The 1960 meeting between the Jewish historian Jules Isaac and Pope John XXIII is often portrayed as a moment of ecumenical epiphany, a catalyst that purified the Catholic Church of a supposed two-thousand-year "teaching of contempt." This popular narrative, however, masks a deeper, more unsettling reality: the event did not mark the beginning of a genuine theological reconciliation, but rather the culmination of a successful political campaign to subvert traditional Catholic doctrine concerning the Jews. The result, enshrined in Nostra Aetate, was not a deepening of truth but a capitulation to political pressure that has left the Church theologically weakened and vulnerable.
✝️The False Premise of the "Teaching of Contempt"Isaac's central thesis, which he presented to the Pope, was that Catholic teaching was the direct forerunner of modern racial anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust. This charge, however, fundamentally misrepresents the nature of the historical relationship between the Church and the Jews. The Church's position was never based on racial animosity but was a direct theological response to the Jewish rejection of Christ, the incarnation of the Logos. The Gospels, particularly St. John's, are not documents of hatred but chronicles of a theological separation. They record the moment when the term "Jew" was redefined: from a racial and religious term to a designation for those who rejected the Messiah (Jones, 2008, p. 33-39).
To argue that the Church is the font of modern anti-Semitism is to ignore the fact that the Church's traditional opposition to Judaism was theological. The source of Jewish tragedy does not lie in a Catholic "teaching of contempt," but in the Jewish revolutionary spirit itself, which was born from the rejection of the Logos. By rejecting the social and moral order inherent in the Logos, post-Christian Judaism doomed itself to a cycle of revolutionary activity and subversion, which in turn provoked often violent reactions from host cultures (Jones, 2008, p. 41). Isaac's campaign to reform Church teaching was, in effect, an attempt to force the Church to repudiate the Gospels and absolve the revolutionary spirit of its historical consequences.
📜Nostra Aetate as a Cultural Weapon
What followed the Isaac-John XXIII meeting was an intense lobbying effort by Jewish organizations, such as the American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith, to shape the Council's declaration. The resulting document, Nostra Aetate, became a weapon in the cultural war against the Church. By getting the Church to "deplore" anti-Semitism without defining the term, Jewish lobbyists secured a semantic victory of catastrophic proportions. For Jews, any measure of self-defense by Christians against financial, moral, or political subversion is labeled "anti-Semitism" (Jones, 2008, p. 1063-1064). The Church, by adopting this term without qualification, unwittingly accepted the framework of its opponents.
The most significant change was the removal of the explicit hope for the conversion of the Jews. The final version of Nostra Aetate omitted the passage stating that the Church "awaits with unshaken faith and deep longing the entry of this people into the fullness of the People of God" (Jones, 2008, p. 933). This omission, justified in the name of avoiding "proselytism," was a betrayal of Christ's evangelical mandate. Dialogue replaced conversion, and truth was sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. The result was a theological confusion that has led Catholic prelates to make heretical statements, such as the idea that Jews do not need Christ for salvation, directly contradicting the teaching of the Gospel and magisterial documents like Dominus Iesus (Jones, 2008, p. 1071-1072).
🌍The Consequences of Subversion
The "dialogue" inaugurated by Vatican II brought not harmony, but an escalation of Jewish demands and a weakening of Catholic self-confidence. The Church abandoned the balanced wisdom of its traditional policy, encapsulated in Sicut Iudaeis non, which protected Jews from physical harm while simultaneously protecting Christians from moral and cultural subversion (Jones, 2008, p. 86-88). In its place, the Church adopted a posture of appeasement that only encouraged further aggression.
The campaign against the Oberammergau Passion Play, the vilification of Pope Pius XII, and the continual demands that the Church "repent" for its past are the bitter fruits of this capitulation. By accepting Jules Isaac's premise, the Church placed itself in the dock, accepting guilt for crimes it did not commit and ignoring the role of the Jewish revolutionary spirit in history. The post-conciliar period resulted not in genuine "dialogue" but in the rise of a neoconservative foreign policy in the United States, which led the world into political disaster, a direct outcome of the Church's acquiescence to the Jewish interpretation of Nostra Aetate (Jones, 2008, p. 24).
🙏Conclusion
The encounter between Jules Isaac and Pope John XXIII was not the beginning of a healing, but the infection of the Church with a political virus. The narrative that the Church "changed its teaching" on the Jews is, in fact, the story of how the Church was pressured into abandoning the truth of the Gospel in favor of a political agenda. The only true solution to the 2000-year conflict between the Synagogue and the Church lies not in "dialogues" that demand the denial of faith, but in the conversion of the revolutionary Jew to the Logos he rejected. Until that happens, any attempt at "reconciliation" will only be another form of subversion.
📚References
Jones, E. Michael. The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History. South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008.