Valley Forge [OP]

2004-06-12 23:50 | User Profile

[COLOR=Blue][SIZE=4]New Furor Over Gibson’s Muse[/SIZE][/COLOR] Vatican’s move to beatify anti-Semitic nun draws interfaith ire. Stewart Ain - Staff Writer

In the wake of Mel Gibson’s box office blockbuster “The Passion of the Christ,” which sparked a crisis in Jewish-Christian relations, the 19th century German mystic whose writings Gibson relied on for the negative portrayal of Jews is about to become beatified, touching off a new storm of protests.

[B]“Why do this when it will be painful to us?” asked Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who was Gibson’s most vocal critic in the run-up to “The Passion.”[/B]

The Rev. John Pawlikowski, a Catholic priest and director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, pointed out that the “worst parts of the film about Jews and Judaism are supposed to have come from her writing.”

He was referring to Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, who the Vatican reportedly is set to beatify Oct. 3. Such a move is the last step in a process that could lead to sainthood.

Although Gibson relied on the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, the filmmaker said he also borrowed heavily from Sister Emmerich’s book, which presents her own “eyewitness” accounts of the lives of Mary and Jesus, including the Crucifixion.

The Catholic News Service reported that Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit in Rome who has championed her cause, said that in making the decision to beatify her, the Vatican ignored her writings.

“She is being judged not on the basis of what she has written but, as always, on the basis of her virtues,” Gumpel was quoted as saying.

Rabbi David Rosen, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee in Jerusalem, said he wrote to the Vatican several weeks ago and received a similar response. He said the Vatican explained that “beatification does not mean that the person was 100 percent kosher, only that the actions attributed to the person are worthy of emulation.”

“More important is that they have acknowledged that that book that is the basis for Gibson’s inspiration … has nothing to do with the process of beatification,” Rabbi Rosen said.

“Does that make us happy? No. Are we concerned about it? Yes, because in the wake of the Gibson movie one would have expected a certain degree of sensitivity on the part of the Vatican as to how it would be viewed,” he said.

In a letter last week to Catholic Church officials in Rome, the United States and Germany, Foxman expressed “great distress” over the beatification plans. He said Sister Emmerich’s visions, as recounted in writings attributed to her, have “fomented hatred and anti-Semitism.” And he said beatifying her “could cause harm to Jewish-Catholic relations,” especially in the aftermath of the Gibson movie.

Told that the Vatican is saying it ignored her writings in deciding to beatify Sister Emmerich, Foxman said in an interview, “How do you beatify the good and ignore the bad?”

Sister Emmerich lived from 1774 until 1824. As a child she is supposed to have received visitations from Jesus and John the Baptist. In 1799 she began to bleed from a ringlet of tiny wounds around her head. Three years later she exhibited the stigmata on her hands, feet and side, and became so weak and ill that after 1813 she rarely left her bed, according to an article by the Rev. John O’Malley in the national Catholic weekly America.

An examination of Sister Emmerich by civil and ecclesiastical officials found no evidence of deception. Six weeks after she died, her body was exhumed to make sure her followers had not stolen it. The body was found to be free of “corruption and odor,” Rev. O’Malley noted.

It was while she lay in bed that Clemens Brentano, a German poet, sat at her bedside and transcribed the words she spoke during her visions about the lives of Jesus and Mary. Nine years after her death, he published them in a book, “The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ After the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich.”

Efforts to beatify her began in 1892 but were halted in 1928 by the Vatican after questions were raised about whether the text of the book came from Brentano or were truly Sister Emmerich’s visions.

Speaking of Jesus, one passage in the book said, “His body was entirely covered with black, blue, and red marks; the blood was trickling down on the ground, and yet the furious cries which issued from among the assembled Jews showed that their cruelty was far from being satiated.”

Said another: “The Jews, having quite exhausted their barbarity, shut Jesus up in a little vaulted prison, the remains of which subsist to this day.” Other passages labeled the Jews as “wicked” and “cruel.”

The beatification process was resumed in the 1980s, but with the proviso that her writings be excluded from consideration. Her application languished until Gibson said in an interview last fall that her book had influenced his movie.

Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs for the ADL, said her writings profoundly influenced Gibson’s work, giving him the idea to include Satan among the Jews; to include a scene of Jewish figures brutalizing Jesus and dragging him around with a bag over his head; to flip Jesus upside down while nailing him to the cross; and to make an earthquake that destroyed the entire Temple after the Crucifixion “because of the Jews’ rejection of Jesus.”

“It is possible to present the Passion of Jesus without making it into an anti-Semitic screed,” Rabbi Bretton-Granatoor said, adding that the movie made it appear that the entire Jewish community was allied against Jesus when that was not the case.

Rev. Pawlikowski said that if one takes seriously the statements of the Church and Pope John Paul II that anti-Semitism is a sin, they must be applied in a concrete way.

“There is no indication that she changed her views, and unless you clearly repudiate her writings you give a halo to all her material, including the anti-Semitic material,” he said.

Sister Mary Boys, a professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary, said Sister Emmerich’s writing “betrays all the prejudices and limitations of a 19th century peasant woman … [and] reflect a very negative understanding of Judaism.”

She speculated that because of the Pope’s failing health, Sister Emmerich’s beatification is being “driven in a power vacuum by certain right-wing groups.”

“I don’t understand what they were thinking,” Sister Boys said. “This is not a book that we want people to read as a commentary on the gospels. It is precisely an interpretation that the Church has been writing against for 40 years.”

Rabbi Jack Bemporad, director of the Center for Interreligious Understanding in Secaucus, N.J., said beatification is the Church’s own decision and “does not reflect on a whole range of Jewish relations. … Whoever they beatify, they beatify for very narrow internal reasons in the same way whoever we chose as Israel’s chief rabbi is chosen for internal reasons.”

“I don’t think we should get involved in this,” Rabbi Bemporad said. “What we should basically deal with is the issue of can they come out with a full and final statement that recognizes Judaism as a valid, living religion so that in no way can they ever view Judaism again as a fossil or something that could be superseded or anything like that.”

But Rabbi A. James Rudin, senior interreligious adviser of the AJCommittee, expressed concern that if Sister Emmerich does eventually become a saint it will have an impact on the Jewish community “because her writings are really anti-Jewish.”

“Here is a nun from a fairly recent time and her writings are just filled with anti-Jewish stereotypes and images,” he said. “If someone [like this] merits sainthood, it is a damaging signal and a setback for Catholic-Jewish relations.”

Rabbi Rudin said he was concerned as well about the timing of the Vatican’s action, which will come just a month after Gibson’s movie is released on DVD.

Philip Cunningham, executive director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, said that aside from her writings, he does not know much else about the life of Sister Emmerich.

“She was sickly and bedridden toward the end of her life, and people visited her and were edified by the experience,” he said.

Cunningham added that he found it “puzzling that someone would be advocated for sainthood on the basis of not a whole lot of information.

“I don’t see how, at least in the current climate in the aftermath of the Gibson movie.”

[url]http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=9533[/url]

Faust

2004-06-13 00:17 | User Profile

Valley Forge

Christianity is what they hate.

Valley Forge

2004-06-13 00:22 | User Profile

I know.

And I sincerely hope everyone on OD is aware of that and is willing to do what is necessary in recognition of that reality.

Jews only understand one language. And we need to begin speaking it soon.

darkstar

2004-06-13 00:45 | User Profile

I am happy to see that the ADL is buying more rope. They sure must want to do a lot of hanging (note to the Feds and sundry idiots: of the metaphorical kind). Perhaps they feel guilty for their crimes?

Valley Forge

2004-06-13 00:47 | User Profile

It's not just the ADL -- it's the Jews. All Jews.

The ADL gets most of its money from rank and file allegedly "good" Jews.