And Why Not? She Said
Sister Rose Thering. I had never before heard of her, knew nothing of her history, of her noble passion as a religious. But there it all was, laid out for me in the obituary section of my local newspaper. The headline read: "Inspired voice of dialogue among Catholics and Jews". What an admirable mission she chose for herself; to reconcile the Catholic Church to its debt to Judaism. She led the Catholic Church to recognize and finally reject, its ignoble attachment to the tried-and-true, much-embraced vilification of the Jews.When I was a child growing up in an inner-city environment of immigrant families struggling to make a place for themselves in this country, living among lower-class, long-settled families of older Canadian descent, I vividly recall being publicly reviled for being a Jew. A Jewish child of 6, 7, 8 years of age, having to hear herself screamed at by other, older children, described as a "dirty Jew", and more often, "Christ killer". I must have brought my concerns and my queries to my father and mother, and presumably they did their best to explain. Truth was, I was a proud Jewish child, and nothing that I could be accused of, as a Jew, would wound me personally, but it did cause me to devalue Christianity because of this blatant enmity and obvious stupidity.
So Sister Rose Thering, a Roman Catholic nun, spent her life battling anti-Semitism within her church. She contributed to a historic Vatican declaration finally admitting that Jews were not, after all, collectively responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. Sister Thering entered religious life the very year of my birth: 1936. Sister Thering, it would seem, wore a Star of David along with the cross she wore around her neck. This woman devoted much of her life writing, lecturing and travelling the world on a personal mission to promote greater understanding between the two religions, an opening for dialogue and accommodation.
She was the recipient of over 80 humanitarian awards. She grew up on a farm in Wisconsin where distrust of Jews was endemic in her neighbourhood, and her parochial school, where Jews were spoken of in whispers, mentioned in catechisms and other religious texts, as Christ killers. Although she learned the messages of intolerance and hate early in her life she found them unacceptable. Searching through her students' Catholic textbooks later in her life as a teacher, she was shocked by the overt and detestable prejudice and hate she found there.
She resolved to act against what she identified as a fundamental flaw in church teaching, and the result was a study of anti-Semitism in Catholic texts, and a dissertation for her doctorate that condemned the calumnies preached against Jews and Judaism. When Pope John XXIII convened the ecumenical council, Vatican II, Cardinal Augustin Bea used Sister Rose's texts upon which to base his draft of the 1965 Vatican document Nostra Aetate, reversing church policy and declaring that Jews could no longer be held responsible for the death of Christ.
Took long enough, didn't it? That a Christian organization which holds itself aloft as representing the glory of God Almighty upon earth could with deliberation undertake to systematically and over millenia defame that very religion and its people from whom their own beginnings and their Saviour came, finally had to admit their gross unChristianity is amazing. That it took the dedicated and spirited activities of one sole woman who demanded justice is no less amazing.
Just last week my husband I were at a local gardening centre. We began a spontaneous conversation with a woman who was looking, like us, at culinary herbs for our gardens. She was a tall, large woman, very affable, and a passionate gardener. She wore around her neck a cross and with it a Star of David. At my age I don't hesitate to make comments or enquiries at times that others might think twice about. I asked her how it was that she was wearing both symbols of Christianity and Judaism. A broad smile covered her face, and she explained she was a Christian, but she was giving homage to the religion from which hers had derived.
posted by Pieface @ Friday, May 19, 2006
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