Bnei Miriam Havurah: Tasmania

I belong to the group called Yachad BeYeshua which is a united voice for Messianic Jews and Jews in the Churches - Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. This is the latest Press release.

Date: 2 March 2025

Vilnius, Lithuania— In a historic gathering of Jewish disciples of Jesus from Israel, Europe and the USA, the Yachad BeYeshua (YBY) conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, unveiled a groundbreaking statement on the calling of Jewish disciples of Yeshua. The Vilnius Statement, developed through years of dialogue and reflection, represents a bold and unified commitment to reconciliation, Jewish-Christian relations, and the witness of Jewish believers in Jesus within both the Church and the wider Jewish world.

We (Father John-Joseph and Brother Gilbert Joseph) went up to Launceston in the north of Tasmania on Saturday, where Father John-Joseph said the evening mass at one Church on Saturday evening. Then back to see the parish priest Fr Leonard who is Sri Lankan to eat dinner and have a good chat. Fr JJ stayed with him.

Then on Sunday morning Fr JJ came to pick me Br G in order to go and celebrate the Mass for the Carmelite nuns at 7.30 for Candlemass, where they renewed their vows.

I just watched a presentation by Angela Costley, a British Hebrew Catholic and Scripture Scholar and Theologian, on the Jewish roots of the Mass in the Temple and its sacrifices and the Passover Seder. It was an informative and excellent presentation. The question of when and how the Last Supper was celebrated came up and different harmonisations were mentioned between the synoptic Gospel accounts and the account in John.

In recent years there has been a theological movement known as the New Jewish Perspective on Paul. It has been a reevaluation of the writings of St Paul based from the context of the Second Temple Judaism and seeing Paul as an observant Jewish Rabbi. This evaluation was much needed especially with the often anti-Judaism perspectives of the past which had become entrenched in Christian theology.

King Herod in his Palace with his Nordic Princess slave girls

On Christmas Eve our parish of the Huon Valley at the Cygnet Church staged a nativity event I am calling  the Bethlehem Extravaganza where I starred as King Herod. It was a brilliant afternoon with the recreation of the village of Bethlehem and the production was bigger than Ben Hur.

This week an article about Br Stephen Joseph was in the "Catholic Standard" newspaper in Tasmania.

Daniel Deronda from the BBC series

The world of the old Anglo-Jews, who were a mix of the British Jewish way of being Jewish and the Anglican-style Englishness of loyalty to Queen and Empire, seems to be one of those lost worlds of the past. Reared on the poetic cadences of the Jacobean English of the King James Bible and the English literature such as Shakespeare was the inheritance of these generations of Anglo-Jews. It was a softer more dignified style of Judaism and Jewishness.

by Brother Gilbert Joseph of the Divine Presence LEB

I entered the Catholic Church some 34 years ago in 1987, the Marian Year, when I was almost 24 years old. I entered as a practicing Jew, dressed in black trousers and a white shirt with a black waistcoat, wearing kippa and tallis katan with my tztitzits showing. I also wore a tallis gadol during the Mass in which I covered my head with it during the consecration and other solemn moments of prayer or adoration of the Divine Presence.

Photo at the RSL Club late in the event after half the people had already left

The synod on Synodality has been occurring in the month of October and the Pope surprised many by deciding to approve the final statement with his own authority rather than waiting and putting out a document months from now. I have managed to read through some of it and glance through the rest and contrary to the anti-Francis rhetoric there were no shocking or surprising aspects to the document.