It's come to the attention of Josh Trevino and, of course, Mark Shea, that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has "declared unequivocally that the biblical covenant between Jews and God is valid and therefore Jews do not need to be saved through faith in Jesus."
Does this take Mark Shea is off the hook? Hardly. This news, following upon the "interfaith understanding" controversy of the last few days has simply provoked comments like this:
"Look, folks. This is the deal. There is one Way, one Truth one Life, that He is Jesus. He is the Savior of all who are saved, whether they explicitly realize it or not. If you folks will be saved it is through His Blood. That is what I believe and I believe that because He revealed it to us. Now, I don't expect that to thrill you. But on the day we start saying that Jesus is NOT your Savior, watch out -- because we will be saying that you aren't human."
And this:
Jews get closer to Christ by drawing close to the heart of their covenant, not by renouncing it. That, by the way, was Mother Teresa's way of bearing witness to Christ too. She urged Muslims to be the best Muslims they could be and Hindus to be the best Hindus. She was confident that Christ was real enough that he could meet them in the way they understood best.
And this:
Today's document makes clear that Jesus is the savior of all people, whether they realize it or not. It was to that question I originally spoke and there is simply no shred of evidence that the bishops denied this. That would be the essential heretical statement, if there were one in this document. It's not there.
It appears from the posts on Mark's blog that the notion that God honors solemn covenants, doesn't abrogate them unilaterally and has the ability to offer different paths of "salvation" for different people is so abhorrent to some Catholics that the bishops couldn't possibly have meant what they said. Pretty sad.
