by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Keep on Marching, Ctd.
"I have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of an American epoch." That’s Taylor Branch, describing his method in his great trilogy America in the King Years. Branch will be our guest in the Faith & Culture conversation series at Georgetown tonight, and as it happens, a personal story that took place 50 years ago tonight is utterly apt for the themes of the conversation series. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — who inspired King, mentored him, and marched with him — goes on an urgent mission to the Second Vatican Council, where a declaration on the church’s understanding of the Jewish people is facing fierce resistance from traditionalist cardinals. Branch, in Pillar of Fire, tells the story, in a way that makes clear just how far — if not far enough, alas — we have come:
As King headed for Chicago, Heschel flew from Idlewild to Rome for emergency intercession with Cardinal Bea at the Vatican. Word had leaked into the New York Times a month earlier of Bea’s long-standing consultation with Jewish leaders before November 18, when the Vatican Council formally opened debated on the 399-word schema entitled “The Relation of Catholics to Non-Christians and Especially the Jews.” In a jolting departure from the hushed pomp of two thousand church fathers in spectacular raiments, three Patriarchs denounced the schema as a political surrender to Israel, and Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini — Archbishop of Palermo, Sicily, spokesman for the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy — accused Cardinal Bea of heresy, saying the integrity of the faith forbade “giving honorable mention” to Jews. When Bea rose to address the crisis himself the next day, November 19, bishops in St. Peter’s Basilica applauded before he spoke a word.
