AOTM tonight debates same topic that triggered Fr. Echert removal from St. Thomas University

HT Abbey-Roads

Less than two years into the new millennium, Moslem terrorists attacked the United States on 9/11, murdering thousands of Americans and sending hundreds of thousands of military troops to wars that would last for years. Among those deployed was a Catholic military chaplain from Minnesota, who was called to active duty from the classroom; this priest was also the Scripture Expert for the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) website.

Little did I realize at the time that there would be an ecclesiastical war awaiting me back home upon my return! Continuing my online work for EWTN late nights from a canvas tent in a deployed desert location, in temperatures that were 100 degrees hotter than back home in Minnesota, I had the following Q&A website exchange in my capacity as the EWTN Scripture Expert:

Question to EWTN:

Father Echert, just WHAT is going on in the Church? In the recently released announcement of our bishops they say that we can’t try to convert Jews to the Catholic Faith because of the Old Covenant and that Vatican II mandated this. Really! Well what if a Catholic said, “Hey forget Catholicism, I want to be Jewish!” Does it REALLY matter to be Catholic? If the likes of our bishops and Cardinal Kasper are correct then it really doesn’t. Have we lost our minds?

continue at  akaCatholic

I can't make it tonight, so I trust some of you can post a recap.

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'Nostra Aetate' 50th anniversary inspires Milwaukee celebrations

Local Jews and Catholics active in interfaith relations all declared that “Nostra Aetate” led to thoroughgoing changes. “As I began learning” about this document, said Elana Kahn-Oren, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, “I had my eyes opened again and again about how amazing [‘Nostra Aetate’] is.”

Because of it, Catholics have “changed their approach to how they deal with non-Catholics and specifically with Jews,” said Kahn-Oren, who is one of the leaders of the celebration events and a co-chair of the Catholic-Jewish Conference. Rabbi Ronald Shapiro, who recently retired from being senior rabbi at Congregation Shalom, has participated in interfaith relations work throughout his rabbinate, including in a Catholic priest-rabbi dialogue group.

He said priests have told him that older priests ordained long before “Nostra Aetate” tended to exhibit hostility to Judaism. “When the topic of Judaism came up,” he said, “there was the old belief that Jews had something to do with the crucifixion of Jesus, and that Judaism was a religion that was antithetical to Catholicism.”

“Many years after ‘Nostra Aetate,’” Shapiro continued, “and another generation had grown up, the priests said they never hear that kind of attitude any more. They don’t feel that sense of anti-Semitism. That was most impressive to me.”

Richard Lux is founding director of the Lux Center for Catholic-Jewish Studies at the Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology. For him, Catholic-Jewish relations has been “a 40-year passion of my life,” he said. “‘Nostra Aetate’ rejected 18 centuries of anti-Jewish teaching in the church,” he said. “It was a total transformation of church teaching.”

full article at The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle