Nostra Aetate – the Moral Heart of the Second Vatican Council

Nostra Aetate – the moral heart of

the Second Vatican Council

Michael Barnes SJ

The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relationship

of the Church to Non-Christian Religions was promulgated fifty

years ago, on 28 October 1965. Michael Barnes SJ explains why

the process of Nostra Aetate’s development is as important as

the text itself. ‘Perhaps more than any other document, and de-

spite its obvious weaknesses, it encapsulates the extraordinary

outpouring of the Spirit that characterised the Council’.

I sit down to write this article do. Dialogues of common life fifty years to the day after the and common action flourish as bishops of the Catholic Church people get to know and voted on the text of Nostra appreciate their neighbours. Aetate, Vatican II s celebrated What is often called the Declaration on the Relationship of dialogue of spiritual experience the Church to Non-Christian is more muted and controv- Religions. The shortest of the ersial; yet plenty of people are Council s documents, it marks deepening their faith by read- an extraordinary experience of ing the texts of other religions, real learning on the part of the and even learning how to med- Church. itate by using yoga or Buddhist practices. The dialogue of What did the Church learn then theological exchange is yet Photo by Ned Trifle at flickr.com and what does Nostra Aetate more difficult and not just inspire today? Since those heady days many people of because Nostra Aetate left so much unsaid. In a faith have come to see the Declaration as a magna carta thoroughly pluralist age, in which the curse of bad for dialogue and have responded with generous and religion seems to outweigh the blessings of the good, open statements of their own. In 2008 an initiative of the Declaration reads at best like a few worthy the Anglican Communion, Generous Love, structuring statements of the obvious, at worst a patronising mission in a pluralist world around a Trinitarian summary of rich and complex sources of ancient vision, acknowledged its debt to Nostra Aetate.1 In wisdom. It would, however, be an enormous mistake 2000 over 150 Jewish scholars and rabbis published to dismiss Nostra Aetate as a bland bit of 1960s Dabru Emet, a series of statements about what Jews optimism. Perhaps more than any other document, and Christians hold together.2 In 2007 Muslim and despite its obvious weaknesses, it encapsulates scholars responded to Pope Benedict s ill-fated the extraordinary outpouring of the Spirit that Regensburg lecture with A Common Word, a much characterised the Council. longer meditation on the theme of the love of God that unites Muslims and Christians.3 Small beginnings

But what about the Declaration s effect on the Cath- In this article I make no apologies for telling the olic Church itself? Nostra Aetate s amazingly prophetic Nostra Aetate story again because stories of deep imperatives to Catholics to encourage, preserve and transformation always bear repetition. The fact that it promote the spiritual values of other religions have also records another side of the Council a debate certainly raised the profile of interreligious dialogue with a sharp political dimension, hammered out at from a niche concern for a few specialists to times in the full glare of media publicity only adds something that everyone is expected to do and can to the significance of the lesson that Nostra Aetate continues to teach people of good will everywhere, have helped to foster an image of the Jews as the sole both inside and outside the Church. enemies of Christ which has contributed to anti- semitism in the secular world .4 The first sign of transformation went almost unnoticed at the time. On Good Friday 1959 Pope It s important, of course, to distinguish anti-semitism John XXIII spontaneously eliminated the expression from anti-Judaism. The former uses racial categories, perfidious Jews from the liturgical prayers. The the latter theological. The question is about the relati- move, which was extended to the universal Church onship between them and how certain theological soon afterwards, was more than a gesture. A friend presuppositions can hide the sort of anti-Jewish preju- reminded me recently that the rubric for the altar dice that breeds a much more virulent anti-semitism. servers had been to kneel during the prayers. Seelisberg did not take place in a theological vacuum. F , intoned the deacon, and we The issue was a subject of intense debate in the 1930s, all obeyed like clockwork. But during the prayer for not least among circles that included the likes of the Jews, he said, we were expected to stand, as if to Jacques Maritain and Karl Barth. In Britain, the Angl- ponder the tragic fate of people who had refused to ican James Parkes drew attention to how a whole recognise the coming of the Messiah . culture of anti-Jewish prejudice had infected historical and scripture studies.5 Seemingly innocuous phrases In 1959 no one expected a rapprochement with the such as late Judaism to describe the 1st Century wor- Jews to become one of the major achievements of the ld of Jesus were made to support uncritical supersess- Council, let alone a positive statement about the ionist or replacement theologies. In the wake of the truths and values of other religions. The omission of a Holocaust his words seemed prophetic. It took the single word seems a small enough shift, but liturgy Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 for the full horror filters scripture into the religious consciousness, of the Final Solution to be talked about openly. By forming faith and generating thought sometimes that stage, many Christian theologians, especially in even among distracted altar servers. It was a small Germany, were beginning to reckon with the power indication of what was beginning to happen elsewhere of dismissive and uncritical language to destroy the as a traumatised world began to take stock of the delicate web of human relations and much worse. darkness of Nazi atrocities. The politics behind the text At a conference of the nascent International Council of Christians and Jews held at Seelisberg in Only nine Catholics attended Seelisberg and to that Switzerland in July and August 1947, a group of extent Nostra Aetate represents a massive bit of catch- Jewish, Catholic and Protestant theologians produced ing up on the part of the Catholic Church. John Con- a series of ten points. Their deliberations were nelly, in his detailed study of Catholic anti-Judaism, summed up as five calls to remember what Jews and notes the disappearance of overt hostility in the 1950s 6 Christians share (eg. that there is one God of Old and but an absence of ideas of how to relate to Jews . New Testaments, that Jesus was born a Jew, that the Only a handful of activists, many of them Jewish con- commandment to love God and one s neighbour is verts, kept up the pressure that began with Seelisberg. binding on both Christians and Jews), and five to A year after Pope John s ban on the word perfidious , avoid certain anti-Jewish attitudes and actions (eg. a petition from the Jesuits at the Pontifical Biblical distorting or misrepresenting biblical or post-biblical Institute, closely followed by another from the Judaism with the object of extolling Christianity , or Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall teaching that the Jewish people are reprobate, University, New Jersey, asked for the Council to accursed, reserved for a destiny of suffering ). The address the implicit anti-Judaism of much traditional conference participants were responding to the Catholic thought, especially as it affected the growing realisation that an unchecked history of anti- interpretation of scripture. Jewish theology had created the climate in which anti- semitism could flourish. A year later the first general The Holocaust was hovering in the background. A assembly of the World Council of Churches was a lot little later that summer, on 13 June 1960, the great more blunt, declaring that: The Churches in the past Jewish historian, Jules Isaac, author of The Teaching of Contempt, visited the pope.7 With the authority of the

Nostra Aetate – the moral heart of the Second Vatican Council

Holocaust survivor, Isaac spoke about three in the USA, expressed concern at the Vatican s interlocking dimensions of a negative account of motives, fearing that ecumenism was code for a Judaism: the diaspora as a punishment for Jewish lack covert form of Christian proselytism. of faith; the degeneracy of 1st Century Judaism; and the charge of deicide. Isaac traced this theology back The Declaration and the Council to the pages of the New Testament or, rather, to tendentious exegesis of key passages that were read as Managing the unease felt by bishops on the Council stereotyping the Jews as a corrupt opposition to floor presented its own problems. Gavin D Costa s Jesus and the first Christians. meticulous outline of the debate that began with De Iudaeis focuses on three issues: Jewish collective guilt At the meeting with Pope John, Isaac focussed on the for the death of Jesus; the constancy of the God who deicide charge and quoted the Catechism of the Coun- calls Israel into a covenantal relationship; and the cil of Trent. He drew attention to the section on the issue that so exercised Soloveitchik mission to the Fourth Article of the Creed, on the passion and death Jewish people.9 All of these touched on knotty issues of Jesus. In that section of this monumental work, of scriptural exegesis; finding a formula that satisfied a intended as a sort of theological vade mecum for parish range of opinions, some of which insisted that serious priests, Jews are not mentioned except in combination matters of doctrine were being compromised, was not with Gentiles who together are described as advisors easy. But it s easy to miss a more substantive issue, and perpetrators of the passion . Who bears the resp- namely the role played by the process dedicated to the onsibility for the death of Jesus? The answer is given Declaration in the Council s debates and deliberations in terms of human sin, the original sin of our first as a whole. parents and the vices and crimes which people have committed from the beginning of the world to the Compared with shifting some well-entrenched positi- present day and will go on committing until the end ons, the question of where De Iudaeis should be situat- of time .8 Not a word about deicide; indeed hardly a ed in the scheme of work of the Council may seem tri- word about Jews or Hebrews in the entire text. Pope vial but it sheds interesting light on the status of Nost- John, who as papal nuncio in Bulgaria during the war ra Aetate, which is contested even today. The process had been instrumental in rescuing many Jews from began, as we have seen, as an addition to the Secre- deportation to the death camps, felt an instinctive rap- tariat s main concern, for intra-Christian ecumenism, port with what Isaac was telling him. Soon afterwar- then found a temporary place as an appendix to the ds, Cardinal Bea was asked to add problems concer- document on the Church, Lumen Gentium. Later sugg- ning the Jews to his in-tray at the Secretariat for estions for a home included Dei Verbum and Gaudium Promoting Christian Unity. It was, however, an odd et Spes. There was also an opinion that the whole home and immediately aroused Jewish suspicions. thing be postponed until after the Council. Only at the end of the third session, in November 1964, did it Opposition to a text that began as De Iudaeis ( On the assume the status of a Declaration in its own right. Jews ) seems to have come from three directions: from the Roman curia and those within the Council itself It is certainly correct, as D Costa points out, that as a who sought to defend the integrity of Catholic tradit- Declaration dealing with specific pastoral issues, Nost- ion; from bishops in the Middle East who were mind- ra Aetate needs to be interpreted in accord with the ful of Arab sensitivities and feared any positive acco- theological teaching laid out in the Dogmatic Constit- unt of Judaism would make the life and mission of utions. But this is not to deny that a pastoral docum- Christians there more difficult; and politically the ent is also theological in the sense that it says some- most difficult from Jews themselves and the still thing about the ways of God with human beings. very young State of Israel. Notorious in this regard Given the level of suspicion it occasioned in various was the Wardi affair which blew up in the summer quarters, the shift from sorting out a problem to of 1962 over press reports that a senior Israeli diplo- opening up a new opportunity for Christian witness mat, Chaim Wardi, was to be invited to attend the in a pluralist world is nothing short of remarkable and Council sessions. Powerful voices in the wider Jewish carries its own moral authority within the life of the diaspora, such as orthodox Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik Church.

Nostra Aetate – the moral heart of the Second Vatican Council

That prospect seemed unlikely at the end of the first pragmatic bit of theological realpolitik, reaching out session of the Council, in December 1962, when the to the Jews in order to make amends for the original draft was withdrawn in the wake of the Holocaust? Or is it more the record of an Wardi affair , and even bleaker the following year extraordinary conversion of the Catholic soul, a when a second draft suffered a similar fate. Pope John coming to terms with a history of anti-Judaism? At died in 1963 but his successor, Paul VI, committed one level the shift from the Jewish problem to himself to finish the major tasks the Council had set. include reference to other religions gives support to In January 1964, he made an unprecedented and the view that the Declaration grew in response to highly successful visit to the Holy Land where his purely pastoral concerns, firstly to avoid a stand-off speeches to Jewish and Muslim audiences prepared between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East by the way for a certain rapprochement. In August of bringing a statement on Islam to complement that on that year he issued his first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, the Jews, secondly in response to missionary bishops a powerful evocation of the relationship of Church in Asia and Africa who argued that the religious and World in terms of the concept of dialogue . It communities which most concerned them should be was this great meditation on the religions as so many specifically named. But in the theological vision the concentric circles set around the central axis of the Council was seeking to build up are there any purely truth manifested in Christ, that is reflected in Lumen pastoral concerns? Perhaps there is something else Gentium §14-16, where the religions are similarly going on, something more richly theological? orientated to the Church.10 This takes us back to the question of what I called The ideas behind the encyclical and Paul VI s perso- above the moral authority of the Declaration. Nostra nal influence breathed new life into the Nostra Aetate Aetate did not say the last word, nor even the only project. A revised text came back to the Council in word, on religious pluralism. Nor did it make any September 1964, still as part of the decree on ecumen- major doctrinal innovations. Even the most powerful ism but now including a brief section on Islam. Two statement about the Jews, that they still remain most months later, Cardinal Bea presented the first comple- beloved of God , does not say anything explicit about tely independent text, with new introductory material the continuing validity of the Covenant. That was to about the history and phenomenology of religion, come some years later when Pope John Paul II, during references to Hinduism and Buddhism, and an expan- a visit to the synagogue in Mainz, spoke about the ded section on Islam. The thorny issue of the charge covenant that has never been revoked .12 Similarly, in of deicide against the Jews, which had been in and out the period since the Council, several magisterial docu- of drafts since the process began, was finally dropped. ments have taken the initial promptings of Nostra Aet- The explicit line on mission to the Jews was replaced ate forward. Judaism is recognised as a living tradition by a much more eschatological hope. The balance of with its own integrity of faith and practice, not an the sections, following the order of the concentric ossified relic which stopped growing with the advent circles in Ecclesiam Suam, caught the mood of the of the Christian Church. This, of course, is to say not- moment. After a few more smaller changes, the text hing of advances that have been made at the official came back to the Council for the concluding session a level between the Catholic Church and other people year later. Nostra Aetate, the result of a process that at of faith, such as Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. times seemed to be teetering on the verge of collapse, received overwhelming approval. After that point , In other words, Nostra Aetate set in motion a process comments Connelly, it was impossible to portray of learning in the Church. The voice of the Spirit does hostility to the Jews as compatible with Catholic doct- not only sound in drafting commissions and in the rine. Jews were not enemies of God or Christians. 11 carefully related hierarchies of Vatican documents. This is where it is important to set Nostra Aetate with- Pastoral and theological in the wider framework of the Council s overall vision and purpose. Behind all the great themes and ideas I hope that even the briefest of overviews is enough to revelation and the Word of God, renewal of the litur- show how Nostra Aetate was subject to enormous gy and sacramental practice, dialogue between Church pressures not to say prejudice and political intrigue. and World, the Church as a people called to a life of This raises the question of its real significance. Is it a

Nostra Aetate – the moral heart of the Second Vatican Council

holiness was a gathering insistence on a renewal of more recent examples of barbaric fundamentalism. If theology itself in more pastoral and dialogical terms. there is one constant theme joining Jews and Christ- ians together in the Biblical revelation it is memory. A principle established itself early on at the Council: if And memory has to be assiduously cultivated and age-old truths are to be communicated in today s world, renewed if it is not to turn the life-giving richness of then the Church needs to go back to the sources and human relations in which God is mysteriously pres- rediscover the roots of its own inner life. Taking ent as its life-giving centre into chauvinist oppositions account not just of the content but of the style that the that reduce God to the talisman of the tribe. texts share, whether authoritative Constitutions or more pastorally inspired Declarations, is essential in Memory can be so selective, and sometimes we need understanding the spirit or mystery of Vatican II. As someone else, someone overlooked, even ignored, to John O Malley convincingly argues, the primary remind us of what we have forgotten. That other great literary genre is the inspirational meditation, not the Jewish prophet of Nostra Aetate, Abraham Heschel, juridical canon.13 would say that the only thing Jews want is to be taken seriously as Jews, not as candidates for conversion. To My point is that Nostra Aetate made an enormous do that requires a commitment to remember and contribution to that spirit, not because it turned out learn. Nostra Aetate has reason to be considered the to be a wonderfully innovative dogmatic treatise, but moral heart of the Council because it demanded and because it encapsulated in a few words something of got real integrity from those who worked on it. the energy and passion of the people who made it There is, of course, a lot missing in the text: possible. The influence of Jews on the genesis of the Hinduism and Buddhism feel like gratuitous asides; text was enormous. In the pre-war years it was Jewish there is no mention of the prophet Muhammad; the converts to Catholicism who fought to have a true more contentious issues between Christians and Jews account of the faith of their forefathers recognised by are either played down or left out. There is a degree of the Church. Bea met a number of Jewish leaders and implicit agnosticism about the status of the religions, thinkers, sharing many lengthy conversations which whether they are ways of salvation or carry some had a profound influence on his own thinking. The truth or revelation to which Christians can assent. It great theologian, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, for instan- is but a beginning, a pastoral document that records ce, became not just a casual acquaintance but a trusted a theological moment in the life of the Church. confidante who challenged much of the Cardinal s thinking about the inner life of contemporary Juda- What Nostra Aetate has inspired amongst people of ism. For the erudite Bea, too, the Nostra Aetate process faith has been quite extraordinary in terms of inter- was a significant learning experience. Nor should it be religious dialogue at various levels. The lesson it goes forgotten that in the final revised text, the new Chap- on teaching the Catholic Church is to remain faithful ter 4 which took its stand on the necessary theological to its inner spirit of collaboration and dialogue. Like link between the Church and the Jewish people was all good theology, the Declaration does not aim to the responsibility of a small group of theologians, provide answers to every question that human endea- Gregory Baum, Bruno Hussar and John Oester- vour throws up; rather it inspires a more humble yet reicher, all of whom were converts from Judaism. creative speech that speaks with integrity of what God has revealed to God s people. That is by no means to Learning how to remember counsel a hesitant silence but to commend a truth- filled remembrance of what is always Holy Mystery, Let me conclude by recalling that melancholy image wherever it is discerned. of altar servers standing during the prayer for the perfidious Jews . It is not, of course, inevitable that Isaac s teaching of contempt will spring fully formed from the odd bit of anti-Jewish thoughtlessness. Nevertheless religious practices, beginning in well- meaning innocence, can become a breeding ground Michael Barnes SJ is Professor of Interreligious Relations at for the demonic if not properly discerned. That is one Heythrop College, University of London. lesson to take from the Nazi Holocaust and from

Nostra Aetate – the moral heart of the Second Vatican Council

1 Generous Love: an Anglican Theology of Inter Faith Relations, 6 John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: the Revolution in published by the Anglican Consultative Council (London, Catholic Teaching on the Jews (Cambridge MA: Harvard 2008). University Press, 2012), p. 181. 2 Dabru Emet (Zechariah 8: was originally 7 Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: the Christian Roots of published as a full-page advert in the The New York Times, Anti-Semitism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, just before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, 10 1964). September 2000. 8 Catechismus ex Decreto Concilii Tridentini ad Parochos, 3 An open letter to Pope Benedict from 38 Muslim scholars, promulgated by Pope Pius V; 1566. It is worth noting that 13 October 2006, led to an expansion which was issued as no A Common Word and published 13 October 2007. For text and responses from Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of 9 osta, Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews and Canterbury see the official website: Muslims (Oxford: OUP, 2014) www.acommonword.com. 10 Lumen Gentium, 4 Held in Amsterdam from 22 August to 4 September 1948; (§14). see especially the report of Committee IV, Concerns of the 11 Connelly, From Enemy, p. 265. Churches , chapter 3: The Christian Approach to the Jews . 12 Mainz, 17 November 1980. See discussion in Norbert 5 James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue: a Lohfink, The Covenant Never Revoked (New York: Paulist, study in the origins of anti-semitism (London: Soncino Press, 1991). 1934). 13 What Happened at Vatican II, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

Nostra Aetate – the moral heart of the Second Vatican Council