Thursday, October 29, 2015
NOSTRA AETATE (In Our Time)
Yesterday
was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate. NPR remembered it as a
revolutionary document that radically changed Jewish-Christian relations. NPR
also said this proclamation absolved Jews of the charge of killing Jesus. Nostra Aetate actually did not use the
language of absolution and quite right that it did not. It would be absurd to
absolve a people or an individual of something they never did. It is also not quite
right to say that it exonerated Jews, as I will explain below.
Nostra Aetate was actually a
very weak statement and not very revolutionary, unless you regard going from
doing absolutely nothing to a tiny, tiny effort at improvement as a revolution.
This is not a judgment in hindsight. Complaints were made at the time by
liberal Catholics that it did not go far enough. In particular, they lamented
that a previous draft had said Jews cannot be accused of having committed
deicide, but that word was removed from the final version. Conservatives had
objected that such a statement could be read as implying that Jesus was not the
son of God.
There
were two main things that were seriously wrong with this Catholic effort at
reconciliation between Jews and Christians. It has to be remembered that the
part having to do with Jews was a small part of its purpose. The full title of
the document was “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian
Religions”. Jews were not the main issue. In correcting its relations to other
religions, Nostra Aetate sang the
praises of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. They may not be Christians, but they
have wonderful ideas about God and life.
And
what did Nostra Aetate have to say
about the goodness of Judaism? Absolutely nothing. Not one word of praise. That is
the first thing that made this declaration so weak regarding Jews. The contrast
to how it treated other religions is startling. There must have been complaints
about this because nine years later in “Guidelines on Religious Relations with
the Jews” (Dec. 1, 1974), the Catholic Church made up for the deficiency in Nostra Aetate. Here, Judaism is praised
and respect is shown for Judaism’s independent relationship with God.
Between
the two, the 1974 “Guidelines” is far more revolutionary than Nostra Aetate, yet it hardly ever
receives attention. That just goes to show that true revolutions are often
ignored, while inferior efforts are exaggerated out of all proportion to what
was actually accomplished. I don’t deny that 1965 marked a change, but it was
not because of Nostra Aetate, it was
rather because liberal Catholics and liberal Jews incorrectly promoted Nostra Aeatate as doing more that it did
and made it out to be some sort of full scale apology which it was not.
The
second thing that was deeply wrong with Nostra
Aetate concerns what it actually said about Jews and the death of Jesus. It
is typically misquoted by quoting it out of context. Even the “Guidelines”
misquoted the document on this point. Nostra
Aetate does say that Jews today and all Jews in the time of Jesus cannot be
blamed for “the crimes committed during his passion.” But it introduces this by
firmly declaring, “Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed
their lead pressed for the death of Christ …” In other words, the Church was
affirming its right to blame some Jews for Jesus’s execution, and not just
some, but apparently a wide contingent (how wide is left vague) who followed
the leaders.
That
is the part that most people, including those who authored the 1974
“Guidelines”, leave out when they quote Nostra
Aetate. And since in most societies we regard the leaders as representing
the culture, then ancient Jewish culture, or some important aspect of it, is
still being blamed in Nostra Aetate.
That’s not much of an exoneration. And it ignores how much Gospel evidence
there is that makes the case against Jewish leaders or any other Jews for
complicity in the death of Jesus a very bad case.
What
Nostra Aetate stands for is the idea
that Church officials will never let go of the traditional story of Jesus’s
death; the only thing it will do is not extend the blame to all Jews. The
Church would have done a lot better to have retracted all the false things it
has said over the centuries about ancient Jewish culture, taken responsibility
for having created these stereotypes about Jews and Judaism and for having
fomented bad feelings about Jesus’s people and culture, and perhaps above all,
encouraged continued study of the New Testament to get to the bottom of what
happened to Jesus. It should have admitted that there is no consistent pattern
of evidence in the Gospels blaming any Jews for his demise. Therein lies the
beginning of a real revolution.
©
2015 Leon Zitzer
