A timely anniversary

Sixty years ago, on Oct. 28, 1965, the Second Vatican Council adopted, and Pope Paul VI promulgated, the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, known by the first words in the official Latin text as Nostra Aetate (In Our Age). I chart Nostra Aetate’s sometimes rocky passage through Vatican II in To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II. Suffice it to note here that the obstinate refusal of some Arab states to concede the reality and permanence of Israel as a Jewish state injected itself into the Council’s discussion, creating difficulties. Nonetheless, and in no small part because of the indefatigable work of Pope Pius XII’s former confessor, the German biblical scholar Cardinal Augustin Bea, SJ, Nostra Aetate made it across the conciliar finish line — and thank God it did, given the resurgence of the cultural cancer of antisemitism today.

At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Tucker Carlson continued his pell-mell descent down the slippery slope of vileness by attributing Jesus’ death to the “hummus-eaters.” So it is well that we have the Catholic Church’s solemn declaration, in Nostra Aetate, that “neither all Jews indiscriminately” at the time of Christ, “nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during [Christ’s] passion” — and the unambiguous affirmation that the Church “deplores all hatreds, persecutions, [and] displays of antisemitism leveled at any time or from any source against the Jews.”

Just as importantly, we have the Council’s acknowledgment of the religious debt that Catholicism owes to Judaism:          

The Church of Christ acknowledges that … the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ — Abraham’s sons according to faith (cf. Galatians 3:7) — are included in the same Patriarch’s call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church is mysteriously foreshadowed by the chosen people’s exodus from the land of bondage. The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles. (cf. Romans 11:17-24). …

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 …” (Romans 9:4-5) … 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. …

In company with the Prophets and [St. Paul], the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice…”

As I said in a lecture last month at the University of Colorado Boulder, antisemitism is a betrayal of Christianity, for Jew-hatred is Christ-hatred. Why? Because Jesus of Nazareth makes no sense without understanding him as he understood himself: as a son of God’s covenant with the Jewish people who, from the Cross, evoked Psalm 22 and its triumphant claim that “dominion belongs to the Lord” who “rules over the nations” and to whom “all the proud of the earth bow down.”

Moreover, Christianity makes no sense without its Jewish parent, as the Christian New Testament makes no sense without the Hebrew Bible. Absent its foundation in, and tether to, Judaism, Christianity would have been another short-lived mystery cult from the ancient world, with Jesus of Nazareth as the miracle-working Galilean version of the first-century miracle-working Neopythagorean, Apollonius of Tyana. Early Christians understood this. So even in its childhood, historically speaking, Catholicism decisively rejected the heresy of Marcionism, which scorned the Old Testament and created a repugnant caricature of the God of the Hebrew Bible.

Antisemitism is a malignancy in society. Throughout modern political history, rising antisemitism has been an unmistakable marker of cultural decay. And as politics is downstream from culture, the public effects of that cultural decay can be draconian, as history teaches us — from the passions unleashed during the Dreyfus Affair in the French Third Republic, through the cultural meltdown of Weimar Germany and its genocidal political outcome, to the maniacal barbarism of Hamas on October 7, 2023. If we imagine the 21^st-century Western world immune to those political passions, we are fooling ourselves — and not paying attention.

 So let us mark the diamond anniversary of Nostra Aetate by slamming down, and then nailing shut, the widening Overton Window on antisemitism.

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