Steven K. Baum, Ph.D., a psychologist and genocide scholar, author of “The Psychology of Genocide” (Cambridge University Press, 2008), explains that when an authority in the Church makes such statements as Archbishop Acquila did in Steamboat Springs, he vests the angry, the psychopath and the psychotic to use the Jew as his scapegoat.
There are Catholics who see Jesus for his love. John 13:34-35 states: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
I had the privilege of meeting Sister Rose Thering a few years before she passed away in 2006 at which time she gave me as a book as a gift, titled, “How Catholics Look at Jews: Inquiries into Italian, Spanish and French Teaching Materials,” compiled by Claire Huchet Bishop and published by the (Paulist Press, 1974). The book zeroes in on all the passages condemning the Jews. The late Sister Rose Thering was well-versed in the holy wisdom of Jesus. Inspired by His teachings, she wrote at the Jesuit-run Saint Louis University her doctoral dissertation, voicing her concern about the treatment of Jews in Catholic textbooks.
Jesus never asked that the Jews be condemned, tortured or excluded, socially and economically. When Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, Cardinal Augustin Bea used Thering's study (and the works of many others, such as Father John Osterreicher, Jules Isaac and Abraham Joshua Heschel) to draft portions of what was to be proclaimed in 1965 by his Holiness Pope Paul VI as the document “Nostra Aetate” (“In Our Age”). Notably “Nostra Aetate” declared that, regarding Jesus’ death, “what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” For future catechetical instruction, it added that, “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.” Historically, we know that Judeans suffered under Roman occupation. Jesus was crucified with two others, allegedly thieves, which personified the suffering of all the Jews at that time – thousands of Jews were crucified by the Romans. Sister Rose realized that the Catholics’ continual verbal condemnation of the Jews had dire consequences. She understood that Hitler had been raised as Catholic. He went to a monastery school, where he walked every day past a stone arch carved with the monastery's coat of arms, which included a swastika. Mussolini was also raised Catholic.
At New Jersey’s Seton Hall University, where Sister Rose joined the faculty in 1968, she established workshops on Judaism for Church leaders and teachers. Today, there is the The Sister Rose Thering Fund for Jewish-Christian Studies. When I contacted Seton Hall, hoping to get an opinion about my concern about Archbishop Aquila’s words, my phone call was never returned. I phoned The Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See to the United States, the diplomatic mission of the Holy See (the Vatican) to the United States. A crisp voice asked me to leave a message, which was never returned. Hoping to get Archbishop Aquila’s views, I phoned his office in Denver, where I was put in touch with Karen Swanson, director of communications. Karen and I emailed back and forth, but I never received a specific answer as to why Archbishop Aquila invoked the Jews when he talked about Christ. What is the purpose of these injurious comments?
Rabbi David Sandmel, a scholar of Judaism and Christianity in the Greco-Roman world and Jewish-Christian relations, and who was, for 11 years, Crown Ryan Professor of Jewish Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, specifies,
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