Nostra Aetate

Why this Chapter exists

1,600 words that reversed two thousand years.

Nostra Aetate, Latin for “In Our Time,” after its opening words, is the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. The Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II”) issued it on October 28, 1965. Vatican II was the worldwide assembly of Catholic bishops that met in Rome from 1962 to 1965, convened by Pope John XXIII and concluded under Pope Paul VI. At about 1,200 words in the original Latin (about 1,600 in English), the declaration is the shortest of the sixteen documents Vatican II produced.

The declaration has five numbered parts. The first speaks of the unity of the human family. The second turns to the world’s religions in general, with attention to Hinduism and Buddhism. The third, which opens “The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems,” concerns Islam. The fourth, the longest, concerns the Church’s relationship to the Jewish people. The fifth closes by rejecting discrimination against people “because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion.”

What it ended

What it ended.

Part four of the declaration rejected two teachings that had circulated in Catholic preaching and instruction, in various forms, for many centuries. It also weakened the ground under a third:

• The deicide charge. “Deicide” means the killing of God. The charge held that the Jewish people as a whole, across all of history, bore the guilt for the death of Jesus and were therefore under divine punishment. The idea had roots in the Adversus Judaeos (“Against the Jews”) sermons and treatises of early Christian writers. It ran through Christian writing, medieval art, and popular religious culture from late antiquity into the twentieth century.
• The “cursed and rejected” teaching. The teaching that the Jewish people, for supposedly rejecting Christ, had been “cursed” or “rejected” by God, and that their continued existence was a standing sign of that rejection. One popular form was the legend of the “Wandering Jew,” a Jew condemned to roam the earth until the end of time. The teaching was used to justify the legal and social subordination of Europe’s Jews.
• Hard supersessionism. Supersessionism (from “supersede,” to replace) is the teaching that the Church had replaced the Jewish people in God’s plan. Its hard form held that God’s covenant with the Jews had been revoked. Nostra Aetate did not say outright that the covenant had never been revoked. The Vatican’s own 2015 reflection notes that this point “cannot be explicitly read into” the declaration. Pope John Paul II first stated it “with full clarity,” in that reflection’s words, at Mainz, Germany, in 1980, speaking of “the people of God of the Old Covenant, never revoked by God.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church later repeated it. The 2015 reflection also rejects a “two-covenant” theology of separate paths to salvation.

Another current ran beside these teachings: the tradition also held that the Jews remained dear to God. Nostra Aetate made that view, for the first time, the official teaching of the Church.

The decisive paragraphs

The decisive paragraphs.

The core statements of part four sit in a handful of sentences. Here they are in the declaration’s own words, from the Vatican’s English text:

• On the Church and the Jewish people: “The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant.”
• On Israel’s continuing election: “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues.” The line draws on Romans 11:28–29. It became the foundation for the later Church teaching that God’s covenant with the Jewish people is “irrevocable.”
• On guilt for the death of Jesus, the sentence opens with a concession: “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.” It continues: “still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” The concession concerns the authorities of Jesus’s day. The second half refuses to blame Jews as a whole, then or now. It is the declaration’s rejection of the deicide charge, although the final text does not use the word “deicide.”
• On the “rejected” or “cursed” idea: “Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.” The opening clause keeps the Church’s description of itself as “the new people of God.” Later documents had to work out how that description fits with an unrevoked covenant.
• On antisemitism: the Church, “moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”
• On why Christ died: “as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love.” The declaration presents this as long-standing Church teaching, which places the cause of the Passion in the sins of all humanity.

The document rejects teachings that had shaped much Catholic preaching and instruction about the Jewish people for centuries. It affirms the continuing election of Israel. In 1965 these were serious theological commitments, with consequences for religious teaching, worship, biblical interpretation, education, and the Church’s dealings with the wider world.

John XXIII and Jules Isaac

Pope John XXIII and Jules Isaac.

One well-documented starting point is a single meeting. On June 13, 1960, the French Jewish historian Jules Isaac (1877–1963) met Pope John XXIII at the Vatican. Isaac had survived the Holocaust in France. His wife and daughter had been deported and murdered at Auschwitz. He had spent the postwar years working to reform Christian teaching about the Jewish people. In 1947 he took eighteen proposals for Christian teaching to an emergency conference on antisemitism at Seelisberg, Switzerland. Its Christian delegates drew on them for the Ten Points of Seelisberg, an address to the churches that asked preachers to remember that Jesus, the apostles, and the first members of the Church were Jews. His book The Teaching of Contempt (1962) documented the anti-Jewish elements that had built up in Christian education and biblical interpretation over the centuries.

At that meeting, Isaac handed the Pope a memorandum summarizing the reforms he urged. As Angelo Roncalli, John XXIII had served as the Vatican’s representative in Istanbul during the war, where he took part in efforts to help Jewish refugees. After the meeting he gave Cardinal Augustin Bea the task of drafting a statement on the Church’s relationship to the Jewish people for the council he was preparing to call.

Bea, a German Jesuit biblical scholar (1881–1968), became the chief architect of Nostra Aetate over the next five years, working through his Secretariat for Christian Unity. John XXIII did not live to see it finished. He died on June 3, 1963, and the work continued under Pope Paul VI.

The drafting was contested

The drafting was contested.

The first draft, a short “Decree on the Jews,” was dated November 1961. The text was then fought over across the council’s second, third, and fourth sessions. It went through many revisions and met steady opposition from several directions. The drafting is documented in John Connelly’s From Enemy to Brother (Harvard, 2012), in Mauro Velati’s collections of the draft texts, and in the multi-volume History of Vatican II edited by Giuseppe Alberigo. The main sources of opposition:

• Arab Christian and Eastern Catholic bishops worried that any council statement about the Jewish people would be read in the Middle East as a Vatican position on the State of Israel, with consequences for Arab Christian communities. The Vatican responded by stressing that the document was theological and pastoral, not political, and by widening its scope to include Islam alongside Judaism.
• Traditionalist theologians and bishops objected that the document broke with doctrines they held binding, particularly the language on Israel’s continuing election and the rejection of the deicide charge.
• Arab governments pressed their objections on the Vatican at various points. The final declaration says the Church acts “moved not by political reasons.”

The drafting produced several successive versions. Some early drafts were stronger than the final text on specific points, and others were weaker. A draft of March 1964 told Catholics never to present the Jewish people as “guilty of deicide,” and said the Church “deplores and condemns” hatred and persecution of the Jews. The final text drops the word “deicide” and the word “condemns.” It keeps the substance: the Passion “cannot be charged against all the Jews.” The final version is the compromise that could win the two-thirds majority a council requires.

Object Spotlight

Heschel and Cardinal Bea, in conversation.

Look first at the two men. The man on the left leans in close beside the other, an open newspaper on the table in front of them. He has a full grey beard, dark-rimmed glasses, and a small cap on the back of his head, a yarmulke, the head covering worn by observant Jewish men. The man on the right, seated, is older, his face deeply lined, wearing a round skullcap and a heavy robe with a chain across his chest. One hand is raised to his lips.

This is a press photograph, the kind taken by a news agency and printed in newspapers. The two men are Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a leading Jewish theologian of the twentieth century, and Cardinal Augustin Bea, the German Jesuit introduced above. Bea was the man Pope John XXIII put in charge of writing the statement that became Nostra Aetate.

The photograph was taken during the years the declaration was being drafted and fought over. Heschel, who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, was one of the leading Jewish voices the Vatican consulted while it wrote part four. He met with Bea and sent the Vatican formal memoranda on what the document should and should not say. He pressed hard on one point above all: that the declaration must not call for the conversion of Jews. The newspaper on the table is Die jüdische Presse, “The Jewish Press,” its masthead in German.

Alongside the formal sessions, Bea and his staff met Jewish scholars and organizations in person, and Heschel was among the most active of them.

Meetings of this kind, a rabbi and a cardinal sitting down together, became regular in the decades that followed, through the dialogue bodies set up after the declaration.

October 28, 1965

October 28, 1965.

The final vote took place on October 28, 1965, in St. Peter’s Basilica, during the council’s fourth and last session. The declaration passed 2,221 in favor to 88 against, well above the two-thirds needed. Pope Paul VI formally issued it (in Church language, promulgated it) immediately after the vote.

More than 2,300 bishops from around the world voted, and roughly 96 percent voted in favor. An ecumenical council, a worldwide assembly of bishops called by the pope, is the highest teaching assembly of the Catholic Church. Its documents come in three kinds: constitutions, decrees, and declarations. Nostra Aetate is a declaration.

Six decades of partnership

Six decades of partnership.

In the sixty years since, the Catholic Church and the major Jewish bodies have built a working relationship through later official documents, papal acts, and formal dialogue institutions. The major steps:

• The Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews (established 1974), the main Vatican body for the relationship with the Jewish people. It has issued the major follow-up documents. They include the 1974 Guidelines and the 1985 Notes on preaching and catechesis (catechesis is the Church’s religious instruction). They also include the 1998 We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah and the 2015 The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable.
• The 1985 Notes gave Catholic clergy and teachers practical guidance on how to present Jews and Judaism. They were written to carry Nostra Aetate’s teaching into preaching and everyday religious education.
• The 1986 visit of Pope John Paul II to the Great Synagogue of Rome, which Vatican News describes as the first time in history that a pope entered a synagogue. His address used a phrase often repeated since: “You are our dearly beloved brothers, and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.”
• The 1993 Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel, which committed both sides to full diplomatic relations, established in June 1994.
• The 1998 We Remember, the Vatican’s reflection on the Holocaust. It addresses the relationship between Christian anti-Judaism (religious hostility to Judaism) and Nazi antisemitism, and the conduct of Catholics during those years. It is the Vatican’s own account, and scholars still debate it, including its treatment of Pope Pius XII.
• The 2000 visit of Pope John Paul II to Yad Vashem and Jerusalem. At the Western Wall he left a signed prayer. It says “we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer,” and asks God’s forgiveness.
• The 2000 Jewish statement Dabru Emet (“Speak the Truth”), written by four Jewish scholars and signed by more than 200 rabbis and scholars. It opens: “In recent years, there has been a dramatic and unprecedented shift in Jewish and Christian relations.”
• The 2006 visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Auschwitz and the 2014 visit of Pope Francis to Yad Vashem.
• The 2015 The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable, the Commission’s fiftieth-anniversary reflection. It describes itself as “not a magisterial document or doctrinal teaching” (magisterial means carrying the Church’s formal teaching authority). It states that the Church “neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.” In the same paragraph it adds that Christians are still “called to bear witness to their faith in Jesus Christ also to Jews,” in “a humble and sensitive manner.”

The wider Christian context

The wider Christian context.

The Catholic process was not alone. Major Protestant denominations issued parallel rejections of antisemitic doctrine across the postwar period:

• The Lutheran World Federation (1984) formally rejected the antisemitic elements in Martin Luther’s writings, above all his 1543 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, and committed the Lutheran communion against antisemitism. The 1994 ELCA declaration extended this in the American context.
• The World Council of Churches, a fellowship of Protestant, Anglican, and Orthodox churches, addressed the theological inheritance of antisemitism in statements from 1948 onward. The 1988 Sigtuna Statement is a key reference.
• The United Methodist Church (1996) set out its position in Building New Bridges in Hope, in terms close to the Catholic framework.
• The Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, and other major American mainline bodies adopted parallel statements.
• The Anglican Communion at the 1988 Lambeth Conference, and the Church of England in its 2001 report Sharing One Hope?

By the early twenty-first century, many of the largest Protestant and Anglican churches in Europe and North America had issued formal statements rejecting antisemitism and the anti-Jewish teachings of earlier centuries.

The Eastern Christian record

The Eastern Christian record.

The Eastern Orthodox churches have not produced a single document like Nostra Aetate. Orthodoxy is structured differently, as a communion of self-governing national churches rather than one body, so its statements on the Jewish people have tended to come as patriarchal statements, conference resolutions, and theological writing rather than council documents.

There has still been engagement. In May 2019 Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (Istanbul), joined the March of the Living, a walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau in memory of the Holocaust’s victims. There he said that since the start of his tenure, almost twenty-eight years earlier, he had denounced “anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia.” Individual Orthodox theologians have contributed to the postwar Christian-Jewish literature. In 2016 the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, meeting in Crete, rejected discrimination based on “skin color, religion, race, sex, ethnicity, and language.” Its document on the Church’s mission does not name antisemitism.

Open questions

What historians still debate.

Several questions remain open or contested:

• Implementation varies. The 2015 document itself says it is important that Catholic educational institutions, “particularly in the training of priests,” integrate Nostra Aetate and the later documents into their curricula. In a study of American Catholic religion textbooks, the scholar Philip Cunningham found that they had largely removed negative or inaccurate references to Jews and to the Pharisees, a Jewish movement of Jesus’s time. What remained, he said, was “the idea that Jesus and Judaism are somehow fundamentally opposed.”
• The Holocaust-era conduct of the Church, including Pope Pius XII and the Vatican between 1939 and 1945, remains a subject of active scholarship and debate. The 1998 We Remember made substantive statements. Research continues, especially since the Pius XII archives opened in 2020.
• Traditionalist dissent. The Society of Saint Pius X, a traditionalist group founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, has no canonical (legal) status in the Catholic Church. In 2009 the Vatican made “full recognition of the Second Vatican Council” a condition for any future recognition of the group. The same year, the Vatican called one of its bishops’ statements denying the Holocaust “absolutely unacceptable.”
• The wider Christian world includes many churches, among them many evangelical and independent churches, that have issued no comparable statements. Positions vary widely by group.
• Mission and witness. The 2015 reflection rejects institutional missions aimed at Jews while still calling Christians to bear witness to Jews. Catholic and Jewish participants in the dialogue continue to discuss how the two fit together.

What it represents

What Nostra Aetate represents.

The declaration changed positions with a long institutional history. In 1215 a Church council, the Fourth Lateran Council, ordered Jews to wear distinguishing dress. In 1555 a pope confined Rome’s Jews to a ghetto. In 1965 a council of more than 2,300 bishops voted, by roughly 96 percent, to reject the charge of collective Jewish guilt and to affirm God’s continuing love for the Jewish people.

Historians still debate how far centuries of Christian anti-Jewish teaching prepared the ground for Nazi antisemitism. The Vatican’s 1998 We Remember calls the Shoah “the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime” whose antisemitism “had its roots outside of Christianity.” The same document asks whether “anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians” made them “less sensitive, or even indifferent,” to the persecution. David Kertzer, whose study is listed below, traces the Vatican’s own role in the rise of modern antisemitism.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. The postwar reshaping of the major Christian bodies (religious freedom, dialogue, and theological reform after the Holocaust) belongs to the postwar global-history unit. Nostra Aetate also anchors a comparative-religion unit on how the Church’s relationship to other faiths developed.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • analyze Nostra Aetate as a major primary historical document, in its own words
  • trace institutional change over time, across the 1965–2015 Vatican documents
  • distinguish the declaration’s official statements from their later implementation
  • compare historical continuity with historical change in Church teaching
  • evaluate the declaration’s historical significance through documentary evidence
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments using primary and secondary sources.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because this Chapter examines religious change, interfaith dialogue, and institutional reform after the Holocaust, it supports Holocaust education, comparative-religion and world-history courses, civic education, and source-based historical inquiry.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.10 (Human Rights Violations).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. The Catholic reckoning with the Holocaust and with the “teaching of contempt,” from Nostra Aetate (1965) through We Remember (1998), is part of the postwar history the mandate supports.
• Common Core RH.11–12.6 & RH.11–12.9. Students analyze the Vatican documents from 1965 to 2015 to study how a major institution states and revises its public commitments over time.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 & D2.His.14. Students investigate chronology, continuity and change, and evidence-based interpretation while tracing how a religious institution reformed its teaching over decades.