Nostra Aetate

Nostra Aetate runs to about sixteen hundred words and took three years and four drafts to produce. John XXIII asked Cardinal Augustin Bea in 1960 to prepare a statement on the Jews, after a meeting with the historian Jules Isaac, whose work had traced the teaching of contempt through Christian preaching and catechesis. The first draft was a decree on the Jews alone. Political pressure from Arab states, which read any Catholic statement on Jews as a statement about Israel, and objections from bishops in Muslim majority countries, pushed the text through successive revisions until it became a declaration on non-Christian religions generally, with the Jewish section as its fourth part.

The final text says that the Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in other religions. It speaks of Hindus contemplating the divine mystery, of Buddhists teaching a way of liberation, and of Muslims who adore the one God, living and subsisting, merciful and almighty, and it urges that the quarrels and hostilities of the past be forgotten.

The fourth section is the one that changed practice. It states that the Church draws sustenance from the root of the good olive tree onto which the Gentiles have been grafted, that what was done in the passion cannot be charged against all the Jews then alive nor against the Jews of today, that they are not to be presented as rejected or accursed, and that the Church decries antisemitism at any time and from any source.

The declaration is not a treaty and it created no obligation enforceable anywhere. What it did was remove the doctrinal footing from a set of practices, and the practices went with it. The Good Friday liturgy had prayed for the perfidious Jews within living memory; the wording had already been altered under John XXIII and was fully replaced in the reformed rite. Catechisms and preaching manuals across the Latin Church were revised. The charge of deicide, which had run through European Christian teaching for well over a millennium and had been the standing pretext for expulsion and massacre, ceased to be teachable.

The institutional consequences accumulated over decades. A Vatican commission for religious relations with Jews was created in 1974 and issued guidelines in 1974 and 1985. John Paul II visited the synagogue of Rome in 1986 and Israel in 2000, and the Holy See and Israel established diplomatic relations in 1993. The same declaration is the reference point of every subsequent Catholic document on Islam.

Its limits are also on the record. It does not address the Shoah directly, which the Church did in 1998 in a separate document, and it left open questions about mission to Jews that later Vatican texts have taken up without closing. The atlas files it as an instrument because of what it repealed in practice rather than what it enacted in law.