The True Face of Anti-Semitism, by Regis Martin

By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine, May 6,2024

Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. …

Anti-Semitism, we need to remind ourselves, is a Christian heresy that has been around since the beginning and, like a bad penny, keeps showing up to inflict its poison upon the world.

In “Veni Creator,” his lyric address to the Holy Spirit, Czeslaw Milosz reminds God of a couple of things, basic facts which, of course, God already knows:

I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.  

It probably never occurred to one of Poland’s premier poets of the last century that his hunger for concrete connection might work both ways. God, too, may have need—in His humanity, that is—for sign making, for not wanting to bypass the body any more than the poet does. If the work of abstraction wearies Milosz, why should it not also weary God? In becoming one of us, God surely did not intend, in the words of another poet, Allen Tate, “to circumvent the image in the illusory pursuit of pure essence.” His immersion in the human condition was complete, total, lacking in nothing save sin.  …