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Tuesday, February 03, 2009

aren't these two always related?

This paragraph, especially the sentence I have in bold print,  from "The Pope's Denial Problem," (a Newsweek article on the pope's  decision to include and ordain holocaust deniers):
:

The crucial change brought about in the everyday life of Catholics by Vatican II was the dropping of the Tridentine or "Latin" Mass and its replacement by services in the vernacular. The crucial change brought about in the relationship of Catholics to non-Catholics by Vatican II was the abandonment by the church of the charge of "deicide" against the Jewish people as a whole: in other words, the dropping of the allegation that the Jews bore a historic and collective responsibility for the torture and murder of Jesus. The two changes, perhaps unfortunately, were and are related. The old Latin form of the Mass included a specific Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews, who were in some versions of the ritual described as "perfidious."

The Pope's Denial Problem
By Christopher Hitchens

...causes me to ask about the connectedness of the two changes in the broader sense.

In other words:

Doing and being church "in the vernacular,"  in the language/culture of the people is simply being incarnational/missional.
Is doing church this way and means related to the church freeing itself from ethnocentricism/perjuidice/racism/anti0Semitism/holocausts?

I am sure it is, but help me connect the dots.

How do we default to prejudice, bounded set-edness, koinonitis, and racism 
as an inevitable byproduct of "doing church in an unknown language," especially be us clergy types?

Hmmm, the proposed answers to "what factors caused the Holocaust" may be related here?
Don;t systems always kill the "other"?

As MacP once said...sorta:

"Goodbye all you neo-Nazis...I hope they give you...uh, grace...after you reoent and make amends"

Time for a temple tantrum?  If so, how do we our violence peacefully (or our peacemaking violently?)?

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Hey, thanks for engaging the conversation!