REEXAMINING VATICAN II AND THE JEWISH QUESTION

The Second Vatican Council (Source: Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales)

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Sixty years on, the Second Vatican Council remains the great hinge point of modern Catholic history: a moment of renewal for some, of rupture for others, and for nearly everyone, a subject of unresolved dispute. It is therefore right—indeed necessary—that Vatican II be examined again. Recent calls from the papacy to “rediscover” the Council only confirm its enduring significance. Few episodes from that era better illuminate the deeper tensions of Vatican II than the Council’s 1964 declaration on the Church’s relationship to the Jewish people—later promulgated in Nostra Aetate. What was presented at the time as a modest corrective to misunderstanding has, in retrospect, proven to be something far more consequential. That is, a theological and moral reorientation shaped as much by postwar politics and elite pressure as by internal doctrinal development.

To revisit these events today is, in part, to ask whether the Church, in her understandable desire to speak with moral clarity after the Second World War, surrendered something essential in the process. Namely, her confidence in her own theological memory and her freedom to speak as a teacher rather than as a penitent defendant before the modern world.

On November 19, 1964, the assembled bishops and cardinals of the Catholic Church voted overwhelmingly in favor of a framework addressing the Church’s attitude toward Judaism. The numbers themselves were telling, with a small minority voting no, a large majority voting yes, and a substantial bloc voting yes, but with reservations. The vote was provisional, but its direction was unmistakable.

Almost immediately, political tremors followed. Eastern Catholic bishops—those most directly situated within historically Jewish and Muslim contexts—registered strong opposition. Arab governments protested. International media framed the vote not as an internal theological matter, but as a global moral event with diplomatic consequences. In short order, what should have been a careful doctrinal discussion was absorbed into the postwar moral and political settlement of the West.

From today’s vantage point, this is the first point that demands attention: Vatican II did not deliberate in a vacuum. It deliberated under the shadow of World War II, misplaced Western guilt for the Holocaust, regrets about colonization, Cold War geopolitics, and the rise of international human rights discourse. These forces did not merely influence the Council. They structured the very items up for debate and the moral terms in which its debates were conducted.

The language approved in 1964 emphasized mutual understanding, condemned hatred and mistreatment of Jews, and urged Christians not to ascribe collective guilt for the Passion of Christ to contemporary Jews. On a strictly individual level, such exhortations were seemingly unobjectionable. The Church had, after all, long condemned unjust violence and coercion against any people, including the lone Jew.

What was new, however, was not the moral injunction, but the implied diagnosis. The declaration suggested that Christian theology itself—particularly the Church’s traditional reading of Scripture and the Fathers—had fostered a certain contempt toward Jews that required correction. In effect, the Church was invited to reinterpret her own doctrinal inheritance as morally suspect.

They sensed that the Council was being asked not merely to clarify doctrine, but to renounce a significant portion of its inherited language about Judaism in order to conform to a new moral consensus, one shaped in large part by the postwar powergrab by world Jewry.

This marked a profound shift. Historically, the Church distinguished between theological judgment and moral treatment. Judaism, as a religious system rejecting Christ, was understood to be in pernicious error. Jews, as human beings, were to be protected from violence and coercion. Medieval Christendom largely maintained this distinction, even in light of such events as the exsanguination of Blessed Simon of Trent. Jews were often restricted, sometimes expelled in order to defend Christian society from Jewish practices like usury, but rarely subjected to systematic annihilation. The Church’s anthropology—its insistence that every human being bears a soul ordered toward God—functioned as a restraint. The postconciliar turn blurred this distinction. Theological disagreement itself came to be viewed as a moral failing, and the Church’s historical self-understanding was reframed through the categories of modern guilt and apology.

It is now well documented that the Council’s engagement with Judaism did not arise spontaneously. It was the culmination of a sustained intellectual and political campaign led by a small number of highly influential, often Jewish figures, not least among them the anti-Christian, French Jewish historian Jules Isaac.

Isaac’s project was explicit and systematic. In the aftermath of the Second World War, he dedicated himself to reexamining what he deemed the Christian roots of European anti-semitism. His books, Jésus et Israël and Genèse de l’Antisémitisme, argued that Christian theology, particularly its interpretation of the Passion narratives, laid the groundwork for modern racial hatred.

For Isaac, the solution was not merely moral exhortation but doctrinal revision. The Church, he insisted, must purify her teaching—by which he meant revisiting the authority of the Gospels, the Fathers, and centuries of theological reflection. This was less an interreligious dialogue, and more a demand for institutional repentance and correction according to his will.

Through conferences, friendship societies, memoranda, and direct appeals to popes and curial officials, Isaac and his confrères succeeded in reframing the Jewish question as a test case for the Church’s moral credibility in the modern world. By the time Vatican II convened, the intellectual terrain had already been prepared.

One of the most revealing aspects of the 1964 vote was the resistance of the Eastern Catholic bishops. Their opposition is often dismissed as parochial or politically motivated, but this is too easy. These bishops came from traditions that had lived for centuries alongside Jews and Moslems, often as minorities themselves. They understood that theological declarations issued in Rome would have concrete consequences on the ground. More importantly, they intuited something that much of the Western episcopate had forgotten: that theology cannot be indefinitely subordinated to diplomatic convenience without hollowing itself out. A Church that defines her doctrine primarily in response to external pressure, be it political, cultural, or moral, risks losing the capacity to speak authoritatively at all.

From today’s perspective, the Eastern bishops appear less reactionary than prescient. They sensed that the Council was being asked not merely to clarify doctrine, but to renounce a significant portion of its inherited language about Judaism in order to conform to a new moral consensus, one shaped in large part by the postwar powergrab by world Jewry.

One of the enduring legacies of Nostra Aetate has been the replacement of theological clarity with humanitarian sentiment. Dialogue, mutual respect, and shared values have become the dominant idiom of Catholic–Jewish relations. While these are not necessarily without merit, they have often functioned as substitutes for serious theological engagement, and certainly for paths toward the conversion of the Jews.

The result has been a kind of polite silence on fundamental disagreements: the messiahship of Christ, the authority of the Church, the nature of covenant, and the meaning of salvation history. In the name of reconciliation, the Church has increasingly avoided articulating what she actually believes about Judaism as a religious system distinct from—and, in key respects, opposed to—Christianity.

This silence has not been reciprocated in all quarters. Jewish theological self-understanding has not undergone a comparable revision in light of Christianity. The asymmetry is striking: one side is urged toward continual self-critique and repentance, while the other is treated as beyond theological scrutiny. The irony being that modern Talmudic Jews believe Christ is boiling in human excrement in Hell, and that non-Jews are beasts to be subjugated and, if necessary, annihilated—something no Catholic would ever say about a Jew.

Perhaps the most troubling consequence of the Council’s approach is the logic it inaugurated. If centuries of Christian teaching are morally suspect because of their historical effects, then no doctrine is safe from retrospective condemnation. Theology becomes a function of outcomes rather than truth, and history becomes a tribunal before which the Church must continually justify herself. Of course, the Church is answerable only to God.

This logic has not remained confined to Jewish–Christian relations. It has expanded to encompass colonialism, mission, migration, sexual ethics, and even the doctrine of sin itself. The Church is increasingly expected to apologize for having taught anything with moral or doctrinal specificity.

What began as a response to a genuine historical catastrophe has metastasized into a permanent posture of defensiveness. The Church speaks hesitantly, qualifies her claims, and often anticipates condemnation before it arrives.

It did not have to be this way. The Church could have condemned indiscriminate malice and violence unequivocally—something she had long done—while reaffirming her theological convictions with equal clarity. She could have distinguished between misuse of doctrine and doctrine itself. She could have insisted that the ex post facto crimes of the twentieth century were the result not of too much theology, but of its collapse.

The Jews, despite being historically treated like nothing, and being famously from nowhere, seem, then as now, to know more about who they are and where they come from than many of the amaranth and cardinal zucchettos in St. Peter’s.

Instead, Vatican II’s handling of the Jewish question set a precedent wherein moral credibility would henceforth be purchased at the price of doctrinal concession. The applause of the modern world would be secured by strategic ambiguity.

Sixty years later, the question is no longer whether Nostra Aetate improved relations between Catholics and Jews in a diplomatic or psychological sense. It did. The deeper and more difficult question is whether it strengthened—or subtly weakened—the Church’s confidence in her own identity and authority as a theological body.

A Church that forgets her own theological history in order to make peace with the present risks becoming irrelevant to both. Authentic dialogue requires two parties who know who they are. The Jews, despite being historically treated like nothing, and being famously from nowhere, seem, then as now, to know more about who they are and where they come from than many of the amaranth and cardinal zucchettos in St. Peter’s.

To revisit Vatican II’s declaration on Judaism today is not to advocate hostility, exclusion, or contempt. It is to insist that charity without truth dissolves into sentiment, and truth without confidence collapses into silence. The Church cannot indefinitely sustain a posture of apology without forgetting why she exists at all. If the Council was meant to open the windows of the Church to the modern world, it is worth asking—six decades on—whether, in this instance, it also let something irreplaceable slip quietly out the door.