I am pleased
to learn that you occasionally visit Catholic churches on Sunday mornings. It shows a
willingness to make a direct examination, I hope sympathetically, of the heart of
Catholicity, its Sacrifice of the mass, which the Church holds to have displaced the
Mosaic sacrifices, that are no more.
The Mass must have appeared to you to be a rather strange performance, as it
did to me until I began to seriously study its significance. To non-Catholics it often
appears to be mere ceremonialism, interwoven with superstitions, whereas every movement of
the priest at the altar, and the responses of the people in the congregation, is a sublime
expression of love of, dependence upon, and obedience as well as petition to God directly,
and to Him through the Lily of Israel, the mother of the Lamb of God who was sacrificed on
the altar of the cross for you and for me.
I wish you would realize the significance of the Gospel you heard Father
D.... read on the occasion of your recent attendance at Mass, viz. - "And the child after eight days was circumcised, and they
named him Jesus."
Evidently you listened not with understanding, which your query
makes evident, viz.,
"Why does not the Catholic Church incorporate this
(circumcision) ritual into the proceedings of the Church?"
Your visit to the Church in Los Angeles must have been
on the feast day of the Circumcision of Our Lord, which is celebrated on the first day of
each year, when the Gospel of St. Luke (2:21) is read to the standing members of
the congregation. It is the feast that honors the Covenant God made with Abraham, the laws
of which Moses outlined. That occasion signified obedience to the will of God and respect
for the divinely ordered ritual of the Old Dispensation. Jesus, as a Jew, was subject to
the ceremonialism of the Jewish Church, as was His mother Mary, who voluntarily went
through the ritual purification ceremony in the Temple, at Jerusalem, soon after she had
brought forth her Son in Bethlehem. It is, inferentially, a public recognition of Judaism
of old, with its priesthood, sacrifices and Temple, as the only then existing organic
spiritual community of God's making.
Incidentally, it may interest you to know that Catholic regard for the Israel
of the Lord-God is shown by the Church in the Old Testament personages she honors in her
liturgy on a half hundred occasions every year. Among them are Abraham, Moses, Aaron,
Isaiah, David, Elias, Daniel, the mother of the Machabees with her seven sons, martyrs for
Judaism, and others. They are saints of the Old Dispensation, whose names adorn the pages
of her Roman Martyrology. By honoring those illustrious Jewish personages, the Catholic
Church honors Judaism of old as the mother of Christianity. This is added evidence that
conversion from the Synagogue to the Church is based upon love of the faith of our fathers
in Israel, which fulfilled its mission in bringing forth the Messiah and His Church.
To ask the Catholic Church to incorporate circumcision into her ritual, is
asking Christians to become Jews. Circumcision, as a religious rite, embodies the
obligation to observe the Mosaic Law in those other aspects that have been voided, having
been supplanted by the Law of Christ.
Circumcision was commanded exclusively for Jews, that is, as a religious
ceremony. It made them a religious people apart. They were a spiritual aristocracy that
would not tolerate the uncircumcised within their family circle. That is why Jews would
not permit slaves into their houses, nor a "stranger" to participate with them
in the meal of the paschal lamb, unless they submitted to circumcision. The Talmud goes so
far in Jewish exclusiveness as to say that a circumcised Israelite never goes to hell, to
quote -
"Rabbi Levi said Abraham sits at the gate of hell and does not
permit any circumcised Israelite to enter. But if any appear who happen to have sinned
unduly, these he (by an indescribable contrivance) causes to become uncircumcised and lets
pass without scruple into the region of torment -" (Yalkut Chadash, fol.
121, col. i. sec. 3).
Circumcision was for the posterity of Abraham; it
marked them out as distinct from the idolatrous nations that surrounded them. It was a
practice to be obeyed in fulfillment of the covenant God made with Abraham, "between
Me and you, and thy seed after thee" (Gen. 17:10). Circumcision was a Jewish
sign, an evidence, an assurance that the Jews were the children of the promise, the people
from whom the Messiah would come out of the loin of Abraham. That is one of the reasons
Pope Pius XI could say that "Abraham is Our prophet, Our patriarch, . . . We are all
semites spiritually."
The question of circumcision was discussed in the first years of the Catholic
Church, when converts from the Synagogue held that Gentiles who became Christians should
be circumcised before they were baptized (Acts 15). The Council of Jerusalem (A.D.
49) decided for all time that the Mosaic Law, the ceremonial part of it, would no
longer be binding. Baptism, a spiritual circumcision, took its place (Col. 2:12-18).
It is a sacrament that was instituted by Jesus the Messiah to make man a son of the New
Covenant. Circumcision was an initiatory act that made man a member of an exclusive group
in society that had God's Law in its keeping. Baptism is universal instead of exclusive.
It is dependent upon belief, not birth. It wipes out the stain of the sin of Adam from the
soul of man, thus making him one with the Messiah through incorporation into His Mystical
Body, the Church.
Some day, if the light of Christian faith penetrates your being, which God
grant soon, you will realize that your suggestion is an invitation to inheritors of
Judaism-full-blossomed to go back ceremoniously into the seed from which their faith
sprouted. |