Judaism and ChristianityAnswered

How should a Catholic respond to the Protestant practice of calling Jewish converts "Messianic Jews"?

A viewer asks how to answer the Protestant practice of calling Jewish converts to Christianity "Messianic Jews."

Answer

You mean that in Protestantism, they call Jewish converts Messianic Jews, right? We don't divide people up into Jewish Catholics, Italian Catholics, Polish Catholics. You can have your own group of people that you go to church with. Polish people like to go to church with Polish people. Germans like to go with Germans. They sing in German, especially if they live in the same neighborhood. So that's all good. But we don't use names like German Catholic, Polish Catholic, Italian Catholic. We don't do that, because we're unified. The only names we use are those that come from the Church, like Christian, like grace. I receive God's grace. Those are the names that unify us. Those are the names that we want to share amongst one another, not anything to do with our ethnicity. That we leave by the wayside. Not that ethnicity is bad. It's not bad. But it's not good for people to overdo it with their ethnicity, make it a point of departure from somebody else. And we should be doing just the opposite. We see the distinctions. Everybody is going to respect the fact that we have a different ethnicity, and they're willing to tolerate differences. It's not like we're robots that can't adjust. We can tolerate people's ethnicity and groups and be happy and joyful about it all, but we don't want to press it. We don't want to push it. A little is fine. Too much, everybody knows when it gets to be too much. And you don't want that, especially in the churches, where it can be divisive because people might misunderstand one another.

Answered by Dr. Robert Sungenis

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