Catholics and Jews Use Anniversary to Reflect on Relations

As the 40th anniversary nears for a landmark Vatican document that declared that Jews as a people were not responsible for the death of Jesus, American Roman Catholics and Jews are taking stock of how far the religions have come in healing nearly 2,000 years of enmity -- and the challenges ahead.

“Nostra Aetate” (In Our Time), issued by the historic Second Vatican Council in October 1965, said not only that all Jews in the past and present could not be blamed for Jesus’ crucifixion, but that they remained “most dear to God.” The document deplores anti-Semitism and affirms that Jesus and most of his early followers were Jews. The pronouncement also paid respect to Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism.

“ ‘Nostra Aetate’ was a sea change in which both sides spoke to each other and with each other and modified their understandings based on those conversations. That’s huge,” said Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. “For the first time, the Catholic Church no longer has a theology of seeking to make Jews disappear.”

Msgr. Royale Vadakin, a ranking Los Angeles priest who has been involved in interreligious exchanges, called “Nostra Aetate” an epic event. “Without it, we would still be locked in the descriptions of our relationships between Jews and Catholics as indifferent at best and hostile at worse,” Vadakin said.

Commemorative events for the 40th anniversary are being held throughout the world, including a public one at 7:30 tonight at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles. Among the scheduled speakers are Rabbi Michael A. Signer, a professor of Jewish thought and culture at the University of Notre Dame and director of its Holocaust Project; Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles; and Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore, a member of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and moderator for Catholic-Jewish Relations at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Other upcoming events include a major interfaith conference starting Sunday in Rome, sponsored by the Pontifical Gregorian University, Georgetown University and other schools; and symposiums in Houston; St. Paul, Minn.; and other U.S. cities.

Such events are a sign of improved relations between Jews and Catholics, leaders say. Instead of pogroms of the past, popes and cardinals pay calls on synagogues, and rabbis join in interfaith services at Christian churches. Many Catholics see Jews as “elder brothers,” following the example of the late Pope John Paul II.

None of this was necessarily inevitable, those on both sides say, even after the moral revulsion to the Holocaust, during which 6 million Jews were exterminated. “Nostra Aetate” distilled Christian guilt and repentance, horror and hope, and precipitated what many call a major change in Christian-Jewish relations.

Jewish leaders say the document’s legacy is especially relevant at a time when they warn of rising anti-Semitism in areas of the world, fanned in part by the protracted Middle East crisis. Others note what they call the indiscriminate targeting of Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

“We have to be ever more committed to fundamental religious pluralism and respect for diversity as never before,” said David Elcott, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee. “The pendulum is actually going in the other direction.”

Many Catholic and Jewish parochial students learn about each other’s faith, but the efforts are uneven and spotty, religious educators said.

Nancy Coonis, superintendent of secondary schools for the Los Angeles Archdiocese, said teachers in Catholic schools were involved in several programs initiated by the Jewish community, including “Bearing Witness,” an effort to familiarize Catholic teachers with the Holocaust and the history of anti-Semitism. Another program sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles sends Catholic teachers to Israel for a week.

“We make a major effort in our Catholic schools to constantly work on the issues of dialogue, inclusiveness and anti-bias,” Coonis said. “We have to be constantly vigilant.... It only takes a generation for [anti-Semitism] to start again if we’re not careful.”

Rabbi Mark Diamond, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, said that although good progress had been made in academia and seminaries, more attention must be paid to those in the pews. “Even as we bemoan the fact that too many Catholics and Christians are ignorant about Judaism, surely many, many Jews are woefully ignorant about Christianity,” he said.

Among the events that Catholics and Jews cite as evidence of greatly improved relations since “Nostra Aetate” are John Paul’s visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome early in his pontificate, and his visit later to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The pope, a witness to the Holocaust during his youth in Poland, established Vatican diplomatic relations with Israel.

Benedict XVI, who succeeded John Paul this year, has also visited a synagogue as pope, this one in his native Germany.

Two stories help illustrate what has happened since “Nostra Aetate” was put forth on Oct. 28, 1965.

The first occurred last year when a rabbi left a Southern California theater after a screening of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” After sitting through the film with a largely Christian audience, some of whom wept at the brutal scene of Jesus’ flogging by Roman soldiers, Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, a former president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, filed out of the theater with three companions. “Listen,” Goldmark said. “I don’t hear anyone saying, ‘Let’s go kill Jews!’ ”

In another time, that may have not have been the case. Holy Week Passion plays commemorating Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion have led to taunting and brutalizing of Jews in the Middle Ages and modern times.

The church by its own reckoning had been culpable in fostering anti-Semitism. For example, the bishops of the Second Vatican Council, which produced “Nostra Aetate,” decried the bishops of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 for having declared that Jews must not be seen in public during Easter week, must pay a yearly tax at Easter and must wear distinctive clothing. The Catholic liturgy used to contain a prayer for the conversion of Jews.

Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, Western regional director of the American Jewish Committee, who is to speak tonight at the Los Angeles cathedral, agreed that the atmosphere had improved greatly, although with some exceptions. He recalled what he described as a personal affront from a Roman Catholic archbishop in 1995 when both spoke at a program on Catholic-Jewish dialogue, which was going well until a question-and-answer session.

According to Greenebaum, the archbishop then said that he believed in building interfaith respect, but that he would still try to bring “faith in Jesus Christ” to Rabbi Greenebaum if the opportunity arose.

“I [was] deeply hurt and wounded,” Greenebaum said. He said that he realized that the archbishop, whom he declined to identify, was speaking as a Christian who wanted to share something he valued with a friend. But such outreaches, Greenebaum said, are why many Jews remain suspicious that some Christian efforts at dialogue mask an agenda to convert Jews.

There have been ebbs and flows in Catholic-Jewish relations, said Vadakin, the Los Angeles priest. “But it will not go back to where it was [before ‘Nostre Aetate’], and the spirit won’t die,” he said.

“There’s always going to be bumps in the road,” agreed Rabbi Diamond. “But 40 years after ‘Nostra Aetate,’ the greatest gift and enduring legacy of that document is that it has set us on a course that is irreversible.”