Augustin Cardinal Bea, who had guided the recent Ecumenical Council’s declaration on the Catholic Church’s relations with the Jewish people to successful approval by an overwhelming vote, declared today that any political interpretation of the document would be “arbitrary and distorted” and constitute “a travesty of the Council’s intention.” Cardinal Bea made his statement in a front-page article in Osservatore Romano, official organ of the Vatican. The Bea article followed Arab attacks against the declaration, and was apparently provoked by those political recriminations.
Recalling that the declaration, which dealt with the Church’s relations with all non Christian religions, not only with Jews but also with Hindus, Moslems and Buddhists, to which “obviously no political meaning” can be attached, he said the section on the Jewish people also excludes any political interpretation. The section, he noted, treated, in fact, only the relation existing between the religion of the Old Testament and the Christian religion, as well as the religious future of the Jewish people according to doctrine.
Neither, he continued, is the question of the guilt of those who took active part in the condemnation of Jesus touched explicitly, and it is only affirmed that such condemnation cannot be attributed to the 4,000,000 Jews who, in that time, lived outside Palestine, and so much less to the Jews of our time. The pastoral consequences of these facts concern exclusively the religious field, he maintained.
“After all these cautious and objective measures and declarations, one can reasonably hope that the declaration will be rightly interpreted and serenely evaluated, and that all echoes regarding political aims and intentions would disappear,” Cardinal Bea wrote. He emphasized that “the Council’s intentions, and the counciliary document inspired by motives of truth, justice and Christian charity are obviously in full accord with the Gospel, and should not be misrepresented. It is a religious question through which the Council intended only to advance peace everywhere and further hopes that religion will not be abused in order to justify political discrimination and prejudice.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.