Last week, at the conference “Nostra Aetate: In Their Age and In Ours,” we gathered to mark sixty years since the Catholic Church publicly renounced theological antisemitism and began reconsidering its relationship with the Jewish people.
It should have been a moment of commemoration. Instead, as the day unfolded, particularly through historian Sarah Han’s searing lecture, some voices made clear that the Church has never fully accepted the implications of the document it celebrates.
To understand Han’s point, we must first recall what Nostra Aetate actually is: a short, non-dogmatic declaration of the Second Vatican Council, promulgated in October 1965.
