Rome Bishop Claims Judaism Remains Condemned; Evokes Jewish Ire

Jewish sources criticized today an assertion by Bishop Luigi Carli of Segni that Judaism, as a religion, contains “by its very nature, ” the judgment “of condemnation by God.” The assertion, in a 44-page article in a clerical review, which appeared yesterday, was in rebuttal to an earlier statement by Augustin Cardinal Bea, opposing a prior statement by Bishop Carli. A spokesman for Cardinal Bea’s Secretariat said there was no comment on Bishop Carli’s new statement.

The exchanges were an outgrowth of the struggle in the second Ecumenical Council last year on the issue of Catholic-Jewish relationships. The final statement of the Council, which repudiated the charge of deicide against the Jewish people, was a diluted version of a stronger original declaration proposed by Cardinal Bea’s Secretariat for Christian Unity. The adopted version omitted use of the term “deicide” and “deplored” rather than “condemned” anti-Semitism.

Bishop Carli was one of the conservative prelates who opposed the stronger version. Subsequently he wrote an article asserting the collective responsibility of Judaism for the death of Jesus. Cardinal Bea rejected that position in an article in “Civi-lita Cattolica.” Bishop Carli’s second statement appeared yesterday in the semimonthly clerical review, “Palestra del Clero.”

The Jewish sources declared that in general, the second Carli article “suggests again that the last minute ‘appeasement’ in the Council did not pay and that a crisper, clearer and stronger formulation of the declaration, not its watering down, was needed to silence the virulent anti-Semitism on some parts of the Catholic hierarchy, which cannot be appeased.”

The Carli article, the same sources added, “can only be interpreted by Christians of goodwill as evidence that a declaration was urgently needed by and for the Catholic Church and that, by having watered it down, Catholic teaching can apparently go on in its old tracks as if nothing had happened.”

Bishop Carli declared, in his second statement, that after the destruction of the Temple, “Judaism continued, in fact, to survive but illegally with respect to God. It carries, in fact, always with it, one would say, by its very nature, the judgment of condemnation by God because, refusing Christ, Whom it did not and does not want to accept, it puts itself against the will of God. ” Throughout his long article, packed with Biblical and other citations, Bishop Carli insists that he is making a distinction between “Judaism” the faith and individual Jews, and he rejects any anti-Semitism.