Annual Jerusalem lecture focuses on Catholic-Jewish relations

The work of eradicating antisemitism in the Catholic Church and building strong relationships between Catholics and Jews has come a long way in 60 years, but there is still work to be done, according to Rabbi Ruth Langer.

That’s become increasingly clear since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, and the ongoing war in Gaza, which Langer said has increased overt incidents of antisemitism exponentially, perhaps laying bare biases that had been hidden over the past several decades.

“One of the effects of this war has been the explosion of global antisemitism that I’ve mentioned, or better, probably, the surfacing of a latent antisemitism, not yet eradicated,” she said.

Auxiliary Bishop Mark Bartosic, who introduced Langer, said that working to eliminate antisemitism is not a matter of choice for Catholics.

“Our need to call out antisemitism has never been greater,” he said. “Reminded of this need, I want to focus on the fact that the Catholic stance against antisemitism is not a political one. Rather, it is fundamentally theological. The message of Jesus found in Christian Scripture requires Christians to oppose anything that expresses hatred for our Jewish brothers and sisters.”

Langer delivered the annual Cardinal Joseph Bernardin Jerusalem Lecture at DePaul University on May 8. The lecture, with alternating Catholic and Jewish speakers at alternating Catholic and Jewish venues, examines ongoing issues in Catholic-Jewish relations.

Langer, a professor of Jewish studies in the theology department at Jesuit-run Boston College, looked at how relationships between members of the two faiths have developed since the 1965 promulgation of “Nostra Aetate,” the Second Vatican Council declaration on the relationship of the church to non-Christian religions.

The Bernardin Jerusalem Lecture series commemorates Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s journey to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, accompanied by local Catholic and Jewish leaders inn 1995. On March 23 of that year, Cardinal Bernardin delivered a lecture titled “Anti-Semitism: The Historical Legacy and the Continuing Challenge for Christians,” in the Senate Hall at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Sponsors of the continuing series include the Archdiocese of Chicago, AJC-Chicago, the Anti-Defamation League, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago Board of Rabbis, DePaul University, JUF/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership.

To understand how far the relationship between Catholics and Jews has come, Langer said, it is necessary to remember how far apart they were when they started.

“Sixty years is a long time, and yet, in the 2000-year history of Christianity, 60 years is a tiny blip,” she said. “‘Nostra Aetate’ called for new thinking about Jews and Judaism that in many cases flew in the face of the inherited insights and instincts and prejudices of the preceding millennia.”

Things have changed so much, she said, that her students at Boston College “don’t know that Jesus’ Jewishness had been forgotten. They don’t know that the church taught that God had rejected the Jews and replaced them with Christians.”

Now the church teaches that the Jews were chosen by God, as the Bible says, and St. John Paul II referred to the Jewish people as “our older brothers in faith.”

Before ‘Nostra Aetate,’ most Catholics and Jews would have been forbidden to enter one another’s worship spaces, she said, and even the bishops who wrote the document had very little familiarity with Jewish people. That’s one reason why references to Jewish life in the text of the document focus on biblical Judaism.

In the decades since, she said, dialogue has built relationships, but much of the easy, getting-to-know-one’s-neighbors work has been done, leaving thornier theological issues on the table.

“On the ground, we’ve come a long way — or we thought we did,” Langer said.

Areas where Catholics and Jews can do more to understand one another include the nature of religion itself, with Catholics focused much more on faith and Jews on practice.

“A dialogue about doing is more interesting to Jews than a dialogue about believing,” she said.

Christians, including Catholics, often don’t understand the meaning of “Israel” for Jews, with a single term referring to a people, a nation and the modern political state, and seem deaf to the way Christian Scriptures negatively describe Jews or groups of Jews, by, for example, teaching that Pharisees were hypocrites, Langer said.

“Attention has to turn to teaching aids, seminary curricula and, perhaps, to the lectionary itself,” she said.