Interesting. . .

Late to Holy Week and too late to post I caught that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was concerned that the words of Scripture might be misunderstood and decided that a clarification of God's Word needed to be made lest anyone mistake what they read and heard.

In the relevant part of a “liturgical note” that the USCCB mandated to be inserted into the missalettes that are used in the pews of Roman Catholic churches was this warning not to read in any “antisemitism” into the reading of the Passion according to Saint John the Evangelist on Good Friday:

“The passion narratives are proclaimed in full so that all see vividly the love of Christ for each person. In light of this, the crimes during the Passion of Christ cannot be attributed, in either preaching or catechesis, indiscriminately to all Jews of that time, nor to Jews today. The Jewish people should not be referred to as though rejected or cursed, as if this view followed from Scripture. The Church ever keeps in mind that Jesus, his mother Mary, and the apostles all were Jewish. As the Church has always held, Christ freely suffered his passion and death because of the sins of all, that all might be saved.” (The USCCB’s Good Friday pastoral note.)

I think I am fully aware that nearly any part of Scripture can be misread or misunderstood but I also rather leery of any attempts on the part of churches to explain what God really meant by His own words.  It would seem to me that this is the most blatant form of saying that we know better than the Scriptures what God meant and therefore what He should have said.  While every Christian worth his salt already probably feels that way about every word of Scripture that impinges upon his favorite sin, we also know what God is His own interpreter.  So I would hope that we take leave of this habit of trying to explain what God really meant when it too often means denying what He did say.  That, in my own experience, has been the undoing of the Church more than it has helped anyone better know what God could have, should have, and would have said if He had only known as much as we know now.