Nostra Aetate, Forty Years after Vatican II
Anniversary Conference of the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry
Rabbi David Rosen
Rome, October 27, 2005
The late Pope John Paul II described the Declaration Nostra Aetate that emanated from the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council as “an expression of Faith” and “an inspiration of the Holy Spirit, as a word of Divine Wisdom”.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry has described the impact of Nostra Aetate as “an astonishing transformation.” Indeed in relation to the Jewish People the implications were truly revolutionary in the most positive sense of the word. With the promulgation of this declaration, a people – formerly viewed at best as a fossil but more often as cursed and condemned to wander and suffer – was now officially portrayed as beloved by God and somehow very much still part of the Divine plan for humankind.
In his visit to the Rome synagogue in 1986, Pope John Paul II referred to the Jewish people as “the beloved elder brothers of the Church.” He developed this idea with his own notable formulation of the essential message of Nostra Aetate. One of the occasions on which I was privileged to meet with John Paul II was in Assisi in January 1993 on the occasion of the gathering he had convened for prayer for peace in the Balkans. In receiving me and my colleague, he declared, “I have said, you (the Jewish People) are the beloved elder brother of the Church of the original Covenant never broken and never to be broken.”
This phrase does not just reflect a transformation in attitude and teaching towards the Jews; it has profound implications for the Church in terms of its own theology.
Indeed Pope Benedict XVI himself has said that the Church has not yet fully discovered all the profound implications of Nostra Aetate. Part of the reason for this lies in the very novelty of the Declaration. Cardinal Augustin Bea at the time of the declaration’s promulgation emphasized its ground-breaking nature. Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, former President of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry, elaborated on this idea further affirming that never before had such “a systematic, positive, comprehensive, careful and daring presentation on Jews and Judaism been made in the Church by a Pope or a Council.”
Moreover Catholic theologians such as Michel Remaud have noted that “of all the documents promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, that on the Jews is the only one which contains no reference whatsoever to any of the Church’s teachings – patristic, conciliar or pontifical.” There are, therefore, in paragraph 4 of Nostra Aetate and in the Holy See’s 1974 “Guidelines and Suggestions for the Implementation of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, No. 4,” innovative elements and hence radical changes. As Prof. Father John Pawlikowski has put it, in returning to Romans 9-11, Nostra Aetate in fact said that “the Church is now taking up where Paul left off in his insistence that Jews remain part of the Covenant after the Resurrection despite the theological ambiguity involved.” This is not to ignore the fact that the text itself in its final version after much argument and many compromises, fell disappointingly short of the originally proposed text, which we now know was the hope and intention of Pope John XXIII.
As has also been pointed out frequently, the implications of Nostra Aetate can only be properly understood in the light of subsequent teaching of the Magisterium – in particular, the aforementioned “Guidelines,” the 1985 “Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church,” the statements of Pope Paul VI, and in particular the extensive body of Pope John Paul II’s declarations on this subject, as well as those of various Episcopal conferences. This dynamic had sought to preclude any negative interpretations which might otherwise have been possible in expounding the text of Nostra Aetate itself. Thus as Dr. Eugene Fisher has pointed out, in Pope John Paul II’s articulation concerning God’s Covenant with the Jewish People to which I referred above; and in calling for a joint mission of witness to the Name of One God “by Jews and Christians in and for the world,” he sought to resolve the question of abrogation/supersession in favor of “mutual esteem” and cast into an entirely new framework the ancient question of proselytism/conversion. Indeed a number of Cardinals and Bishops Conferences have categorically rejected the need for “a mission to the Jews.” For example, delegates of the U.S. Bishops Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious affairs declared in their “Reflections on Covenant and Mission” (August 2002) that the distinctive Jewish witness must be sustained if Catholics and Jews are to truly be as Pope John Paul II envisioned, “a blessing to one another.”
In keeping with Pope John Paul II’s statements, Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry, stated in an address at Boston College in November 2002, “This does not mean that Jews in order to be saved have to become Christians; if they follow their own conscience and believe in God’s promises as they understand them in their religious tradition, they are in line with God’s plan, which for us came to its historical completion in Jesus Christ.”
It seems to me that the 2001 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission entitled, “The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible,” published under the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s imprimatur and with his introduction, is very much in keeping with this spirit, when it declares that “the Jewish messianic expectation is not in vain …. Like them we too live in expectation.”
However the position relinquishing the invitation for conversion to Christianity to Jews has come in for strong criticism and arguably there is no other issue that remains a bone of theological contention within the Church in relation to the Jewish People as this matter.
This was already evidenced in the treatment of the working document of 1969 prepared by a special committee for the Holy See’s office for Catholic-Jewish relations entitled “Reflections and Suggestions for the Application of the Directives of Nostra Aetate.” This document declared that as far as Christian relations with Jews are concerned, “all intent of proselytizing and conversion is excluded.” Yet the “Guidelines” that were promulgated in 1974 by the newly established Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry on the basis of the working document, did not include this explicit directive, though the Commission’s President, Cardinal Willebrands, did echo this view on a number of occasions. Similarly, at the significant Jewish-Catholic International Liaison Committee meeting in Venice in 1978, Professor Tommaso Frederici presented his study outline on “The Mission and Witness of the Church” in which he called for a formal renunciation of actively seeking the conversion of Jews. While Jewish organizations translated the text from Italian and published in its original full form, in the Holy See’s official published version of Frederici’s lecture issued a few years later, this call had been substantially qualified to reject only “undue proselytization.” Evidently even though the Church has repudiated proselytizaton and no longer allocates material resources for the conversion of the Jews, the theological position of the Church still awaits full clarification from the Holy See.
Some Catholic scholars have suggested that the very reason that there has not been more theological reflection exploring the meaning and power of Nostra Aetate on the part of the Church is precisely because the document obliges Christian theologians to rethink their Christology and ecclesiology in keeping with the idea of God’s abiding covenant with the Jews. Indeed there are some recent signs not only of a reluctance to do so, but even of attempts to minimize this very idea and the significance of Nostra Aetate itself. For example in May 2003 an interview with an Italian theologian (Ilaria Morelli) was published by the Zenit News Service expressing the position that as Nostra Aetate is a pastoral document it has no doctrinal authority and that to attribute such to it would be “greatly [dis]ingenuous” and a “historical error.”
This attitude echoes positions that I hear from some Christian theologians and clergy in the Holy Land and the Arab world, who claim that Nostra Aetate was nothing less than a contextual product of European Christian guilt over the Shoah and thus its reappraisal of Jews and Judaism is not really relevant for them.
Moreover, Cardinal Avery Dulles, who criticized the aforementioned dialogue document “Reflections on Covenant and Mission,” stated at the Nostra Aetate 40th anniversary conference in Washington last March that it is “an open question whether the Old Covenant remains in force today” and has opined that it is still a Catholic duty to invite Jews to receive the Christian faith (his text has recently been printed in the publication First Things).
As an outside observer, it would appear to me that these comments categorically contradict the late Pope John Paul II’s clearly articulated teachings on the subject, as well as those of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry and several statements of leading Bishops’ Conferences. I must confess to some disappointment that there no refutation, distancing, or at least clarification on this from the Church authorities in Rome.
It appears to me that there is a pressing need for a clear reaffirmation of the Magisterium in this regard. Without such, there will remain not only an unhealthy ambiguity in our relationship, but we will continue to have to deal with unfortunate and unnecessary tensions regarding motives, including the presence and role of specific personalities in the Church whose background is particularly pertinent to this relationship.
In many parts of the world the internalization at all levels within the Church of the essence of Nostra Aetate and its positive teaching regarding Jews and Judaism is a great success story. This of course is especially the case where Catholic communities live alongside vibrant Jewish communities and interact positively with them – the United States of America is the most striking example of this. However there are places in the world where my travels take me, where I find that even the content of Nostra Aetate itself is often unknown to Catholic leaders let alone the rank and file.
One of the most important relevant instructions to bishops regarding Christian-Jewish relations was issued last year by the Holy See’s Congregation for Bishops, in its Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004, p.31, no. 19): “The Second Vatican Council recalls the spiritual bond uniting the people of the New Testament with the descendants of Abraham. By virtue of this bond, the Jewish People have a special place in the Church’s regard for members of non-Christian religions: to them ‘belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ’ (Rom 9:4-5). The Bishop should promote among Christians an attitude of respect towards these our ‘elder brothers,’ so as to combat the risk of anti-Semitism, and he should be vigilant that sacred ministers receive an adequate formation regarding the Jewish religion and its relation to Christianity.”
I sincerely congratulate the Holy See’s Congregation for Bishops for this important directive and pray that it will be full implemented. Yet to the best of my knowledge Nostra Aetate and the subsequent relevant teachings of the Magisterium on Jews, Judaism and Israel are still not even a required component of the curriculum for the formation of priests throughout the Catholic world. Ensuring that the fruits of Nostra Aetate are more firmly embedded in the formal fabric of the Church seems to me to be a principle challenge ahead for the Church.
All this is of course in no way to minimize the achievements of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry and the important documents it has produced. In response to the establishment of this Commission, the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Relations (IJCIC) was established to represent World Jewry to the Holy See and it is currently my privilege to be President of this body. These two bodies constitute the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee to which I have referred and which has produced some dozen important joint statements on a wide spectrum of contemporary challenges reflecting what Nostra Aetate describes as our “shared patrimony,” without in any way minimizing regard and respect for the profound differences that make us two separate faith communities. This collaboration is the blessed and impressive fruit of Nostra Aetate.
However, inevitably in the same way as the sociological context has determined the degree to which the fruits of Nostra Aetate have been internalized in the Catholic world; the extent to which Jewish communities have understood and responded to the changes has also varied according to the degree to which those communities function in living engagement with Catholic neighbors. Thus we have seen throughout the majority of the American Jewish community a sea change in attitudes towards the Catholic Church, to the point where arguably no other religious community is viewed by U.S. Jewry as more