“Do I hope that eventually she is somehow moved by what I was moved by in church?” J.D. Vance responded to a question regarding his Hindu wife. “Yeah,” the VP—a Catholic convert—said, “because I believe in the Christian Gospel…”
And so, the floodgates came crashing open.
Vance’s sentiments “are reflective of a belief that there is only one true path to salvation,” grumbled The Hindu American Foundation. Warned author Susan Katz Miller: “To respect your partner and everything they bring…is [what] you need…in a marriage.”
Interfaith marriage is a subject dear to my heart. My mother, a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Germany, married an agnostic Methodist from Montana, who became my father. And yet I was raised Jewish.
My former wife, a Catholic, converted to Judaism following the birth of our first child. And now I’m married to another Catholic, with whom I live in the predominantly Catholic Philippines, raising our children in their mother’s faith. And yet my son wears a Mezuzah and my daughter a Star of David. All of which is to say, hey, it’s complicated.
But only a little. Because we respect each other’s faiths and don’t see them as conflicting. Which certainly hasn’t always been true of Judaism and Catholicism. “For centuries,” Catholic historian Stephen A. Allen has written, “Catholics persecuted Jews, crowding them into ghettos, forcing them to convert to Christianity, and frequently killing them. For centuries, Catholics accused Jews of ritually murdering Christian children, engaging in sorcery, poisoning wells and desecrating images of Christ. For centuries, Catholics were taught that Jews—all Jews—were cursed because they killed Christ…”
That changed in 1965 when the Second Vatican Council adopted Nostra Aetate. Promulgated by then-Pope Paul VI, it called for dialogue and respect between Christianity and other religions, especially Judaism. “This luminous document,” current Pope Leo XIV said on the recent 60th anniversary of its publication, “teaches us to meet the followers of other religions not as outsiders, but as traveling companions on the path of truth.”
Which is why I traveled to Manila in October for an event celebrating that anniversary. Organized by the Philippine chapter of B’nai B’rith, an international Jewish service organization, it was a day of religious dialogue at the Catholic University of Santo Tomas featuring, among others, a rabbi, priests, professors, and Israel’s ambassador to the Philippines. “This conference,” the program proclaimed, “seeks to build bridges of hope, promote peace, and cultivate a culture of healing in a fractured world.”
And indeed, some of those fractures have recently grown into chasms. Especially following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel when now-deceased Pope Francis accused the country of committing “genocide” in Gaza. Then posed for pictures with a baby Jesus wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh.
His action “ignores and twists beyond all recognition a small, often-overlooked fact underlying the whole Middle East conflict,” I fumed in a subsequent column. Namely, “that Jesus was a Jew.” Two weeks later I wrote another piece slamming Filipino Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David for delivering a Christmas homily bemoaning the Gazan refugees “displaced from their lands that Israel has occupied.”
Ah, but none of it has affected relations with my lovely Catholic wife. Because we actually do respect each other’s religions. Which is why, upon completing the construction of our Surigao City home in 2020, she let me mount a Mezuzah—the small vessel containing Judaism’s most central declaration of faith—at its front door.
My God, I wondered as a priest sprinkled holy water on that Jewish relic during the traditional Catholic blessing of our abode, would it hiss and explode? Would hot steam fill the room as the flames of Hell burned the new building down?
Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, a super typhoon showed up several months later to blow the roof off our house and scatter its contents to the wind.
Was it divine retribution?
I’ll let you decide.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao, Philippines. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
