Nostra Aetate - In Our Time

53 NOSTRA AETATE AND THE RELIGIONS OF ABRAHAM ogically – as I hope you will see in a moment if this is not familiar to you – I should have actually started before the other speakers. Why? Because the origins of Nostra Aetate did not come from a desire of the bishops of the Second Vatican Council to address the relationship between the Church and world faiths. The origins of Nostra Aetate are the result of Pope John XXIII, Angelo Roncalli – to whom Dr. Sammak referred at length – and his charge to Cardinal Augustin Bea to address the relationship of the Church with the Jewish people, de Iudaeis. Why? This was overwhelmingly the result of the impact of the Shoah, the holocaust. The holocaust was over- whelmingly a Jewish tragedy but it was substantially a Christian scandal. Why was it a Christian scandal? Because it was perpetrated by overwhelmingly baptised Christians in ostensibly Christian lands. Of course the Shoah was, as Pope Benedict XVI has described it, a pagan enterprise, but it could not have succeeded to the degree it did with the extermination of six million Jews if the land had not been tilled, over cen- turies, with what was called “the teaching of contempt”. The teaching of contempt had been the predominant attitude within the Christian world that said that the Jews were rejected by God, indeed even cursed by God, con- demned to wander. Indeed they were the enemies of God and therefore in league with the devil. They were diaboli- cal and therefore, they deserved everything they got. That kind of theology created the sense of dehumanisation of the Jew that facilitated the enormity of the tragedy. Now, in the context of those tragedies there were remarkable individuals. Angelo Roncalli was one of those most outstanding, saintly people who was not only one of the first to know of the Nazi extermination machine, but also saved thousands when he was the Legate in Turkey – to which Dr. Sammak has referred – and this moved him deeply. And therefore, when he convened this Aggiornamento – this updating of the Church as Father Neuhaus so beautifully recalled in the film we just saw: “Open up the windows, let the air in, let the light in” – one of the things he wanted to address was precisely the relationship with the Jewish people. His famous meeting with the great French Jewish his- torian Jules Isaac confirmed that determination. He gave the task to Cardinal Bea but there was opposition to this desire of the Church to change its attitude towards the Jews. And the opposition not only came from the arch con- servative elements who believed that the Jews really were condemned and did not want to let them off the hook; but it was also rejected, and fearfully, by bishops within the Muslim world who were wary that this would be seen as a political statement on the situation in the Middle East. It was also opposed by those in the Far East from lands where Jews did not even feature on the radar screen. Why were they so obsessed with the Jews? What about our relationship with Hindus? What about our relationship with Buddhists? So, there is a fascinating irony here. Nostra Aetate reflects the desire of elements within the Church, above all John XXIII and Cardinal Bea, to address their rela- tionship to the Jewish people, but it was only possible for them to do so if they addressed the relationship of the Church with Islam, with religions of the East, with the world faiths. So, in order to address its relationship with Judaism, the Church came to address its relationship with the rest of the world. That in itself is fascinating but, conversely, through desiring to be able to address its relationship with Israel, with the Jewish people, it came to address its relationship with the faiths of the world. So it facilitated that at the same time. Now section 4 of Nostra Aetate , the particular section that related to the Jewish people, said four things. People focus on three of these and they are all remarkable but they are not at all new, contrary to many public miscon- ceptions. First of all it said that any idea to condemn the Jews, as Dr. Sammak referred to, as collectively guilty for the death of Jesus, even at the time let alone in perpetu- ity, is wrong. The Council of Trent had actually stated that four hundred years earlier. But of course in practice, Christian teaching continued very often to ignore what the Council of Trent had said and continued to see Jews as collectively guilty. So, it was important to state, there- fore, that the Jews were not to be seen as responsible even if this was not actually official Catholic teaching anyway. The second thing it spoke of was the Covenant between God and the Jewish people being an eternal covenant. That in itself was not necessarily positive because Saint Augustine had already said that the Jews remain precisely in their homelessness and humiliation to prove what happens to you when you do not accept the truth of Christianity, and therefore the eternity of the covenant could be seen quite negatively. Indeed, even L