Not Everbody Loves Raymond

I'm sure that Francis does not love Raymond! St Raymond of Penyafort was the impetus for the Summa Contra Gentiles of Aquinas.

From One Peter Five

By Edmund J. Mazza, PhD

The last thing you must do is…to convince. It’s not right to convince someone of your faith…. Proselytism is the strongest venom against the path of ecumenism.

So Pope Francis reportedly addressed thousands of Lutherans in Rome on October 13th, 2017, ahead of the ecumenical commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation (while standing beside a statue of Martin Luther!). Unfortunately, it seems the case, to quote Bishop Sheen, that “[t]he man who can make up his mind when proofs are presented [and he who presents proofs] is looked upon as a bigot.” Meanwhile, the man who “ignores proofs and the search for truth is looked upon as broadminded and tolerant.”

What depths have we reached, when even a putative Pope speaks this way!

Today, January 6th, however, is another significant anniversary: 750 years since the entry into Eternal Life of one of the most remarkable saints in Church history, one who—in direct opposition to Bergoglio’s stance—took the traditional Catholic approach to proselytism: I speak of St. Raymond of Peñafort (1175-1275).

Raymond, successor of St. Dominic as head of the Order of Preachers, created schools in Spain for his friars to learn Arabic and Hebrew in order to convince Muslims and Jews that Jesus is King and that they needed to be baptized in order to enter the Church and to attain salvation. No churchman since St. Paul had ever launched such a notable evangelical initiative toward the Jews, neither had anyone taken the Talmud seriously. But Raymond was convinced that through philosophy and literature, Christ could reign in the hearts of his own people. In his apologetic approach, the saint was very much like Pope Benedict in his 2006 Address at Regensburg: “‘Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God’ … It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.” It was in this vein that Raymond pressed his brother Dominican, St. Thomas Aquinas, to compose his celebrated Summa contra gentiles. In it, Thomas explained the faith to his fellow friars in terms intended to reach Jews and Muslims, that is, by rational arguments.

St. Raymond was himself the author of a summa, the Summa de casibus, a manual for confessors to use in administering the sacrament of God’s mercy, one of the bestselling books of the whole Middle Ages. In it, he outlines the Church’s theology of sin and repentance, and although he composed it to assist repentant Catholic sinners, significantly, he includes Jews and Muslims in the same category of fallen humanitas in need of pardon and redemption. Because they rejected Christ and His Church Jews were considered objectively guilty of “infidelity,” or “blasphemy,” but not “heresy.”[1]

This is not an unimportant distinction.

In his acclaimed work The Friars and the Jews, Professor Jeremy Cohen accuses Raymond of posing a new mendicant theology-against-the-Jews, branding them heretics for following the Talmud: “the Dominicans and Franciscans developed, refined, and sought to implement a new Christian ideology with regard to the Jews, one that allotted the Jews no legitimate right to exist in European society.” He adds: “Raymond de Peñaforte was not satisfied with simply ridding Europe of contemporary Judaism; he committed himself to making contemporary Jews believing Christians.”[2]

But far from “see[ing] no place for the Jews in Christendom… [and] trying to extirpate manifestations of contemporary Judaism from Christian Europe,” as Cohen claims, Raymond is quite clear in his Summa as to their continued right to coexist:

Jews as well as Saracens ought to be moved more strongly to receive the Christian faith as their new religion by citations of authority, by reasoning, and by pleasant incentives, rather than by harshness. Furthermore, they are not to be compelled, for compelled acts of service do not please God, Who wants sincere ones. The Council of Toledo says the same, as it distinguishes in the same way concerning the Jews.[3]

Cohen’s charges, however, pale in comparison to the heated rhetoric of the otherwise magnanimous Norman Roth: “That notorious Jew-hater Ramón Peñafort, the DOMINICAN friar then a canon lawyer in Rome and ultimately the author both of the Decretals for Pope Gregory IX and the Siete Partidas for Alfonso X,”[4] “[h]e went from Castile to his native Catalonia stirring up hatred against Jews… This Jew-hater was later made a saint.”[5]

Despite his detractors in Academia, contemporary sources paint a very different picture of Peñafort. As Peter Marsilio, O.P. describes Raymond: “Inflamed with fires of charity, he inspired a special devotion and reverence for himself among infidels also, to wit, Jews and Saracens [Muslims], who admired the excellence of his honesty and were delighted by his sweet and reasonable speech.”[6]

“Sweet and reasonable” discourse stemming from a supernatural love, or caritas, for the salvation of souls was certainly the Dominican ideal, as propounded by the life and work of its founder.

As I chronicle in my biography of Raymond, The Scholastics and the Jews, love and tolerance are not normally associated with the Middle Ages.[7] Yet it was the medieval Church, in its canon law for instance, which established the West’s first working-definition of societal “tolerance”:

Permission [tolerance] is taken in three different ways. First, when something is allowed that is not forbidden by any law…Second, when something is indulged that runs counter to human rules…The third type of permission occurs when lesser evils are permitted so as to prevent greater ones. This is called the permissio comparativa, and it does not excuse from sin. It should, however, be called tolerantia rather than permission.[8]

These words were penned by none other than Peñafort. In 1231, Raymond was given the monumental task by Pope Gregory IX of codifying centuries of ecclesiastical decrees into a “uniform” body of canon law; his Decretals, once completed in 1235, actually stood until 1917. Based on this definition of tolerance the Church was able to maintain that she (as established by Jesus Christ) alone possessed the fullness of truth and yet, in the same breath, condemn as sinful the forced conversion or molestation (i.e. greater evils) of Jews and Muslims. This medieval Christian definition of tolerance balanced both the Church’s recognition of absolute truth and the individual’s right not to be coerced in the practice of his or her non-Christian religion.[9] It is indeed ironic that Raymond—Roth and Cohen’s evil genius behind mendicant intolerance— is the same chief canonist who laid down the Church’s authoritative definition of tolerance![10]

This brings us back to the issue of whether proselytism is incompatible with tolerance.

In a Roman address on June 17, 2013, Pope Francis related the following exchange: “‘Father, now I understand: it is a question of convincing others, of proselytizing!’ ‘No: it is nothing of the kind. The Gospel is like seed: you scatter it, you scatter it with your words and with your witness. And then it is not you who calculate the statistics of the results; it is God who does.’”

And let us not forget Bergoglio’s “Top 10 Tips” for bringing greater happiness to one’s life (from an interview published in part in the Argentine weekly Viv, July 27, 2014). Number Nine was instructive: “Don’t proselytize; respect others’ beliefs. We can inspire others through witness so that one grows together in communicating. But the worst thing of all is religious proselytism, which paralyzes: ‘I am talking with you in order to persuade you,’ No. Each person dialogues, starting with his and her own identity. The church grows by attraction, not proselytizing.”

Against this backdrop, it came as a surprise to no one when on December 10, 2015, Cardinal Koch and the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews issued a document commemorating the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, calling for the “principled rejection” of “institutional” proselytization of Jews.[11]

Both Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae on religious liberty have been viewed by many inside and outside the Church as breakthroughs in her relations with non-Catholic religions. Together they have led to much scholarly debate and divergent opinion as to whether the Council’s teaching that individuals have a right to immunity from coercion in religious matters represents a rupture with traditional Catholic teaching on truth and tolerance or merely a natural development of doctrine, and the inevitable consequence of the Church’s experience of modernity.

Furthermore, in the wake of the Council’s call for Catholic ecumenical outreach to other faiths, the last half-century has seen the starkest drop in conversions to Catholicism in Western history and, more importantly, in efforts to actively facilitate those conversions. Indeed, tens of millions of Catholics have either left the Faith altogether or no longer actively participate in the Church’s liturgical life. And with statements from Francis like those cited above—not the least of them: “proselytism is solemn nonsense”—many faithful Catholics are wondering whether the Church has left its former teachings—not to mention its senses—behind.

We may conclude, therefore, that not only academia, but the Bergoglian church and contemporary society have much to gain from a reappraisal of St. Raymond’s scholastic approach to tolerance and dialogue.

As Benedict XVI expressed it at Regensburg:

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur—this is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.

Scholar István Bejczy expresses well the danger inherent in the West’s Enlightenment (i.e. anti-medieval) view of tolerance: “Admitting the relativity of our truths, we should be reluctant to condemn the acts of our fellow human beings that differ from our own—that is the basic idea of our so-called tolerance. An idea that makes us morally defenseless if outright evil shows up.”[12]

Ironically, by condemning medieval Catholic belief in universally recognizable moral truths, today’s intelligentsia could be throwing away the only true remedy to the escalating sectarianism (i.e. sectarian violence) they so fear:

Medieval authors never doubted that they possessed the absolute truth, but they developed the concept of tolerantia as a way of getting along with the untrue. Medieval authors were never morally defenseless against outright evil and condemned it wherever they believed to find it, but still they advocated not to interfere with it if this seemed to be opportune. Obviously, we do not have the same enemies as medieval people. Still, with regard to the question of how to handle the enemies we do have without going to the extremes of tyranny and inertia, the medieval doctrine of tolerance contains a lesson for our age as well.

What a different world it would be, for example, if the U.S. and its allies had adopted a “medieval” stance of tolerance toward Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and if Muslim zealots had long ago adopted the same posture toward the U.S. and Israel?

As for the putative Pope and his minions, they would do well to remember Pope Benedict’s words on tolerance and dialogue:

Christians of the nascent Church did not regard their missionary proclamation as propaganda, designed to enlarge their particular group, but as an inner necessity, consequent upon the nature of their faith: the God in whom they believed was the God of all people, the one, true God, who had revealed himself in the history of Israel and ultimately in his Son, thereby supplying the answer which was of concern to everyone and for which all people, in their innermost hearts, are waiting. The universality of God, and of reason open towards him, is what gave them the motivation—indeed, the obligation—to proclaim the message. They saw their faith as belonging, not to cultural custom that differs from one people to another, but to the domain of truth, which concerns all people equally.

Regrettably, Bergoglio directly contradicted this teaching at his Wednesday Audience of January 18, 2023, when he said:

To evangelize is not to proselytize. To proselytize is something pagan; it is neither religious nor evangelical. There is a good word for those who have left the flock and we have the honour and the burden of being the ones to speak that word. Because the Word, Jesus, asks this of us: to always draw near to everyone, with an open heart, because he is like that. Perhaps we have been following and loving Jesus for some time and have never wondered if we share his feelings, if we suffer and we take risks in harmony with Jesus’s heart, with this pastoral heart, close to Jesus’s pastoral heart! This is not about proselytism, as I said, so that others become “one of us”. No, this is not Christian. (bold emphasis mine)

If he does not recant his public declarations against the Gospel’s injunctions to proselytize (Mark 16:15, Luke 14:23, Matthew 28: 19-20), then let him be reminded of St. Raymond’s canonical teaching:

every heretic hidden, or manifest, excommunicates himself with the greater excommunication, and incurs deposition [of office], whether he be a cleric or a layman, pope or emperor.[13]  (bold emphasis mine)

Portions of this article were originally published in 2013 at Catholic World Report.  

[1]  “Objectively” in error, as opposed to “subjectively,” since no one knows the inmost thoughts of his non-Christian neighbor. Even Vatican II upheld this medieval approach to non-Christians when it taught: “Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved,” Lumen Gentium, 14. On the other hand, the fault of many medieval Churchmen was to assume that the truthfulness of the Church’s claims was practically self-evident, making non-Christian protestations of agnosticism seem shallow and “perfidious.” Raymond is quite explicit in his Summa in his own hand, that Jews are not heretics: “Dictum est supra de Iudaeis, & pagani, qui per infidelitatem Deum inhonorant: nunc agendum de Haereticis, qui a fide deviantes in Deum multipliciter peccant.” Summa de poenitentiae, I, 5, 1.

[2] Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews (1983), 14; 168–69.

[3]  Summa de poenitentiae 1, 4, 1.

[4] Norman Roth ed., Medieval Jewish Civilization, an encyclopedia, “Moneylending,” (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 455.

[5] Ibid., “Canon (Church) Law and Jews,” 131; Roth, like Cohen, fails to document a single genuinely “hate-full” expression on Raymond’s part.

[6] Raymundiana I; seu: Documenta quae pertinent ad S. Raymundi de Pennaforti vitam et scripta, Eds. François Balme; Ceslaus Paban; Joachim Collomb (Rome, Stuttgart: Jos. Roth, 1898-1901,) 12.

[7] István Bejczy, “Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1997, 365-384.

[8] Ibid., 369-370; St. Raymond of Peñafort, Summa de iure canonico, ed. Xaverius Ochoa, and Aloisius Diez, Universa bibliotheca iuris I A (Rome, 1975), I. 5. 4, 8-9.

[9] The medieval Church’s approach to Catholic heretics is, of course, another matter. But even St. Thomas teaches in his Summa that heretics may be tolerated if there are a sizable number of them.

[10] Bejczy, 373.

[11] The Gift and the Calling are Irrevocable (Rom 11:29), A Reflection on the Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of “Nostra Aetate”

[12] Bejczy, 384.

[13] “Seu occultus, seu manifestus,” is ipso jure excommunicated with the greater excommunicationand incurs deposition “sive sit clericus, sive laicus, papa vel imperator.” Peter LePage Renouf, The Condemnation of Pope Honorius, (1868), 34.