The Church, the Jews, and the Development of Doctrine 

Since Vatican II in the mid 1960s, the Catholic Church seems to be following a very different line of appreciation for and engagement with the Jewish people, from a long tradition of anti-Jewish sentiment and actions, to now affirming and extolling the Jewish covenant. To some Catholics, this seemed like a doctrinal U-turn. Others heralded it as a much-needed revolution in Catholic theology. It was neither. Instead, it is best viewed as the slow unfolding and development of doctrine.  

Two qualifiers before pursuing my claim: first, one cannot deny deep anti-Jewish views in patristic, medieval, and late modern theologians, among clerics (of all ranks) and the laity. However, one can deny, based on evidence, any magisterial doctrinal teaching against the Jewish people that specifically contradicts the teachings of Vatican II. This is crucial to defend the position I’m advancing. In fact, the popes were often at the forefront of protecting the Jewish people against anti-Semitism (e.g. the papal bull Sicut iudaeis issued by Pope Calixtus II in 1120). Hence, there is no doctrinal U-turn in the strict sense.  

Second, doctrinal development sometimes takes centuries. An example is the Immaculate Conception, declared in 1854. It required more than a thousand years of evolution, where the magisterium slowly unpacks scripture and its implications. First, the doctrine of divine motherhood was declared at Ephesus, then arising from that, the perpetual virginity of Mary. Both these provided the building blocks that led to the conclusion of the Immaculate Conception. All Catholic doctrinal teaching works in this way: the Church slowly unfolding and more deeply grasping revelation. John Henry Newman’s classic On the Development of Christian Doctrine is full of historical examples and is now considered a classic explanation of this phenomenon. Regarding the Jews, we will see the building blocks go back to St. Paul in his letter to the Romans. Herein lies the basis of the magisterium’s current teaching on the Jews. 

What happened at Vatican II? World War II and the destruction of six million Jews in the heart of Christian Europe raised questions. The World Council of Churches accepted a deep level of responsibility. It recognized anti-Semitism in Christian theologies of the Jewish people. These theologies went something like this: the Jews killed Jesus, they cursed themselves (Matthew 27.25: “his blood be upon us, and on our children”), they were punished by God for this crime, they wandered the earth and are a reprobate people. The Church has inherited the covenant with God. We get the “new covenant,” the “new people of God,” the “new Israel,” and the “Old Testament.” St. Augustine developed a powerful theology of God’s purpose for this reprobate people: to carry the scripture, the Old Testament, that gave testimony in pointing to the truth of Jesus Christ. Even amid this negative theology of the Jewish people lay elements of positive affirmation: God still had a purpose for his people for they were chosen. Thus, even within this negative theology that the Church now clearly (and rightly) rejects, there are strands that are being recovered and reconfigured in thinking critically about certain theological issues. 

Vatican II was initially concerned to reject the deicide charge: that the Jews as a people, during Jesus’s time, and now in our own, are guilty of the death of God. The final text achieved this. It read:  

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. (Nostra Aetate)  

Pope John XXIII had seen the deicide charge against the Jews as the root of Christian anti-Semitism. The Tridentine Catechism of 1566, which had been commissioned by the Council of Trent to disseminate the Council’s teachings to the clergy, had already technically distanced the Church from this type of approach. It acknowledged that historically Jews had crucified Jesus, but it taught that the principal reason for the crucifixion was “the original sin passed down from our first parents.” It argued that Christian sins “seem graver in our case than it was in that of the Jews; for the Jews, as the same Apostle says, ‘would never have crucified the Lord of glory if they had known him’ (1 Cor 2.8). We ourselves maintain that we do know him, and yet we lay, as it were, violent hands on him by disowning him in our actions.” 

The Council drew on Romans 9–11, where St. Paul speaks of the irrevocable covenant made to the Jewish people and says that God keeps faithful to his promises and covenant. It used the same Pauline verses in both key documents on the Jews: the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium; and the Declaration on the Church’s Relation to non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate. This meant that the Jewish people are not rejected or accursed by God. This is the teaching of Nostra Aetate (see above). In using Romans, the Council Fathers also began to recover the Jewishness of the early Church. Nostra Aetate says: 

The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: “theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church’s main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who  proclaimed Christ’s Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people. 

It is debatable whether the Council Fathers could predict the way this teaching began to unfold after the Council. It was a clear condemnation of anti-Jewish theologies, and with it, the idea of the Jews as rejected and cursed. Furthermore, it was a clear condemnation of anti-Semitism wherever it arises, stating that “the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” 

What was not clear in 1965 was the precise status of contemporary Rabbinic Judaism, which was different from the biblical Judaism existing in St. Paul’s time. Some theologians argued that Nostra Aetate had not been formally applied to contemporary Jews. Paul only had biblical Jews in mind. This controversy was resolved in 1980, when Pope St. John Paul II addressed Jews in Mainz, Germany, identifying them as “the present-day people of the Covenant concluded with Moses.” He further stated: 

It is important here “that Christians—to continue the post-conciliar directives—should aim at understanding better the fundamental elements of the religious tradition of Judaism, and learn what fundamental lines are essential for the religious reality lived by the Jews, according to their own understanding” [Introduction ]. The way for this mutual knowledge is dialogue. 

Under the pontificate of John Paul II, the doctrinal teachings began to unfold as the Church actively engaged in dialogue with the Jewish people. Centers of Catholic Jewish study were inaugurated in universities in Germany, France, Poland, and especially in the United States. A special dicastery was entrusted with the task of unfolding these teachings: the Dicastery for Religious Relations with the Jews (DRRJ), which operates through the Dicastery for Christian Unity. In 2015, the DRRJ took stock on the fiftieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate on the Jewish people. It is quite remarkable to read the 2015 document to see the strides the Catholic Church was slowly making. (This document does not claim magisterial authority.)  

For example, it suggests: “That the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery.” This raises a tension that the document itself realizes is difficult to resolve. The Catholic Church continues to claim that all salvation is from Christ and his Church, yet it is now affirming the continuing legitimate covenant that God has with the Jewish people. The document appears to allow God’s resolution of this tension in eschatological terms:  

There cannot be two ways of salvation, therefore, since Christ is also the Redeemer of the Jews in addition to the Gentiles. Here we confront the mystery of God’s work, which is not a matter of missionary efforts to convert Jews, but rather the expectation that the Lord will bring about the hour when we will all be united, “when all peoples will call on God with one voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder’” (“Nostra aetate”, No.4). 

Paul’s Letter to the Romans can be read as resolving this eschatologically, but that reading does not necessarily entail no witnessing of Christ to our Jewish brothers and sisters.  

However, this witnessing should be distinguished from mission, which is traditionally understood as ad gentes, “to the gentiles,” those who do not know God. It is also unlike the mission to the gentiles, which requires a conversion, whereas a Jew who became a Catholic would still remain an ethnic and religious (if they were already) Jew. Their entering the Catholic Church would be more analogous to the special ordinariate created for Anglicans so that they would not lose their religious practices and patrimony. All this stands in a fragile relationship to many Jewish perceptions that to become Christian would be like granting Hitler a posthumous victory: that Jews will lose their identity. Hence, most importantly, given the document’s recognition of the special place of Judaism in God’s plan, one would not approach the Jewish people as if they did not know God, or were aliens to his salvific grace, or that their covenant is no longer operative. Clearly, any coercion in witnessing is unacceptable.  

This development of doctrinal teaching is organically related to the Church’s existence in the world. We see the same things happen in many different areas: Mariology (as noted earlier), or regarding nuclear weapons that were used at the end of World War II. Catholic teachings on just war doctrine, for instance, were deployed to analyze this new phenomenon. The Church engages with the world patiently and carefully, discerning the meaning of nature and culture (including religious cultures) through the lens of revelation. It is thus able to preach Christ and his salvation to the world more effectively. In such a dynamic process, we must be careful to see what the magisterium and its organs are teaching, and how they apply scripture to new and old realities.  

There is no question that the Catholic Church now is firmly committed to opposing anti-Semitism. This was central to Nostra Aetate. In the document, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, the DRRJ faced the question of Catholic responsibility for anti-Semitism during the Holocaust. It asks: “Did Christians give every possible assistance to those being persecuted, and in particular to the persecuted Jews?” In response, it states: “Many did, but others did not.” It recognizes the need for repentance, saying: “We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church” and concludes that “whenever there has been guilt on the part of Christians, this burden should be a call to repentance.” Some criticized the document for assigning anti-Semitism to individuals rather than the Church as a whole. However, given my comment above about there being no official magisterial teaching at any time urging anti-Semitism, the condemnation of “the Church” would be inaccurate.  

A formal condemnation of anti-Semitism is a significant addition to the teachings of the Catholic Church, but what it entails in each different situation requires prudential judgement. For example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance includes in its definition of anti-Semitism a much-contested clause: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” The Catholic Church formally recognizes the State of Israel and has diplomatic relations with it and thus could not be deemed to be anti-Semitic by this definition. However, some Catholics, including some Palestinian Catholics, do claim that declaring the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor. Should they be condemned as anti-Semitic when they argue for a single state where Jews, Christians, and Muslims should be granted equal freedoms and rights? Of course, it is possible to argue that Israel is a result of racist endeavor and still uphold the State of Israel’s right to exist. This “endeavor” underlies the boundaries of many a legitimate state.  

Precisely what constitutes anti-Semitism is not settled within Catholicism. What is settled is that the Jewish people are beloved by God, that Catholics are spiritual Semites as they are grafted into Israel for their very existence, and that Catholics are committed to listening and learning from the Jewish people as they enjoy God’s covenantal fidelity and love. 

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