Nostra Aetate wasn’t a cure for antisemitism, only the start of repentance
Last week, at the conference “Nostra Aetate: In Their Age and In Ours,” we gathered to mark sixty years since the Catholic Church publicly renounced theological antisemitism and began reconsidering its relationship with the Jewish people.
It should have been a moment of commemoration. Instead, as the day unfolded, particularly through historian Sarah Han’s searing lecture, some voices made clear that the Church has never fully accepted the implications of the document it celebrates.
It was the first Catholic document in history to speak directly about Jews. It was inspired in part by French Jewish historian Jules Isaac, who argued that Christian anti Judaism had helped prepare the ground for the Holocaust. Pope John XXIII agreed that the Church had a moral obligation to confront this past.
But the comforting narrative the Church still clings to, that antisemitism at Vatican II was confined to “the margins,” voiced by a few fringe extremists, is simply not true. Han showed, with unsettling clarity, that antisemitism sat at the center of the Council’s debates themselves.
Han reminded us that one of the most vocal and organized factions at the Council, the Coetus Internationalis Patrum, led by Archbishop Lefebvre, Bishop Carli, and Cardinal Ruffini, openly defended anti-Jewish theology as Catholic tradition.
Under the banner of “protecting Catholic identity,” they argued that Christian truth required an anti-Jewish stance. Their opposition was not subtle: they saw any shift toward Judaism as a threat to the Church itself.
Alongside them, what Han called the “apologetic choir” attacked the declaration as a Zionist conspiracy. Some claimed Jews were “arrogant,” “provocative,” even “Eurasian,” the vocabulary of classic antisemitic propaganda.
One cardinal declared that the Church “cannot oppose the entire Arab world just to satisfy its Jews,” as though Jewish theological dignity were a bothersome political request. A prominent theological adviser added: “The Jews are so clever that they have succeeded in dividing Christians.”
To call this “antisemitism at the margins,” Han argued, is to participate in a carefully crafted illusion. It is not an innocent scholarly phrase. It is a strategy, a way of pushing antisemitism out of sight, protecting the Church’s self-image, and insisting that the hatred lived outside Christianity rather than within it.
The Council’s difficulty in articulating any positive theology of Judaism was not a bureaucratic accident. It reflected a deep structural reality: for nearly two thousand years, Christianity had defined itself against Judaism. Whenever the Church feared losing its exclusive claim to be the “sole People of God,” anti-Judaism returned.
That dynamic did not disappear after 1965. It continued, sometimes quietly, sometimes openly, into the decades that followed. It still shapes Catholic thought today.
The phrase “antisemitism at the margins” allows the Church to congratulate itself for Nostra Aetate while ignoring the persistence of anti-Jewish patterns in religious textbooks, catechism classes, preaching, and theologies of “fulfilled” or “spiritualized” Judaism.
The door opened in 1965, but what stands behind it is nothing less than the theological core of Catholic identity. Walking through it means confronting where antisemitism lived, and still lives, at the very heart of Christian thought.
That is the work the Church has not yet done.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-878943
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
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