George Weigel on the Second Vatican Council and the Jews

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The legacy of Christian anti-Semitism is not a happy one. Early in the history of Christianity, as the religion grew, the persecution of Jews became a normal feature of life in Christian lands. By the Middle Ages, the Jewish people were subject to dislocation, alienation, psychological torment, violence, and torture—all with the approval, and at times the official encouragement, of church authorities. Even in modern times, religiously inflected anti-Semitism has been an unavoidable part of the relations between the two religions.

Is that still the case? Perhaps not. Relations between global Christianity and the Jewish people are fundamentally different than they have been. In part this is because of one document: the Vatican’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, more commonly known by the Latin words with which it begins, Nostra Aetate, “In our time.” Nostra Aetate was promulgated at the ecumenical council called by Pope John XXIII known as the Second Vatican Council, only the 21st such council to have been convened in the nearly two millennia of the Catholic church. This month marks the 60th anniversary of its being convened. To help us understand what the Second Vatican Council was about, and its effects today, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver speaks with one of the most incisive analysts of Catholicism: the author George Weigel. This week marks the publication of his new book about the Second Vatican Council, To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II, a distillation of which was featured in the Wall Street Journal this month under the title “What Vatican II Accomplished.”

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Early in the history of Christianity, as the religion grew in self-confidence and strength,
0:13.0	the persecution of Jews was a normal feature of Christian communal life.
0:18.0	Throughout the Middle Ages, the Jewish people were subject to dislocation,
0:22.3	alienation, psychological torment, and at times physical oppression, violence, and torture,
0:27.6	all at the approval of, at times with the encouragement of, at times as a policy of Christian
0:35.0	authorities. The medieval legacy of Christian anti-Semitism is not a happy one,
0:40.7	and enduring well into the modern era, even into the living memory of Christians and Jews today,
0:46.4	religiously inflected anti-Semitism is an unavoidable part of the relations between these two
0:52.3	great religions. Incalculable, thousands of Jews have been
0:56.3	killed because they were Jews by Christian hands. Thankfully, we now live in a very different
1:02.2	historical moment, and relations between global Christianity and the Jewish people are
1:07.5	fundamentally different than in previous chapters of Christian history.
1:11.9	One way station on the road to the new, dramatically better present of Jewish-Christian relations
1:18.6	was the Vatican's declaration on the relation of the church with non-Christian religions,
1:25.1	more commonly known by the Latin words with which the declaration begins,
1:29.9	Nostra-a-tate, in our time.
1:33.2	Nostra-itate emphasizes the Jewish roots of the Catholic Church.
1:37.7	It addresses the long-standing folk belief that the Jewish people are culpable for the death of Jesus,
1:46.2	explaining, and now I'm quoting from the text of Nostra Itate, what happened in his passion, that is the crucifixion of
1:51.9	Jesus, cannot be charged against all the Jews without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of
1:59.3	today. This, ladies and gentlemen, in light of all that had come before, was a paradigm shift in Catholic
2:05.6	Jewish relations.
	...

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