Many Christians and Jews still distrust and fear one another, so there is much to do in improving Christian-Jewish relations, Cardinal O'Connor said in Manhattan June 25. Many Jews and Christians are prejudiced today," he said. "That fear is still there. That distrust is still there. We must remove it in order to know where we are going. We have to be careful that we are not just speaking words about making progress."
The cardinal was the keynote speaker at the second annual Nostra Aetate Awards sponsored by the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Cardinal O'Connor received the first Nostra Aetate Award last year. Honored this year were Cardinal William H. Keeler, archbishop of Baltimore; Bishop Krister Stendahl, bishop emeritus of the Lutheran Church of Stockholm, Sweden, and former dean of Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., and Rabbi Mordecai Waxman of Temple Israel in Great Neck. They were honored for "their commitment to dialogue and action on important moral, ethical and religious issues."
Addressing more than 250 people at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Cardinal O'Connor warned that those working for reconciliation and understanding between Christians and Jews must not be lulled into a false sense of satisfaction with the progress made to date. The two groups are "always in danger of being caught up in a passion for respectability" that makes them want to "be accepted."
Christian-Jewish dialogue is not an exercise in confrontation but rather a meeting of "friends with different practices" who bear a special relationship to each other, he said. The cardinal continued, "The Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding is so vitally needed precisely because it must help all of us...to discern how best we can get at the heart of the mystery that one of us is rooted in the other, that both of us believe we are a sacred people, a chosen people, a different people but not an antagonistic people."
Rabbi Waxman said he has seen two "revolutions" in his life: the creation of the state of Israel and the improvement in Christian-Jewish relations. "When the Catholic Church says we accept the Jewish people as they see themselves; when it says that the covenant of the Jews has never been revoked; when it says we must enter into a dialogue in which we see one another from new views and perspectives, it is making a statement which is unexpected against the background of 1,900 years of history," he said.
Nostra Aetate is the document on the Church and non-Christian religions promulgated by the Second Vatican Council. It proclaimed the Church's profound respect for Judaism, repudiated anti-Semitism and launched a historic movement toward understanding between Catholics and Jews.
REFLECTIONS BY WILLIAM H. CARDINAL KEELER 1997 NOSTRA AETATE AWARDS
The publication of the Nostra Aetate document marked a special moment in the history of the Church and its relation to other religions, especially to Judaism. Nostra Aetate repudiated the centuries-old Christian teaching of contempt for Judaism and the Jewish people.
The foundations for the document were laid at the Second Vatican Council, a meeting of the world's Catholic bishops convened by Pope John XXIII in October 1962, and continued by Pope Paul VI in three periods, each of about three months duration, during the fall months of 1963, 1964, and 1965.
Cardinal Augustin Bea, the German scripture scholar who had been a close advisor of Pope Pius XII and became the key figure in developing the Council's program for Catholic outreach to other religions, oversaw the drafting of a statement on Catholic-Jewish relations. His presentation of this theme to the Council on November 19, 1963, caused Pope John XXIII to personally direct the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) to take up the issue of Catholic outreach to other religions and why it was so necessary to treat of it: he cited the Holocaust and how Nazi propaganda used arguments "drawn from the New Testament and from the history of the Church." "It was a question," he continued, "of rooting out from the minds of Catholics any ideas which perhaps remain fixed there through the influence of that propaganda."
Thus began the legislative history of what was to become Nostra Aetate, the Council's Declaration on the Relationship between the Catholic Church and non-Christian Religions. Solemnly enacted by the council on October 28, 1965, its third chapter presented the relationship between Church and Synagogue in terms which responded to Pope John XXIII's original directive.
The Declaration made these principal points:
1. The Church, as Saint Paul points out, is founded by Christ who, "according to the flesh," pertains to the Jewish people (cf. Romans 9:4-5). The Virgin Mary, the Apostles, indeed practically the entire infant Church could be correctly described as Jewish.
2. Although some Jews opposed the spread of the gospel of Jesus, "nevertheless, according to the Apostle, the Jews still remain most dear to God because of their fathers, for he does not repent of the gifts he makes nor of the calls he issues" (Romans 11:28-29).
3. The Church draws nourishment from the revelation contained in the Hebrew scriptures. The Law, the Prophets, the Psalms and the Wisdom literature - all are part of a heritage given to that people with whom God made a covenant through Abraham.
4. "Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred Synod (the Second Vatican Council) wishes to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit above all of biblical and theological studies and of brotherly dialogues."
5. With specific reference to texts of the Christian scriptures, the Council points out that what happened to Jesus in "his suffering cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today." What follows is the basis for catechetical instruction to insure that neither Christian scriptures nor Christian teaching could be used in any way that would be an excuse or pretext for anti-Semitism.
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