Priest calls for personal diocese for Hebrew speakers

(Terrasanta) - The Catholic Church would do well to have a "personal diocese" for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel, was the thesis of the speech given by Franciscan Father David-Maria A. Jaeger on 27 September, on the campus of the Catholic University of America, at the invitation of Inside the Vatican magazine.

The friar, who opened by explaining that he was speaking purely in a "strictly personal capacity" as "a Catholic believer and priest, a member of the Jewish people, born in Israel, with Hebrew his mother tongue," expounded his conviction that the presence, inside Israel's Hebrew-speaking national majority, of "a specifically distinct ecclesial subject", as is the case in every free country, should be useful, not only to the Hebrew-speaking faithful themselves, but also to the nation. It is the nation, he said, that is not at present afforded the opportunity to "hear" the Church, on an ongoing basis, in its own national language.

Moreover, such a Hebrew-speaking "ecclesial subject," or diocese, should be useful to the faithful of the neighboring Arabic-speaking local churches, who would thereby have an institutional advocate, as it were, within the national majority, in the distinct local church of their brothers-and-sisters-in-the faith who yet visibly belong to the majority national group.

Father Jaeger said further that the new "ecclesial subject" he was envisaging would have to be an entirely "normal particular Church", such as would be found anywhere else in the World, and he warned against "pious fantasies" and "various mysticisms." To Terrasanta.net, the theologian explained further that he did not like to see the "eminently and purely pastoral initiative" that he had in mind, associated with "poetical" theories and speculations on, say, "the vocation of Israel" or whatever, types of discourse that risk crossing the line into politics. "A particular Church," father Jaeger says, "cannot be the expression or the vehicle of an ideology."

The absence so far of a distinct "ecclesial subject," the friar observed, is noticed particularly in relation to the "national conversation" in Israel, where there is no authentic voice of the Church intervening regularly and openly in the public discussion on ethically sensitive questions or other matters that concern the nation and the generality of citizens, such as life and death issues, the rights of labour and the freedom of economic enterprise, and so on. "There is no impediment in Israel to such participation," he told Terrasanta.net, "but only an 'ecclesial subject' truly implanted in the soil of the Hebrew-speaking nation's life, "could be sufficiently involved in the life of this nation in Israel, and sufficiently informed, to become a regular participant in this many-sided conversation."