Israel: A Prophetic Sign?

Part II: Israel and the Church Today

Vatican II and Nostra Aetate

Vatican II played a crucial role in changing the Christian attitudes towards Judaism.  Elias Friedman goes as far as to say that the council dealt "a mortal blow" to the theory of substitution.[1] Though one may question whether this blow was really "mortal," considering the amount of anti-Semitism and replacement theology that still linger in the Church more than forty years after the end of the council, the impact of the council's declarations remains nonetheless inestimable.

The Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions Nostra Aetate unequivocally condemned anti-Semitism, especially when rationalized on theological grounds: "What happened at [Christ's] 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 represented as rejected by God or accursed, as if this followed from Holy Scripture...The Church decries hatreds, persecutions and manifestations of anti-Semitism directed against the Jew at any time and by anyone."[2]  Quoting Romans 11, the document also condemned the theology of substitution and confirmed the eternal election of Israel: "God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their fathers; he does not repent of the gifts he makes or of the calls he issues," a statement that was also echoed in the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church.[3] The expression "New Israel" is used only twice in the council documents[4] and never in the sense of the Church replacing natural Israel.  Nostra Aetate also recalled Paul's illustration of the olive tree: "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."[5]

From Vatican II to the 21st Century

The decades following the Council witnessed the publication of a number of additional Church documents that reinforced the Church's new position towards the Jews.

In 1974 the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism published Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate.  It acknowledged that "although Christianity sprang from Judaism...the gap dividing them was deepened more and more, to such an extent that Christian and Jew hardly knew each other."  It encourages Christians to "acquire a better understanding of whatever in the Old Testament retains its own perpetual value, since that has not been cancelled by the later interpretation of the New Testament," for "it is when ‘pondering her own mystery' that [the Church] encounters the mystery of Israel...the very return of Christians to the sources and origins of their faith, grafted on to the earlier Covenant, helps the search for unity in Christ, the cornerstone."[6]

In 1985 the Vatican published Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church. One of its key points was, "We shall reach a greater awareness that the people of God of the Old and the New Testament are tending towards a like end in the future: the coming or return of the Messiah even if they start from two different points of view. It is more clearly understood that the person of the Messiah is not only a point of division for the people of God but also a point of convergence."[7]

On March 16, 1998 the Vatican published We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. It was a striking apology for the misdeeds of churchmen during centuries past, and a promise of better days to come: "At the end of this millennium the Catholic Church desires to express her deep sorrow for the failures of her sons and daughters in every age. This is an act of repentance (teshuva), since, as members of the Church, we are linked to the sins as well as the merits of all her children."[8]

On March 7, 2000 the Vatican published Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, a statement continuing the call to a "special examination of conscience" regarding the relationship between Christians and Jews and condemning the hostility of Christians toward Jews in the course of time as "a sad historical fact" and "the cause of profound remorse for Christians aware of the fact that the Jews are our dearly beloved brothers, indeed in a certain sense they are ‘our elder brothers."

In 2001, the Pontifical Biblical Commission published The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, confirming many of the points discussed above:

In the Letter to the Romans, Paul makes clear that for Christians who have come from paganism, what is involved is a participation in Israel's election, God's special people. The Gentiles are "the wild olive shoot", "grafted to the real olive" to "share the riches of the root" (Rm 11:17,24). They have no need to boast to the prejudice of the branches. "It is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you" (11:18) (...)
The New Testament never says that Israel has been rejected. From the earliest times, the Church considered the Jews to be important witnesses to the divine economy of salvation. She understands her own existence as a participation in the election of Israel and in a vocation that belongs, in the first place, to Israel, despite the fact that only a small number of Israelites accepted it. (...)
The apostle emphasises that "God has not cast off his people" (Rm 11:2). Since "the root is holy" (11:16), Paul is convinced that at the end, God, in his inscrutable wisdom, will graft all Israel back onto their own olive tree (11:24); "all Israel will be saved" (11:26).[9]

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in addition to reaffirming God's irrevocable election of Israel (paragraph 839), and pointing out the common goal towards which Israel and the Church tend, the coming - or return - of the Messiah (840), also mentions how this return is dependant upon Israel's future redemption:

The glorious Messiah's coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by "all Israel," for "a hardening has come upon part of Israel" in their "unbelief" toward Jesus... The "full inclusion" of the Jews in the Messiah's salvation, in the wake of "the full number of the Gentiles," will enable the People of God to achieve "the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ," in which "God may be all in all."[10]

[1] Friedman, p. 92.

[2] NA 4.

[3] NA 4, LG 16.

[4] LG 9, AG 5.

[5] NA 4.

[6] Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate as quoted in Friedman, pp191-197.

[7] Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church, II.10.

[8] Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, V

[9] The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, 36.

[10] CCC 674.