Page 114 - October 7 - Teresa Pirola

1. Catholics Have a Conciliar Document
The Second Vatican Council taught that the church ‘decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone’. This conciliar ‘No!’ to antisemitic prejudice is found in paragraph 4 of Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non- Christian Religions, promulgated in 1965 with a clear eye on the Holocaust.
Yet how many Catholics are even aware that this document exists? With the recent surge in antisemitism, history’s ‘oldest hatred’, it is incumbent upon Catholic leaders, teachers and preachers to give firm voice to the church’s teaching on antisemitism, from pulpits and podiums, through ecclesial statements and media, in education and justice activities.
2. Catholics Have a History
Catholics, like all Christians, have a history of prejudice against Jews that weighs on their collective conscience. Prior to the corrective teaching of Vatican II, toxic distortions of Christian thought (e.g., ‘the Jews are rejected by God’) had infected church catechesis for many centuries, giving credence to the subjugation, expulsion and violent persecution of Jews in the societies in which they dwelt. Inevitably, this pattern of prejudice was a significant contributing factor to the social conditions that lowered the Christian population’s moral resistance to the ideology of Nazism which led to the Holocaust. Some courageous Christians resisted this evil. Yet too many turned a blind eye as their Jewish neighbours were progressively harmed—robbed of their jobs, their homes, their freedoms, their safety and eventually their lives.
This shocking historical backdrop makes it inexcusable for Christians today to remain silent in the face of antisemitic
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