The creeds refer to a Church that is one, holy, catholic… Holy? Think about what Christians have done to Jews over the centuries, for starters. How do we justify the madness, the psychotic character of our revulsion and the acts it inspired that collectively and individually continue to this day to crucify Jesus — the ultimate Israelite, we claim, who reveals the steadfast unconditional love of God — on the cross of this Christian sin. “Jesus Christ, King of the Jews”, Pilate had posted on his cross. This expression of gentile scorn for the People of God mirrors the bitter gall in our gentile Christian hearts that we have borne for that People.[1] For all the tut-tutting of Christian writers over the continual failings of Israel recounted by their own Scripture, have we not done worse, far worse, for all our self-satisfied justification “not by works”?
Is it not paralleled in our own religious wars, massacre upon massacre: the pitiless struggles between Cathars and Catholics during the so-called Albigensian Crusade in which both sides showed the other no mercy whatsoever; the sacking of Constantinople and the betrayal of the Eastern Church; the relentless catalogue of slaughters in reformation and counter-reformation throughout the 16th and 17th centuries; the Irish “Troubles” of our own time…
