A Timely Anniversary

Sixty years ago, on October 28, 1965, the Second Vatican Council adopted, and Pope Paul VI promulgated, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, known by the first words in the official Latin text as Nostra Aetate (In Our Age). I chart Nostra Aetate’s sometimes rocky passage through Vatican II in To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II. Suffice it to note here that the obstinate refusal of some Arab states to concede the reality and permanence of Israel as a Jewish state injected itself into the Council’s discussion, creating difficulties. Nonetheless, and in no small part because of the indefatigable work of Pope Pius XII’s former confessor, the German biblical scholar Cardinal Augustin Bea, S.J., Nostra Aetate made it across the conciliar finish line—and thank God it did, given the resurgence of the cultural cancer of anti-Semitism today.