A Dreadful Mistake

It seems, if I correctly understand the authors responding to Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., (10/21) that I may have made a dreadful mistake. Whatever was I thinking when I responded to Jesus’ gracious invitation and entered the church? Whatever was God thinking? Didn’t he know that I, as a Jew, didn’t need to be evangelized?

Of course, I wasn’t a practicing Jew at the time. Does that matter? Is the Gospel to be irrelevant to Jews as individuals, or to Jews as a people? Perhaps agnostic or atheistic Jews might appropriately be evangelized, while only observant Jews should be exempted from hearing about Jesus? Now, would that be just Orthodox observant Jews, or perhaps also Conservative Jews; what then about Reform Jews? Or are we talking issues of genetics and ethnicity here? (Non-practicing baptized Catholics are part of the covenant toodo they then not need evangelization either?)

St. Edith Stein, help me! Or did you make a dreadful mistake, too? Oh, yes, you died before the rules changed, so you’re O.K.

Of course God’s covenants (plural, please) with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David et al., have never been revoked. But when did Catholic tradition begin to set aside inconvenient biblical truths, rather than learn to live with the tension between seemingly incompatible precepts? We used to call these mysteries.

Cardinal Dulles, always polite, terms the views expressed in Covenant and Mission ambiguous, if not erroneous. To this observer, they appear deficient, defective and distorted. I think it is clear who is making a dreadful mistake. Perhaps evangelization (as opposed to proselytization) might be best understood as proclaiming the Gospel, forthrightly and honestly, to everyone who is willing to listen.

Robert V. Levine