The Catholic Church and the Jewish People: Recent Reflections from Rome

10. Nostra Aetate and the Discovery of the Sacrament of Otherness

10. Nostra Aetate and the Discovery of the Sacrament of Otherness Alberto Melloni 1. Introduction What follows is a quick presentation of the preconciliar work that led to the declaration Nostra Aetate. This presentation is almost always indebted to the main existing historiographical literature: from the memories of John M. Oesterreicher,1 to the theological reflection of Eugene Fisher,2 and to the historical work of Giovanni Miccoli and Mauro Velati in the History of Vatican II edited by Giuseppe Alberigo. I invite you to consult these texts for references that this essay does not mention .3 Today we are aware of the extent to which all these reconstructions , or at least some parts of them, are largely of a tentative nature. This is due to the fact that Paul VI chose to open the Archive of the Council to scholarly examination, moving it to a more accessible location within the Secret Vatican Archive; the documents included therein suggest nuances and corrections that are not just marginal and that in the near future shall necessitate a general reconsideration of all the extant evidence, when the papers of the principal actors of the Council will have also been assembled and studied. If I choose to go over the stages of a long and difficult struggle such as the one that led to the document Nostra Aetate, it is because this struggle is full of special significance for the history of the Second Vatican Council: that document would become a document on all religions, 130 / Alberto Melloni and as such it would be received in the postconciliar period; in its origins , however, we find more problematic issues concerning the relationship between the Church and Judaism. This origin is not merely textual, but, as I shall review toward the end, it is also historical in the deepest sense of the term: the weight of the culture of contempt promoted by official Church teaching,4 the relationship between this tradition and the Shoah,5 the difficulty in discerning that event on the theological level,6 and the burning dilemma of guilt and its polemical use as accusation7 — all of this weighs heavily on Nostra Aetate. It explains the determination with which a few Council fathers wanted contra spem (against all hope) a declaration that did not have behind it the long process of doctrinal exploration that had marked other conciliar decisions. It also sheds light on its reception, which in a certain sense experienced a turning point only when John Paul II inserted into the crannies of the Western Wall the text of the mea culpa of the Catholic Church, with a gesture that is itself a parable of the changes undergone by the Roman papacy and at the same time by the Church in its larger ecumenical sense. Before presenting a few, extremely short points of reflection on this topic, I would like to go over the rapid succession of drafts in an order that is still provisional and that requires some detailed work on the texts themselves, as well as on the archive of the general secretariat, and on the papers of Bea, Rudloff, Oesterreicher, Congar, De Smedt, and many others, so as to go from an individuation of sequential segments to a more articulate ‘‘pattern.’’8 2. The Prehistory The idea to submit for the Council’s consideration the problem of the relationship between the Church and the Jews was an important concern for many of the protagonists of the preparation of Vatican II. Not wholly absent even from the chastened proposita of the Catholic universities ,9 the question did not merely torment the German churches, but also the theological culture as a whole—and Jews especially asserted the topic as demanding reform. Beginning in 1955, Jules Isaac had attempted to convince a very reluctant Pius XII of the necessity of a visible rethinking of the Jewish question through the modification of the oratio universalis of Good Friday. The ‘‘Jewish question,’’ having all sorts of implications that were extremely relevant for the time, Nostra Aetate and the Discovery of the Sacrament of Otherness / 131 would eventually be brought to the attention of the former Vatican legate to Istanbul, who at that time had been actively involved in the effort to rescue the Jews from genocide, and who would in 1958 become pope with the name of John XXIII. It is well known...