Fifty years ago, the Second Vatican Council effected the most important repair of Jewish-Christian relations since the two sides parted ways in antiquity. Pope John XXIII had laid the groundwork by getting rid of the Good Friday prayer for the “perfidious (faithless) Jews,” but in the fourth section of Nostra Aetate — the Declaration of the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions — Roman Catholicism went where it had never gone before, repudiating the charge of Jewish deicide and abjuring all expressions of anti-Semitism.
Marking the anniversary of Nostra Aetate last week, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews — which for 40 years years has fostered increasingly amicable ones — issued “The Gifts and Calling of God are Irrevocable,” a theological essay that takes its title from chapter 11 of the Epistle to the Romans, where the Apostle Paul informs his Gentile audience that “all Israel will be saved.” Embracing something like this Pauline position, the essay declares that the Church must therefore refrain from conducting or supporting missions to the Jews.
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