Commentary Says Church Has Not Fully Faced Antisemitism Behind Nostra Aetate

The Catholic Church marked sixty years since it publicly renounced theological antisemitism and began reconsidering its relationship with the Jewish people at a conference titled “Nostra Aetate: In Their Age and In Ours,” held the previous week. The column’s author describes the day as one that should have been a commemoration, but which, particularly through historian Sarah Han’s lecture, showed that the Church has never fully accepted the implications of the document it celebrates.

Nostra Aetate, the column explains, is a short, non-dogmatic declaration of the Second Vatican Council, promulgated in October 1965. It was the first Catholic document in history to speak directly about Jews. It was inspired in part by the French Jewish historian Jules Isaac, who argued that Christian anti-Judaism had helped prepare the ground for the Holocaust, and Pope John XXIII agreed that the Church had a moral obligation to confront that past.

Han argued that the view that antisemitism at the Council was confined to “the margins” and voiced by a few fringe extremists does not hold up. She drew heavily on the testimony of Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich, a Jewish adviser to Cardinal Bea during the drafting of Nostra Aetate, who watched the process from within. According to the column, Ehrlich saw the Church struggling against its own inherited theology rather than overcoming outside pressure. He wrote that resistance to the declaration on the Jews was only “partly attributable to the Arab League. The rest was original, a Catholic product.”

Han also described an organized faction at the Council, the Coetus Internationalis Patrum, led by Archbishop Lefebvre, Bishop Carli, and Cardinal Ruffini, which she said openly defended anti-Jewish theology as Catholic tradition. The column reports that the group framed its opposition as “protecting Catholic identity.” Han called a wider group of critics the “apologetic choir,” which, she said, attacked the declaration as a Zionist conspiracy and described Jews with terms such as “arrogant,” “provocative,” and “Eurasian.” The column quotes one unnamed cardinal as saying the Church “cannot oppose the entire Arab world just to satisfy its Jews,” and a prominent theological adviser, also unnamed, as writing: “The Jews are so clever that they have succeeded in dividing Christians.”

According to Han, describing this as “antisemitism at the margins” is a misleading phrase that works to push antisemitism out of view, protect the Church’s self-image, and locate the hatred outside Christianity rather than within it. The column presents this as her argument, not as a settled finding of the Church.

Han gave a specific example from Romans 11:25, a passage in which Paul urges Christians not to judge the Jewish people and states that Israel’s future is in God’s hands. She noted that a key 1964 draft of Nostra Aetate subtly rewrote this verse so that it no longer emphasized God’s mystery and instead suggested the verse pointed toward Jews eventually accepting Christ. Ehrlich called the draft “an exegetical embarrassment” and wrote, “I truly cannot understand how anyone can claim to be quoting Paul here.” Han’s account, as reported, is that the change turned a text meant to protect Jewish dignity into support for missionary efforts, and that Ehrlich saw this as evidence that the Church’s habit of using Scripture to assert superiority over Jews remained alive, expressed in softer language. Speaking the truth plainly about how a text was handled matters as much as the text itself (Ephesians 4:15).

Han acknowledged that Nostra Aetate was a breakthrough. It ended centuries of explicit condemnation and started the Church’s long-overdue self-examination. The column credits Cardinal Bea, John Oesterreicher, Gregory Baum, and others, and says the document might never have appeared without their work. Yet, as the column reports Han’s position, Nostra Aetate did not create a new theology. It began the difficult work of unlearning the Church’s centuries-long rejection of Israel, and that unlearning, as Han showed, remains profoundly incomplete.

Source: Read the original report