10 June 2021
Thursday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
The reading from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians reminds us of the difficult relations that have occurred between members of the Jewish faith and the Christian community. In this letter, Paul describes the “veil” that covers the minds and hearts of the children of Israel who have not turned to the Lord. Art historians are familiar with the representations of Synagoga as a veiled figure and Ecclesia as having full sight. The Second Vatican Council addressed a difficult past and gave the direction for a more hopeful future for the relations between Catholics and non-Christians in the document Nostrae Aetate (1965). In this document, the Council identified a reverence for the work of God in all the major religious traditions. This reverence did not identify an equality, an opinion held by some since the age of “Enlightenment,” holding that all religious experience sat on the same footing of faith and, as many of the philosophes of the period argued, it was rather a weak footing. Some contemporary posters evoke the same idea when they espouse the idea that “all rivers lead to the ocean,” implying that it really does not make any difference how you get there as long as you get there. Driving between relativism and reactionism is no easy task and perhaps the best way of proceeding is one of respect and a desire to be informed. We must recall here that knowing about something does not necessitate belief, but it does indicate respect. Knowledge does lead to conversion or at least understanding and perhaps the best way we can live our Christian lives is to serve as models of charity in which we preach by acts and not so much by words. In this we resemble those early Christians whose moral life, amidst poverty and exclusion, served as a beacon of meaning for others.