This piece from The Tablet from two years ago adds some context to the recent crisis in Catholic-Jewish relations. Arch-conservatives in Benedict’s circle have long chafed at the renunciation of the Catholic past by the Second Vatican Council. The Pope himself attended a Passion Sunday homily in 2007 that worryingly regurgitated myths put to rest decades ago. Ed Kessler asks:
Why then are silence and inertia the order of the day? Some suggest that they are born out of a struggle between increasingly confident and outspoken traditionalists, some of whom wish to turn the clock back to a time before 1965 (when Nostra Aetate opened the way to a transformation of Catholic-Jewish relations) and increasingly marginalised liberal elements within the Church. Neo-conservatives within the Curia, it is suggested, are undertaking a determined attack on Vatican II, including Catholic-Jewish relations.
This gloomy theory of what’s really going on in Rome has not exactly been refuted these past two weeks, has it?
The Dish 