FROM a letter written by David Goldstein, Jewish convert to Catholicism, in 1956:
Dear Mr. Solomon,
My lengthy reply to your inquiry as to how, I, of Jewish parentage, could become a Catholic, is, in summary, because I believed in Old Testament principles and predictions, which call for religious and moral guidance by God, through His authoritative, priestly, sacrificial Church. These I found manifestly full formed and majestic in the Catholic Church, that displaced the Church of our Jewish forebears, as foretold by Moses and the prophets.
I fully appreciate your feelings regarding the Spanish Inquisition, and the resultant suffering its decisions caused the State to inflict upon the Marranos, for the guilt of heresy. Whether or not the crime warranted the punishment, the fact remains that the heretics in Spain deserved punishment. Your judgment of the Inquisition is based upon failure to realize that European civilization was virtually a unit in faith during the Middle Ages. The Gospels and the laws of the Catholic Church formed the basis of legislation. Religion was considered of vital import to the State, as civil unity depended to quite an extent upon religious unity. Therefore an attack upon religion, through heresy, was an attack upon the prevailing order of society, which the Catholic Church caused to evolve from paganism, through the Dark Ages, to Christian order. Hence heresy was considered a crime by the State, and a sin by the Church. The severe methods of punishment resorted to by the State during the years of the Spanish Inquisition, which you resent as do I, were always condemned by the Church. They were not of Spanish origin. They were universal for centuries before there was an united Spanish Kingdom. Yet they never reached the number or severity in Spain that Catholics suffered in other countries for the “crime” of loyalty to their religious faith.
The people of the Middle Ages were no more shocked by the excessive punishments, than the people of our country are shocked by the hanging of convicted criminals; putting them to death in lethal chambers; before firing squads; and electrocution for kidnapping, and sometimes burglary. The Catholic Church was never guilty of imposing such punishment; whereas execution by stoning, burning, the sword, and strangling, were the methods used by the Jewish Church authorities to punish blasphemers, Sabbath-breakers, witchcrafters, idolators, and sex sinners. St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death for proclaiming Jesus, the Son of God, to be the Messiah. I have dealt with your impassioned questioning of my judgment in a Christian spirit, prayerfully hoping to allay the hostility that usually arises in the hearts of Jews, when discussing the Catholic Church with a convert from Judaism. Such hostility is due, generally, to failure to appreciate that conversion from Judaism is prompted by love, and not by repudiation of the faith of our fathers of old in Israel, as recorded in the Old Testament. I have stressed the fact that Jewish Holy Writ, which the Catholic. Church made part of the Christian Bible, contains the historic principles and predictions that prompted me, and other Israelites, to become Catholics. I have endeavored to make plain that such conversions are due to the realization that Judaism has been divinely transformed from the Church of an exclusive people, to full stature in the Universal Church, wherein its ancient potentialities are seen manifesting in all their religious and moral glory.
(Warning: The website cited promotes serious errors under false, modernist “Traditionalism.”)
