The Last Wall
In 1951 Karl Stern, a psychiatrist who was a German Jew, wrote an account of his conversion to the Catholic Church called The Pillar of Fire. Reading this book half a century later, I can see that I would not have understood much of it had I read it when it was published. I was an Irish Catholic who had no personal acquaintance with any Jewish people. This is not to say that I didn't know anything about the Jewish people in general. New York City, my hometown, was full of different nationalities, races or tribes -- each with its own neighborhoods and places of worship. We were distant enough so that we could each live "with our own." But we were close enough to know at least that outsiders existed.
Since then, I have gotten to know a few Jewish people who have become Catholics. In getting to know them I unwittingly prepared myself to understand what Stern is talking about in his book.
Hippie Commune
Let me illustrate. There is a Jewish couple that has become Catholic. The woman, having lived in a hippie commune in the early seventies, eventually married a doctor. A decade later, she enrolled herself in a class of instruction for the purpose of becoming a Catholic. Although she did not know much about the Church, she did know that it had some very definite teachings. But when she opened her mouth in class to find out what these teachings were, the instructors informed her that many of them had changed. She was dubious about this claim and kept opening her mouth. Eventually, she saw that she would have to shut it if she were ever to be baptized. Here was a person, born a Jew without much religion, now holding to the teachings of the Church in a way that many born Catholics didn't. That many Catholics didn't hold to the Catechism anymore infuriated me -- that a person coming in from the outside did, surprised and touched me. Who could have predicted that an agnostic Jew from Chicago would find common ground with an Irish Catholic from New York?
The Wall
Her husband, the doctor, took a much longer time to become a Catholic. While he went to Mass with his wife and the kids, he still wasn't a Catholic. But one day he found himself at death's door. At that point he knew he wanted to die a Catholic and so was baptized. Then he recovered and settled into being a regular Catholic. It seemed to me that he had been like a man who, swimming out beyond the breakers, could not bring himself to head for the shore until a big wave came up and threw him there.
It was this doctor who unwittingly gave me my lead into understanding Karl Stern. Somehow it came up that he (the doctor) had not yet told his relatives in another city that he had become a Catholic. Noting my surprise at this, he explained that he had always been the favorite nephew of his Jewish relatives. News of his conversion would have hurt them very deeply. I then got some inkling of how the Jewish people, whether religious or not, often consider a conversion like his to be a desertion. I began to see a great wall still dividing the Jews and the Church.
As a member of the tribe of Irish Catholics, I could get a bit huffy about Jews making so much of this wall. I never had many feelings about it, not because I was particularly open-minded, but because, as I said before, I did not know many Jews in the first place. So it would be easy for me to be annoyed, for instance, at the recent war that many in the Jewish community are waging against the reputation of Pope Pius XII. On the other hand, I know how tribes work. We Irish-Americans have very long memories about the English -- about eight hundred years of them according to the books. Why shouldn't the Jews have their own memories -- about five thousand years of them according to the greatest book of all? If the Holocaust had happened to the Irish, I would have been very suspicious about the claim that some Englishman had tried to help us. On this view of the matter, why shouldn't many Jews doubt the claim that some Roman Pope who could speak German did all that he could to help the Jews? To understand the reactions of people in the present, one has to take into account their memories of the past.
Karl Stem is certainly aware of the wall between the Church and the Jews, not only in his mind as a fact of history, but also in the pit of his stomach as a tribal memory. Why then would he, a loving and sensitive man, write a book telling the whole world why he became a Catholic? Would it not seem that he, even with the best intentions, was rubbing salt in the wounds of his own people?
Roaring To Catholics And Jews
Stern has certainly thought of this. In the Foreword, he recalls the anxiety he always felt upon meeting with another survivor of the persecution in Germany that had swallowed up so many of their friends and relatives. This anxiety was not about the sadness or joy he would inevitably feel upon finding out what happened. It was about the moment he would have to answer the question of what had happened to him. When he confessed that he had become a Catholic, the shock on their faces told him that he was instantaneously on the other side of a very high wall indeed.
Did this isolation from his own people mean that he was at home on this side of the wall with Catholics? In a spiritual sense he was. Otherwise, he would not have entered the Church. But in a very human sense, he did not feel at home. How could he, the survivor of a lost world, feel at home among the typical parishioners of a North American city? As decent as they may have been, how could they have any comprehension of the tragedy that had befallen his people on the other side of the ocean? Further, how could they have any understanding of a man who had been formed, not only in the intellectual and artistic ways of old Europe, but in the ways of the Synagogue? Finally, how could he tell these good people that in joining their Church he had to overcome the fear that he was indeed going over to the enemy?
Stern was well aware that he had, to put it mildly, a problem of communication. Thus, in the Foreword, he called himself a fool for daring to speak to anyone at all. Yet something prompted him to tell his story anyway. As I will try to show, the mantle of a prophet had been thrown on his shoulders. It is unusual for an eminent doctor and psychiatrist, who used to recreate with his friends by playing chamber music, to start speaking like a prophet roaring in the desert. Certainly Stern does not roar. Yet, as we shall see, the effect of what he says is like a roar to both Catholic and Jew alike. In fact, it is like a roar to all the tribes of the earth.
The Bar Mitzvah -- Becoming A Man
To give the reader some idea of Stern's background, let me note the account of his Bar Mitzvah at the age of thirteen in Southern Germany. There, Christians and Jews lived in a kind of easy tolerance, celebrating their traditional feast days without much sense of their deeply religious origins. In preparation for the big day when friends and relatives would show up in their best at the Synagogue, the young Stern had mastered enough Hebrew to be able to sing the scroll and even understand some of it. He would be at the very front of the congregation, singing all alone and thereby becoming a man among his people. Stern records the text of what he sung that day. Many years later, as an author, he knew that the day of his Bar Mitzvah was on a Saturday in March, when the text of Ezekiel is traditionally read. When you read the text below, do not consider it in the eyes of a thirteen-year-old kid. Rather, consider it in the eyes of a grown man who has actually seen the bones of the Israelites spread out over the plain.
In fact, let anyone of any tribe read this text, as God's promise that what has died will one day live again.
The Text From Ezekiel
"The hand of the Lord was upon me, and brought me forth in the spirit of the Lord: and set me down in the midst of a plain that was full of bones. And he led me about through them on every side: now there were very many on the face of the plain, and they were exceeding dry. And he said to me: Son of Man, dost thou think that these bones shall live? And I answered: O Lord God, thou knowest. And he said to me: prophesy concerning these bones: Ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God to these bones: Behold I will send spirit into you and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to grow over you, and will cover you with skin: and I will give you spirit and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord. And I prophesied as he had commanded me: and as I prophesied there was a noise, and behold a commotion, and the bones came together, each one to its joint. And I saw, and beheld the sinews, and the flesh come up upon them: and the skin was stretched out over them, but there was no spirit in them. And he said to me: prophesy to the spirit, prophesy O Son of Man, and say to the spirit: thus says the Lord God: Come, spirit, from the four winds, and blow upon the slain, and let them live again. And I prophesied as he had commanded me: and the spirit came into them, and they lived: and they stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. And he said to me: Son of Man: all these bones are the house of Israel: they say, our bones are dried up, our hope is lost and we are cut off. Therefore prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord God: Behold I will open your graves and will bring you out of your sepulchres, oh my people, and will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your sepulchres, and shall have brought you out of your graves, oh my people, and will bring you to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall have opened your sepulchres, and shall bring you out of your graves, oh my people. And shall have put my spirit into you, and you shall live and I shall make you rest upon your own land: and you shall know that I the Lord have spoken, and done it, saith the Lord God." (Ezekiel 37:1-14) [p. 46]
Meaning Seemed Lost
The text speaks of a man who has seen the bones of his people scattered out over the plain. But God tells him to speak to these bones so that they will arise again. The man speaks and the bones do rise again, but as mere bodies without a spirit. So God tells the man to speak again. So the man does -- and the bodies acquire souls and are led by God into the land promised to them. Here we have a vision that applies, not only to the Jews, but also to any people who has seen its bones spread out over a plain. For the God of the Jewish people is the God of all peoples.
What was the reaction of his folks to the singing of the text? Stern tells us: "When I came home, Aunt Clara said it had been beautiful, she had almost cried. This was an attempt to be sarcastic. There was a gift table with the collected works of Schiller, Kliest, Uhland and Eichendorff, and numerous works on Polar expeditions and on Tibet. The dining table was drawn out to double its length. I said the Thanksgiving for dinner. After that one of my cousins played Wagner's 'Magic Fire' from Valkyrie on the piano." [p. 46]
Unsurprisingly, the meaning of the text seemed to be lost on everyone. They were not like the Jews of old who had seen the bones of their race spread out over the plain. Rather, they were Jews who had become good Germans. Why should they find relevant some ancient text read in Synagogue? Such was the situation before the Nazis came into power.
Jewish And A Good German?
In the next chapters of his book, Stern tells us about his life as a university student learning from eminent professors all that the great medical schools could offer. He associated with their families, who embodied the intellectual and artistic qualities that the well-rounded man should have. He noted the great social unrest that followed upon the Great War but interpreted it as a dialectical materialist would. Eventually, however, the pressures generated by the rising Hitler movement began to make him, along with many other youths, conscious that they belonged to that race called the Jews. It made no difference whether they were religious or not. The fact that they had Jewish blood was enough to throw their identity as Germans into doubt.
The German nation, burning with resentment over the injustices imposed upon them by the victorious allies, began listening to a man who prophesied to them that the Fatherland would rise again. This prophecy was based on the belief that good German blood was too strong to put up with the injustices heaped upon it. Thus there would come a time when the New Germans, like their pagan ancestors of old, would rise up again, no more emasculated by the teachings of a Jewish God who became a Jewish Christ preaching love and forgiveness. As a preparation for this resurrection of the race, the Leaders would put to the wall not only those who possessed tainted blood, but also those who might protest such a barbaric course of action. Frighteningly enough, the nation as a whole seemed to go along with the Leader -- or at least did not reject him.
And so the passion of the Jews began.
In these circumstances Stern, like many of his peers, began to search for his Jewish identity, which had now become, as he calls it, "the Jewish problem." Initially, this identity was forged in reaction to the identity of the new Germany around them. As the rest of the nation were rediscovering the blood of their pagan ancestors coursing in their veins, so the young Jews would rediscover their own blood. Consequently, many (including Stern's brother) devoted themselves to the Zionist vision of once again having their own homeland in Palestine. Religion had little or nothing to do with this effort.
Religious, Not Racial Or Political
Stern, while sympathetic to the courage and idealism shown by those who supported this Zionist project, held back. He did not see how it solved the basic problem. In his view, how could a movement generated in reaction to the flagrantly racist program of the Leader avoid the charge of itself being racist? It was the resentment of the Germans at their unjust treatment by the allies that had made them recall the pure blood of their pagan ancestors. Could the resentment of a persecuted people fuel the drive for becoming a new race? Perhaps Stern had some memory in him of the vision of Ezekiel that he had sung as a young boy. From that point of view, Stern began to see that the problem confronting his people was primarily religious, not racial or political.
Into Very Deep Water
Here we have a very important turning point. Stem, who had been as political and non-religious as many other Jewish youths, had somehow put God into the matter of the "Jewish problem." The fear and hatred he saw all around him seemed to negate the possibility that there could be a merely human solution.
As the persecution deepened, Stern was drawn to the worship of an Orthodox Synagogue whose Chief Rabbi exemplified the ancient piety. Amid the personal suffering of a chronically ill daughter and the communal anguish over the fate of his people, the good man was like Job, who always prayed: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh: Blessed be the name of the Lord."
At about the same time, Stern began to meet in a small apartment to discuss religion with a German Catholic woman and a Japanese Protestant couple. In them he saw the same reverence for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he saw in the Synagogue. Yet while the Christians could understand him in his faith, he knew that his saintly Rabbi would not be able to understand them in their faith. The obstacle was, of course, that these Christians believed that the Messiah promised by the God of Abraham had come in the person of Christ. How could that holy man agree? If there were such a thing as religious truth, he would have to disagree. On the other hand, the Christians loved Yahweh and his prophets in a way that many Jews did not. At this point Stern began to sense that he was getting into very deep water. He had begun as an ordinary Jew of his times and then had become orthodox. Now he was beginning to suspect that Christ was the answer to the cry of his people.
Another Prophet: Jonah
Stern concludes the narration of his time in Germany with an account of another prophet. He portrays a meeting in which young Jewish adults with different or no religious views at all begin to discuss the interpretation of the prophet Jonah. The discussion got more and more heated as everyone got into the fight. Stern recalls this with deep admiration. Had the authorities known of the meeting, they would have shipped everyone there, both religious and non-religious, off to a concentration camp that very night.
I will give the account of Jonah the Prophet, expanding upon Stern's points as necessary. It is all about tribes, resentment and forgiveness. Consequently, it has, like the text from Ezekiel, universal interest.
Yahweh commands Jonah to leave his land and go to Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrians, the most ferocious conquerors in the ancient world. There he must preach to them about repentance for their sins. It is as if a survivor from the Holocaust were called upon by God to evangelize Germany.
Naturally, Jonah does not want to go. So he gets on a boat and sails in the opposite direction from the great city. He is not going to betray his people by warning their most ferocious enemies about the impending wrath of God. For what would happen if they did happen to repent? There he would be, the messenger who had brought both killers and victims together in the arms of a loving God! Clearly, Jonah had to go the wrong way.
Once Jonah gets to the open sea, God sends a great storm that threatens to sink the ship. Jonah finally tells the crew the reason why. To save the ship he suggests that they throw him overboard because he is the one guilty of fleeing from God. The sailors are at first reluctant but finally give in. They throw Jonah into the sea.
But that is not the end of Jonah. A great fish swallows him up. In the belly of the whale, Jonah cries out to Yaweh so that he may once again worship the Lord in Jerusalem. [And Jonah vows to offer a Thanksgiving (Toda) sacrifice (Chapter 2). Editor] God hears the man's prayer; so the whale then spits him up on the shore. God is not only merciful; he is also determined. For this particular shore is where Jonah is supposed to have gone in the first place.
Jonah finally does the job he has been sent to do and, just as he had feared, everyone in the city does penance, starting with the High King and ending with the dogs and the cattle. The Bible then tells us: "Jonah was very indignant at this; he fell into a rage. He prayed to Yahweh and said, 'Ah, Yahweh, is not this just as I said would happen when I was still at home? That was why I went and fled to Tarshish (the end of the earth); I knew that you were a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in graciousness, relenting from evil. So now, Yahweh, please take away my life, for I might as well be dead as go on living." Jonah seems to have forgotten how God had saved him as he was going the wrong way. But God does not point this out to him. He merely asks Jonah whether he has a right to be angry and then lets his prophet go off to a place over-looking the city so that he can sulk. God then arranges that a big-leafed castor plant grow up so that the man can soothe his ill humor and have some shelter from the burning wind and sun.
The rest of the story goes as follows: "But at dawn the next day, God arranged that a worm should attack the castor-oil plant -- and it withered. Next, when the sun rose, God arranged that there should be a scorching east wind; the sun beat down so hard on Jonah's head that he was overcome and begged for death, saying 'I might as well be dead as go on living.' God said to Jonah, 'Are you right to be angry about the castor-oil plant?' He replied 'I have every right to be angry to the point of death.' Yahweh replied, 'You are only upset about a castor-oil plant which cost you no labor, which you did not make grow, which sprouted in a night and perished in a night. And am I not to feel sorry for Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, to say nothing of all the animals?'" Here the story ends.
The Meaning Of The Book Of Jonah
Central to this story is the resentment that Jonah feels towards Yahweh, who commands that the Jews should consider the Assyrians their brothers. Let us expand upon this theme of resentment by considering another author, Dostoievsky. In the Brothers Karamazov one of the brothers, Ivan by name, explains why he will not accept the divine promise that lambs will lay down with lions for all eternity in heaven. He recalls an event in which a dog boy entrusted with taking care of the hounds of the Colonel of a regiment inadvertently hurts one of the dogs. The Colonel is so angry that he not only summons the regiment but also the mother of the young boy to witness punishment. The boy is led out, stripped of his clothes, and then forced to run. The hounds are then let loose and proceed to tear the child apart as if he were some fox or rabbit. So indignant is Ivan at the sheer injustice of this evil, which is only one example of similar evils in the history of man that he refuses to have anything to do with a God who would permit such a thing in His universe. Even the future prospect that the guilty will be punished in hell while the innocent victims will be rewarded in heaven is not enough in the eyes of Ivan to wipe away the stain of so many evils on earth.
Even less satisfying to Ivan is the prospect of repentant Colonels actually being in heaven with their innocent victims as they sing with the choirs of angels in praising the goodness of God. If this is the destiny of mankind, then Ivan refuses to have any part in it. He will, quietly but very definitely, hand back his ticket of admission into the human race. Here we have another Jonah who declares to Yahweh Himself that he has a right to be angry over the repentance of the people of Nineveh and would rather die than continue to witness such a spectacle.
Christ Presents The Same Problem
When Karl Stern leaves Germany, he is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Messiah promised by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for Jesus presented to the Jews the same problem that Yahweh presented to Jonah. Christ told His people that the kingdom He was founding was not to be an earthly kingdom in which He would cast down the Romans and reinstall the earthly glory that was David's and Solomon's. Instead, He had come to redeem the whole world from the oppression of Satan.
To enter this kingdom men would have to forgive their enemies. They would have to root out -- in this world -- the resentment in their hearts so that the lambs and the lions would be happy with Him in the next.
The Leaders of the Nation rejected this message and, consequently, crucified the messenger. Ever since then, the burning question for the Jewish people and, indeed, for the whole world is whether Christ is or is not the Son of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Church said He was; the Synagogue said he wasn't.
Leaving Germany with the conviction in his heart that Christ is the divine Messiah, Stern still did not know many actual Catholics. He had not, then, met the Catholic Church in the concrete. Would he find that Catholics actually followed the Christ in forgiving their enemies? Would he find that they were free of the resentments that inevitably harden the heart of any race that ever lived when left to its own devices? There was no doubt that Christ had conquered resentment. Had his professed followers done likewise?
Big Cities Of The New World
At first, the answer seemed to be no. With the fresh eyes of a newcomer, Stern once stood on a height overlooking the City of Montreal and could see, frozen in the very buildings and streets, the centuries-old quarrels of the European family. In this new world of the Gentiles the prosperity of the English-speaking Protestants looked down upon the poverty of the French-speaking Catholics, dramatizing the smug superiority of the former over the burning resentment of the latter. Here, the Church itself seemed the very bulwark of French-Canadian blood and nationalism. Between the major antagonists were the Jews and the Irish, minorities each nursing their own sets of resentments brought over from the other side of the ocean. Definite boundaries of distrust marked the whole city. Despite the many friends he had, Stern and his wife still felt as if they were rabbits that had turned up accidentally in the middle of a foxhunt. The hounds and the horsemen were really after the fox. But who could tell what would happen to some rabbits that showed up along the way?
In this setting it seemed like a far off dream of long ago when he, a newly religious Jew, had discovered his connection with the German Catholic woman and a Japanese Protestant couple. There in the midst of a far more deadly hunt, Stern found, in a small apartment, the very same love of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that he had discovered in the Orthodox Synagogue. Yet in the new world, jubilant that it had finished off Hitler and his gang, Stern felt that he had found no home at all. Certainly he had felt grateful that Hitler had been defeated. But it seemed that this defeat meant only that one tribe had simply crushed another and was resuming once again its own pursuit of the good life.
The Quiet 20th-Century Prophet
In this atmosphere it did not seem that the Christ that he had found in his heart had any relevance to the new world around him. What understanding would he be able to find among the members of a typical Catholic parish who had their own particular wounds? For a while, then, Stern harbored the thought that, just as he would have to keep his own sufferings and that of his people to himself, so he would have to keep his vision of the Suffering Servant hidden away in his heart. Later Stern would see this reaction as a very twisted piece of logic. And yet at the time it was a logical conclusion.
Karl Stern recounts a conversation in which he was trying to explain why Jews in general have great difficulty with the Catholic Church. He asked the priest how he would feel if the True Church happened to be English? (Even today French Canadians, whether religious or not, periodically threaten to separate themselves from English Canada.) The priest paused for a moment -- and then quietly admitted that he would indeed have a very difficult time in converting to such a Church even should it happen to be the true one. Stern, the quiet prophet, was getting somewhere!
But after a while Stern saw that, beneath the thick coating of mediocrity (his words) that covered the Catholic Church in the new world, were fires of deep sanctity. These were the lives of the many nameless Catholics who, occupying the bottom strata in the great cities, quietly went to Church and said their prayers. In Europe, Stern had experienced these phenomena in the lives of the humble women who had spent their lives as servants in the households of the highly educated and the relatively prosperous. Not having any families of their own, they spent their days in serving other families and watching after their children. Before the day started, they would go to early mass. Stern's wife was a child of one of these families; she always loved Kati Huber, her nurse. So she and her husband had the occasion of experiencing the fact that these humble women with no worldly accomplishments were actually the heart of these households. Stern began to see the same phenomena in the New World.
Dorothy Day And Jacques Maritain
He also met Dorothy Day and Jacques Maritain, the former a convert from communism and the latter a convert from agnosticism. In the social sphere, Dorothy Day showed him how a Catholic could be a radical revolutionary in her concern for the outcasts and the poor. Though no darling of some in the Hierarchy, she was still a stout Catholic. In the intellectual sphere, Jacques Maritain showed Stern how a Catholic could be an intellectual without losing his footing in reality. What was the difference between these two figures and the many social radicals and concerned intellectuals he had met in the Old World? It was, Stern insisted, the humble spirituality they shared. They went to Church and said their prayers.
This was the reason why they could connect with him in the same way the German Catholic woman and the Japanese Protestant couple had connected. They all knew about the God who gently reminded the sulking prophet Jonah that the whole world without exception was the object of His love. They also knew that it was only by praying for the grace of God that they could rise above the resentments that assail every individual and race descending from Adam and Eve. Without this humble piety, which characterized the best in the traditions of both the Rabbi and the Catholic, they knew that mere social reformers were in danger of becoming social engineers and that mere intellectuals were in danger of becoming mouthpieces for the next tyranny that would inevitably descend upon the world.
Finding The God Of Abraham
Eventually Stern found Christ, the Son of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, actually living in the Catholic Church. By this time he had quite a sense of humor about his status as a mere sheep, quite an achievement for an intellectual. Once he had taunted his wife about being religiously superficial and set her up in an interview with a priest. A few hours later she left with the determination to become a Catholic and did so about two months later. This was about three years before he finally went to a priest himself. When he finally met with a priest, the old priest seemed to say to himself: "Here's a deep one I have on my hands." So he asked questions and then quickly gave the answers before the eminent doctor could say a word. The old priest then palmed him off to his regular catechist, a ninety-year-old woman who happened to be blind. She listened to him even less than the priest as she proceeded to drill him in the same way she had done hundreds of trainees before. Stern was finally accepted into the Church in 1943 at a local parish accompanied by his wife and a few friends.
Conclusion
In the account above, I have followed Karl Stern as he traced his journey from a little Bavarian village in south Germany, where a Jewish boy sang the prophetic text from Ezekiel, to a local parish in a North American city, where a grown man acknowledged that Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of that prophecy. From the religious perspective it is a story of a journey from the Synagogue to the Church. Consequently, it is a story of Stern's inner spiritual life as he wrestles with the power of resentment and reaches the conclusion that he must follow the Divine Victim in forgiving his enemies and thereby hoping for the resurrection of the New Israel. There repentant lions and lambs, conquerors and victims, will sing hymns extolling the goodness of Yahweh, who never forgets that all the peoples of the world are His people.
I have only touched upon the social perspective of Stern's journey, which is that of a Jew from Germany finding himself a lonely survivor in the local parish of a large North American city. Now this parish could just as well have been my own parish in the New York City of the thirties and forties, where I received my First Holy Communion and was Confirmed. As I mentioned in the beginning of this piece, I doubt that I would have understood someone in Stern's situation any better than many of the parishioners in Montreal did. I was from one tribe and the exiled Jew would have been from another. But in the last fifty years, my tribe has been dispersed and all kinds of things have happened to me. There are now many dried out bones of the old Church littering the plain.
In the light of this experience I have found the social commentary accompanying Stern's personal story to be prophetic. Writing his book in 1951, he shows a deep understanding of both the strengths and weaknesses of the Catholic parish of that time. Even more amazing, he lays out the remedy for its renewal. Several years ago, I would have had a difficult time in understanding this remedy because I would not yet have had the experience of how another survivor from Europe sees the Catholic Church today. The survivor is a Pole who experienced the savagery exercised upon his people by both the Nazis and the Communists.
The man, of course, is Pope John Paul II. I find it fascinating to see how the themes sounded by Karl Stern are echoed on a worldwide stage by a Pope he never lived to see. In the next installment I intend to follow some of these themes treated by Karl Stern. Perhaps the reader will then see more clearly how a cradle Catholic from the thirties and forties could find common ground with Jewish converts from the fifties and sixties. Still better, perhaps the reader will see how the Catholic Church, heeding the lessons taught by Ezekiel and Jonah, goes about breathing life into the dry bones littering the plains of the world today.
© Remnant of Israel, New Hope, KY 40052, 1-888-352-7153.
This item 3588 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
