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.
It was the first Catholic document in history to speak directly about Jews. It was inspired in part by French Jewish historian Jules Isaac, who argued that Christian anti Judaism had helped prepare the ground for the Holocaust. Pope John XXIII agreed that the Church had a moral obligation to confront this past.
But the comforting narrative the Church still clings to, that antisemitism at Vatican II was confined to “the margins,” voiced by a few fringe extremists, is simply not true. Han showed, with unsettling clarity, that antisemitism sat at the center of the Council’s debates themselves.
She drew heavily on the testimony of Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich, a Jewish adviser to Cardinal Bea during the drafting of Nostra Aetate. Ehrlich watched the process from within.
What he observed was not the Church courageously overcoming external pressures, but the Church struggling against its own internal, inherited theology. He wrote that the resistance to the declaration on the Jews was only “partly attributable to the Arab League. The rest was original, a Catholic product.”
Han reminded us that one of the most vocal and organized factions at the Council, the Coetus Internationalis Patrum, led by Archbishop Lefebvre, Bishop Carli, and Cardinal Ruffini, openly defended anti-Jewish theology as Catholic tradition.
Christian truth required an anti-Jewish stance
Under the banner of “protecting Catholic identity,” they argued that Christian truth required an anti-Jewish stance. Their opposition was not subtle: they saw any shift toward Judaism as a threat to the Church itself.
Alongside them, what Han called the “apologetic choir” attacked the declaration as a Zionist conspiracy. Some claimed Jews were “arrogant,” “provocative,” even “Eurasian,” the vocabulary of classic antisemitic propaganda.
One cardinal declared that the Church “cannot oppose the entire Arab world just to satisfy its Jews,” as though Jewish theological dignity were a bothersome political request. A prominent theological adviser added: “The Jews are so clever that they have succeeded in dividing Christians.”
To call this “antisemitism at the margins,” Han argued, is to participate in a carefully crafted illusion. It is not an innocent scholarly phrase. It is a strategy, a way of pushing antisemitism out of sight, protecting the Church’s self-image, and insisting that the hatred lived outside Christianity rather than within it.
Han highlighted this with a striking example from Romans 11:25, a passage where Paul urges Christians not to judge the Jewish people and reminds them that Israel’s future is in God’s hands, not theirs.
Yet in a key 1964 draft of Nostra Aetate, this verse was subtly rewritten so that it no longer emphasized God’s mystery, but instead suggested that the verse pointed toward the need for Jews to eventually accept Christ.
In other words, a text meant to protect Jewish dignity was turned into support for missionary efforts. Ehrlich was outraged. He called the draft “an exegetical embarrassment” and wrote, “I truly cannot understand how anyone can claim to be quoting Paul here.”
For him, it showed that even when the Church tried to move forward, its old habit of using Scripture to assert superiority over Jews was still very much alive, just expressed in softer language.
Han was careful to acknowledge that Nostra Aetate was a breakthrough. It ended centuries of explicit condemnation and initiated the Church’s long-overdue self-examination. Without the work of Cardinal Bea, John Oesterreicher, Gregory Baum, and others, the document might never have seen the light of day.
But Nostra Aetate did not create a new theology. It merely began the arduous process of unlearning the Church’s centuries-long negation of Israel. And as Han demonstrated, that unlearning remains profoundly incomplete.
The Council’s difficulty in articulating any positive theology of Judaism was not a bureaucratic accident. It reflected a deep structural reality: for nearly two thousand years, Christianity had defined itself against Judaism. Whenever the Church feared losing its exclusive claim to be the “sole People of God,” anti-Judaism returned.
That dynamic did not disappear after 1965. It continued, sometimes quietly, sometimes openly, into the decades that followed. It still shapes Catholic thought today.
The phrase “antisemitism at the margins,” Han repeated, allows the Church to congratulate itself for Nostra Aetate while ignoring the persistence of anti-Jewish patterns in religious textbooks, catechism classes, preaching, and theologies of “fulfilled” or “spiritualized” Judaism.
It explains why antisemitic comments in Church contexts are dismissed as misunderstandings, and why, even now, especially since October 7, Jewish requests for solidarity often meet a hesitant, qualified, or diplomatic silence.
Ehrlich warned sixty years ago that Nostra Aetate would have meaning only if Christians “made it their own and translated it into action.” Han made clear that this translation remains incomplete.
The door opened in 1965, but what stands behind it is nothing less than the theological core of Catholic identity. Walking through it means confronting where antisemitism lived, and still lives, at the very heart of Christian thought.
That is the work the Church has not yet done.
And until it does, the promise of Nostra Aetate will remain not a transformation, but a beginning the Church has been too afraid to finish.
The writer is a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and has a doctorate in religion and theology from the University of Oxford.