Our gathering is titled “The Church and the Jewish Community in Our Age.” That phrase, in our age, invites us to think about time itself: what has changed, and what continues to unfold since Nostra Aetate was first proclaimed sixty years ago.
When the Council Fathers spoke in 1965 of “our time,” it was a very particular moment: a world still raw from the Shoah, yet suddenly open to hope. But “our time” did not end in 1965, and let’s be honest, 1965 was not my time at all. The words of Nostra Aetate were not a closing statement; they were a beginning, the opening of a movement that continues to unfold in our time, in the life of the Church today. The question before us is not only what Nostra Aetate said then, but how the Church has continued to receive and deepen it since.
That is what I’d like to trace today: how, in the decades since the Council, the Church has sought to think theologically about the Jewish people, not only in the biblical or historical sense, but in the lived, covenantal reality of Judaism today.
To begin, let’s look back at what made Nostra Aetate itself so extraordinary. This brief declaration, only five paragraphs, and in English, it is fewer than six hundred words, represented a seismic shift in the story of Christian self-understanding and its approach to other religious traditions, and particularly Judaism.
To speak those words in 1965 required immense courage. It meant confronting two millennia of teaching that had too often portrayed Jews as rejected, blind, even accursed. It meant acknowledging, in the shadow of the Shoah, that such teaching had helped till the soil in which antisemitism grew. It meant recognizing the need for repentance and conversion, to change the Church’s understanding of itself and its history.
The Council Fathers were sustained by the conviction that fidelity to Christ demanded a new beginning with the people of Israel.
They did not act alone, either. Behind those few paragraphs lay years of conversation and persistence from Jewish and Catholic thinkers and diplomats, scholars and survivors, who believed that mutual understanding could rise even from the ashes of the Shoah. The Jewish interlocutors who engaged with Cardinal Bea and his Secretariat for Christian Unity did so with extraordinary patience and trust, often uncertain whether the Church could truly change.
And yet, it did.
When Nostra Aetate declared that the Church “cannot forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that good olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots of the Gentiles,” it recovered something essential: that the Church’s own identity is nourished by Israel’s covenantal life.
For the first time in its history, an ecumenical council explicitly rejected the charge of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Christ. It denounced antisemitism in every form. And perhaps most importantly, it called for “mutual understanding and respect” through “biblical and theological studies and fraternal dialogue.”
Those words may sound almost modest now, but in 1965 they were nothing short of revolutionary. They opened a door that had been closed for centuries and invited the Church to walk through it into a new relationship with the Jewish people.
Still, Nostra Aetate bore the marks of its time. When it described the Jews as still dear to God “for the sake of their fathers,” it reflected a biblical rather than contemporary frame. The emphasis was on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, on Israel’s past rather than on the living Jewish community of the present.
But in planting that seed, the Council also made possible the next six decades of theological growth, a movement that would take that phrase and unfold its full meaning: that God’s covenantal love for Israel is not a memory but a living reality. That our relationship cannot remain confined to the pages of Scripture. It must engage the living people of Israel, the Jewish people of today, as a continuing partner in God’s faithfulness.
Of course, inspiration alone was not enough. The vision of Nostra Aetate needed a home, a place within the Church where dialogue could take root and be sustained.
In 1974, the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews was established, housed within the Secretariat for Christian Unity, signaling that the Church now understood dialogue with Judaism as a theological commitment, part of its own faithfulness to the Gospel. The Commission was charged not merely with organizing meetings, but with helping the Church reflect more deeply on the enduring covenant between God and Israel, on how we preach, teach, and interpret Scripture, and on how the wounds of history could be healed.
That same year, the Commission issued Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate 4. As the title suggests, it focused on the need for “concrete implementation”. It was the first Vatican document to speak explicitly of dialogue between the Church and the Jewish people.
It insists that Christians must not only learn about Judaism but “meet the Jewish people as they actually live in the contemporary world.” That was a quiet but momentous shift: from studying Judaism as an ancient phenomenon to encountering Jews as living partners in faith, including their reading of Scripture.
A decade later came the Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis. Here the Church took a further step. The Notes teach that “the Jewish people have a religious value for us Christians,” not only because of our origins but because “they are still the people of God’s covenant.”
That phrase, “still the people of God’s covenant”, is vital. It corrects centuries of Christian habit that saw the covenant as replaced, annulled, or fulfilled to the point of disappearance.
The Notes also make an important distinction: biblical Israel and the Jewish people of today are not identical, but they are inseparable. The living Jewish people remain the historical bearer of that covenantal identity.
Even its treatment of the State of Israel is handled with care. The Notes say that the Church views the State “not in itself as a religious reality, but as a political one”. And yet, Christians are called to understand what that reality means for Jews. In other words, Catholic theology must deal not only with the Israel of faith but also with the Israel that exists in history with all its complexity.
The Pontifical Biblical Commission built upon this foundation, declaring in its 2001 document The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible that “Christians can and ought to admit that the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one,” an affirmation that can be and has been understood as applying to the whole of Judaism as a living tradition.
At the fiftieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews published The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable.
It begins by affirming that “the covenant that God made with Israel has never been revoked.” It goes on to say that the Church neither replaces nor supersedes the people of Israel.
Those words are revolutionary precisely because they are now ordinary. They have become part of our shared theological language.
The document calls Jews and Christians “partners in a common responsibility to bear witness to the one God.” It recognizes that while our understandings of covenant and Messiah remain distinct, we are both called to be witnesses to God’s fidelity in the world.
It also makes a subtle but crucial move: it says that the dialogue between the Church and Judaism takes place “at a different level” than dialogue with other religions, because Christianity and Judaism are bound by a “unique relationship” grounded in shared revelation.
This is no longer about mutual tolerance; it is about mutual vocation.
Across these decades, the Church has moved from text to encounter, from declaration to relationship.
What began in the Council chamber now lives in countless friendships, study groups, and dialogues. Each of these dialogues embodies a theological claim: that God continues to act in the relationship between Jews and Christians. As Pope Francis has said, “Dialogue is not a negotiation. It is a journey together.”
That journey has not been linear, and it is not finished. But it has changed the Church. The very way Catholics read Scripture, teach theology, and think about covenant has been reshaped by this encounter.
And yet, even as we celebrate these milestones, we need to keep pressing forward.
It remains tempting, especially in theological circles, to speak about “Judaism” mainly in biblical or historical terms, as if the Jew were a figure in the past. But the heart of Nostra Aetate’s legacy is precisely the opposite.
And so, the dialogue must be with the Jew of today: the Jew who prays, interprets, wrestles, and hopes in the living covenant with God. But it must also mean entering into relationship with the whole of that lived reality.
True dialogue is not abstract. It asks us to meet one another in the concrete, often painful, circumstances of history. It asks Christians not only to study Jewish texts, but to listen to the concerns and vulnerabilities of Jewish communities today; to the ways in which memory, faith, and peoplehood are bound up with survival and security, with longing and loss.
And truly, our dialogue has never been a matter of theory, but of lived reality. These past two years have tested that relationship deeply. The horrors of the Hamas attacks on October 7, the anguish of hostages and families, the devastation and suffering in Gaza, and the rising tides of antisemitism and polarization across the world have all placed new pressures on Jewish–Catholic dialogue.
And yet, perhaps this is precisely when dialogue shows its truest form; not as easy agreement, but as the commitment to stay in relationship even when the conversation is hardest. The late Cardinal Cassidy, who led the Commission for many years, once said that dialogue “does not eliminate difference, but transforms how difference is lived.” That is the work before us now: to keep meeting one another in honesty and fidelity, even when the world around us feels fractured.
Sixty years on, Nostra Aetate remains not only a watershed, but a living call. The Church continues to learn what it means to confess that ‘the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable’, a truth for all time, and especially for ours.
Rebecca Cohen
Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
IFC Board Member