Vatican II: 40
years later
Jump-starting the conversation between Jews and
Catholics
By A. JAMES RUDIN
When the Second Vatican Council
(1962-1965) began, I had just completed a two-year tour of duty as a United
States Air Force chaplain in Japan and Korea, and was starting my civilian
rabbinic career at Temple B’nai Jehudah in Kansas City, Mo.
My military chaplaincy experience in Asia followed by living in
America’s heartland provided me unique vantage points to observe the
historic three-year gathering of the world’s Catholic bishops in Rome as
they vigorously debated, among other things, the church’s future
relationship with Jews and Judaism.
As the only rabbi assigned to the U.S. bases in southern Japan, I
worked closely on a daily basis with both Catholic and Protestant clergy. We
shared the same chapel space for our offices, various religious services and
classes. We also cooperated on a host of official military duties including
being present at aircraft and auto accidents involving Americans, as well as
counseling troubled military personnel and their families.
It was my first taste of authentic interreligious cooperation, and
despite the passage of 40 years, I vividly remember the positive attitudes many
of my Christian colleagues, especially the Catholic chaplains, expressed toward
Jews and Judaism. Those attitudes were the direct result of chaplains serving
together in America’s multi-religious, multiracial and multiethnic armed
forces.
Preserving the spiritual lives of our military men and women in
harm’s way required an active form of religious pluralism and clergy
collaboration that was frequently absent in American civilian life during the
early 1960s. Passive tolerance of one another was not sufficient in the armed
forces; mutual esteem and respect were absolutely necessary.
My positive chaplaincy experiences with Catholics predated the
extraordinary achievements of the Second Vatican Council that were to come in
later years, and they represented a preview of what was possible in
interreligious relations.
Once I was out of uniform, America’s Midwest also presented
me something quite surprising. For even as the bishops were deliberating at the
Vatican, Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., Bishop Charles Helmsing publicly reached
out in warm friendship to the Kansas City Jewish community. Joining him in this
pioneering effort were the leaders of Rockhurst College, now Rockhurst
University, a local Catholic school.
I also remember the skepticism expressed by both Jews and
Catholics in Kansas City as the bishops at the Second Vatican Council grappled
with their church’s long record of negative relations with the synagogue
and its people. The skeptics were certain nothing important would emerge from
the council in the area of interreligious relations since there was so much to
confront and overcome.
The Nazi Holocaust (1933-1945), the murder of 6 million Jews, took
place in the heart of “Christian Europe,” and the rebirth of a
sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East in 1948 were unspoken, perhaps
unwanted, guests at the Second Vatican Council and influenced the discussions.
Both events, one horrific and one heroic, demanded a radical recasting of
long-held Catholic theological, cultural, liturgical and pedagogical beliefs
about Jews and Judaism. Could it happen? Past history seemed to say no.
The baleful deeply embedded record of Christian anti-Jewish
writings and teachings is well documented, and the apt phrase, “the
teaching of contempt,” succinctly describes much of the past 2,000 years.
Tragically, there were more shadows than light in Catholic-Jewish
relations.
Three examples, each from a different period of history, reflect
that Christian animus. The fourth century saint, John Chrysostom, called Jews
“assassins of Christ,” and he considered the synagogue “worse
than a brothel.” In 1543 Martin Luther taught that all Jews in Germany
should be “put under one roof” and if they still proved too dangerous
for society, the “poisonous bitter worms” should be driven out of
Germany “for all time.” In 1871, Pope Pius IX, who was recently
canonized, called members of the 2,200-year-old Jewish community of Rome
“dogs barking in all the streets.”
Despite, or perhaps, because of that wretched past, the
council’s tersely worded declaration Nostra Aetate (“In Our
Time”) was overwhelmingly adopted in Rome by more than 2,200 bishops in
October 1965. I didn’t know it back then, but Nostra Aetate became
the key document that set in motion the extraordinary revolution in
Catholic-Jewish relations. The declaration “decries hatred, persecution,
displays of anti-Semitism directed against Jews at any time and by any
one,” and calls for “mutual respect and knowledge” between
Catholics and Jews. It also repudiated the infamous deicide charge that Jews
then and now are collectively responsible for the death of Jesus, a cosmic
“crime” deserving of both divine and human punishment. For some
Christians, the deicide charge became a justification for committing violent
acts against Jews.
Happily, Nostra Aetate broke the dam of suspicion, distrust
and lack of knowledge that had existed for nearly 2,000 years. Because of
Nostra Aetate, there have been more positive Catholic-Jewish encounters
during the past four decades than there were in the first two millennia of the
church.
But in 1965 the declaration drew sharp criticism. For many Jews,
it was a clear case of much too little and far too late. Jewish critics charged
that Catholics, indeed all Christians, were incapable of reversing centuries of
“Jew hatred.” They argued that past history and deep-seated
anti-Jewish theological beliefs could not be overcome.
Catholic critics of Nostra Aetate were also skeptical. They
argued that Jews had failed to accept Jesus as the Messiah and as a result of
their “spiritual blindness,” they represented a vapid, empty
religion. Because of this refusal, there was no reason to build “mutual
respect and knowledge” between the one true faith and a spiritually
exhausted one.
But, of course, the critics in both communities were wrong.
Spurred by Nostra Aetate, the last four decades have been
momentous ones as Jews and Catholics, both clergy and laity, attempted to
reverse 20 centuries of contempt and hostility and replace them instead with
“mutual respect and knowledge.”
The Second Vatican Council surely changed my life. The passage of
Nostra Aetate and the vision it offered of Catholic-Jewish relations
inspired me to join the interreligious department of the American Jewish
Committee in 1968. For the next 32 years the council’s work was the
keystone not only of Catholic-Jewish relations, but of all Christian-Jewish
encounters.
Since the conclusion of the council, there has been a series of
significant Catholic guidelines, notes and teachings amplifying and
strengthening Nostra Aetate. Pope John Paul II has publicly denounced
anti-Semitism on many occasions, knelt in prayer at the Auschwitz death camp in
memory of the Jews killed there, spoken of Jews as “elder brothers in
faith” during a visit to Rome’s Great Synagogue, established full
diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel, and
journeyed to Israel where he left a poignant personal prayer at
Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Judaism’s ultimate sacred space. But it all
began with Nostra Aetate.
Although my wife, Marcia, strongly supported my efforts to build
the “mutual respect and understanding” described in Nostra
Aetate, others in my family, clearly reflecting long centuries of painful
Jewish history, did not understand or fully believe in the efficacy of what I
was doing. My family’s probing questioning about the depth and permanence
of positive Catholic-Jewish relations was a healthy corrective to my unfettered
optimism about the future. With 40 years of hindsight and personal experience,
it is clear the Second Vatican Council represented a kind of Brayshit,
the first Hebrew word of the book of Genesis. The council marked the beginning,
albeit an impressive one, of a long effort to eradicate every vestige of
anti-Semitism within the Catholic church.
What is urgently required now is the full implementation of
Nostra Aetate and all that has followed from it. Or to put it in even
clearer terms, the Second Vatican Council was a “wholesale”
operation. Now comes the “retail” part where anti-Jewish elements are
removed from all church nursery schools, catechetics, colleges, universities
and seminaries, and where the music, biblical readings, liturgy and sermons of
every parish are free of the old “teaching of contempt.” Do I hear
the skeptics once saying it can’t be done? Come on, it’s not 1962
anymore.
Like children on a long journey, we keep asking one another,
“Are we there yet?” The answer, of course, is not yet, but because of
the Second Vatican Council’s achievements, we can now say with confidence
that Jews and Catholics are at long last traveling as faithful pilgrims on a
righteous journey, and traveling together.
Rabbi A. James Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s
senior interreligious adviser, is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of
Religion and Judaica at St. Leo University, St. Leo, Fla., and a past chair of
the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations. He is the
co-editor of Jewish-Catholic Relations (Paulist Press) and the author of
Israel for Christians: Understanding Modern Israel. (Fortress
Press).
National Catholic Reporter, October 4,
2002
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