Thread by @GREENESJ333

Nostra Aetate, Israel, and the Boundaries of Catholic Faith

In recent years, a rising number of voices—especially in online spaces—have attempted to discredit Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration of the Second Vatican Council...
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on the Church’s relationship to non-Christian religions and, above all, to the Jewish people. Some portray it as a betrayal of tradition, others as the product of infiltration or corruption. These claims are not only historically false.
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They are theologically dangerous. What is at stake is nothing less than whether the Catholic Church remains faithful to Scripture, to its own Magisterium, and to the moral truth it painfully recovered in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
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Nostra Aetate is not a private opinion or a political gesture. It was promulgated by an ecumenical council, voted on by the bishops of the world, and solemnly approved by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965.
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In Catholic theology, this places it within the Church’s authoritative teaching—part of the ordinary and universal Magisterium, which binds the faithful.
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It cannot be set aside by bloggers, pressure groups, or ideological movements without rejecting the Church’s own teaching authority.

The declaration made three central doctrinal affirmations about the Jewish people.
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First, Jews today cannot be held collectively responsible for the death of Christ. Second, G-d’s covenant with Israel has not been revoked. Third, antisemitism is a grave sin. These were not innovations; they were corrections of long-standing distortions.
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For centuries, Christians had preached what came to be called “deicide theology,” the belief that the Jews as a people killed G-d and were therefore cursed. That idea fueled ghettos, pogroms, forced conversions, and finally a moral climate in which the Holocuust could occur.
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Vatican II named that theology for what it was: a betrayal of the Gospel.

The deepest biblical foundation for this teaching lies in Romans 11:1-2, 29. St. Paul asks directly, “Has G-d rejected his people?” and answers, “By no means.”
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He insists that “the gifts and the call of G-d are irrevocable” and that the Church is a wild olive branch grafted onto the living root of Israel. In other words, Christianity does not replace Israel; it depends on Israel.
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The Church does not stand over against the Jewish people but lives from their covenantal root. Any theology that claims Jews are abandoned, cursed, or displaced contradicts the apostle who wrote much of the New Testament.
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This understanding was never absent from the early Church. While some Fathers used harsh rhetoric, the most serious theologians affirmed Israel’s enduring role in G-d’s plan. Origen taught that G-d does not lie about His promises.
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Justin Martyr, despite his polemics, still treated the Jewish Scriptures as permanently holy. St. Augustine went further: he insisted that Jews must not be destroyed or forcibly converted because G-d preserves them as living witnesses to His covenant and His Word.
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He famously called them the “living library” of the Church. That is not replacement theology. It is the recognition that Israel and the Church exist in a mysterious, divinely willed relationship.
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Over time, medieval Europe distorted this inheritance by blending theology with politics, racial thinking, and fear. Jews came to be seen not as bearers of G-d’s promises but as enemies of Christ.
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That distortion hardened into doctrine and produced centuries of cruelty. Nostra Aetate was the Church’s act of repentance and theological correction, restoring what Scripture and the Fathers had always taught.
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Pope St. John Paul II made this restoration irreversible in the Church’s moral life. Having lived through the Holocaust, he understood what Christian antisemitism had done to the credibility of the Gospel.
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He called the Jewish people “our elder brothers in the faith,” visited a synagogue, prayed at the Western Wall, and repeatedly taught that antisemitism is a sin against G-d and humanity.
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While not every statement he made was a formal ex cathedra definition, his teaching belongs to the highest level of the Church’s universal magisterium and is binding on the faithful.
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The principles of Nostra Aetate are now embedded in the Catechism, in Canon Law, and in the Church’s pastoral and theological life.
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To reject Nostra Aetate is therefore not to defend Catholic tradition but to rebel against it. It is to deny Scripture, to contradict St. Paul, to reject the Fathers, and to set oneself against the living Magisterium of the Church.
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The claim that Jews are cůrsed, that they are Christ-kil!ers, or that the Church betrayed Christ by affirming Jewish dignity is not traditional Catholicism. It is a resurrected her@sy, one that once wrapped cruelty in the language of holiness.
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The Church has closed that door. Nostra Aetate did not betray Christ; it stripped a lie from His name. And the Gospel cannot be preached in truth as long as hatred of Jesus’ own people is allowed to masquerade as faith.
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