This book explores how Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions of the Second Vatican Council, can influence inter-religious dialogue and understanding in the modern world. Although influential in religious, academic, and scholarly circles, it is relatively unknown outside these areas. The contributors remedy that deficit by highlighting the declaration’s difficult historical and social context and the Church’s evolving relationship with non-Christians. Contentious topics are examined such as the link between the Jewish people and the land and state of Israel, that questions the Catholic understanding of the relativity of national borders and identity, and the challenges posed to the Church’s relationship with Islam by its prioritization of human rights and religious freedom for Christians and minorities in certain Muslim regimes. Given its scope, it is an ideal resource for graduate students and researchers in the fields of political science, international relations, religion, and minority studies.

The contents of this book originated in a conference at the Catholic University of America in May 2015. The essays and lectures contained within focus on the relationships of the Catholic Church with the other "Abrahamic" faiths, primarily Islam and Judaism. There is some discussion of the Asian religions as well. This volume, in structure, loosely follows the document Nostra Aetate itself. The first part of the book gives a broad view of the document and its importance. The following parts concentrates on the relationships between the Catholic Church and the Asian, Muslim and Jewish religions. The concluding section of the book surveys the reception Nostra Aetate received in various ecclesial and academic contexts.

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history? The radical shift of Vatican II grew out of a buried history, a theological struggle in Central Europe in the years just before the Holocaust, when a small group of Catholic converts (especially former Jew Johannes Oesterreicher and former Protestant Karl Thieme) fought to keep Nazi racism from entering their newfound church. Through decades of engagement, extending from debates in academic journals, to popular education, to lobbying in the corridors of the Vatican, this unlikely duo overcame the most problematic aspect of Catholic history. Their success came not through appeals to morality but rather from a rediscovery of neglected portions of scripture. From Enemy to Brother illuminates the baffling silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, showing how the ancient teaching of deicide—according to which the Jews were condemned to suffer until they turned to Christ—constituted the Church’s only language to talk about the Jews. As he explores the process of theological change, John Connelly moves from the speechless Vatican to those Catholics who endeavored to find a new language to speak to the Jews on the eve of, and in the shadow of, the Holocaust.

"This initial volume in the Rediscovering Vatican II series looks at the relationship between the Catholic Church and other Christian churches (Unitatis Redintegratio - Restoring Christian Unity), and between the Catholic Church and other great religions (Nostra Actate - the Declaration on Interreligious Dialogue)."--BOOK JACKET.

Interreligious Friendships after Nostra Aetate explores the ways in which personal relationships are essential for theology. Catholic theologians tell the personal stories of their interreligious friendships and explore the significance of their friendships for their own life and work.

Vatican II's Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) transformed the Catholic view of the Jewish people and the Jewish religious tradition. Asserting that the Church discovers her link to the "stock of Abraham" when "searching her own mystery," Nostra Aetate intimated that the mystery of Israel is inseparable from the mystery of the Church. As interlocking mysteries, each community requires the other in order to understand itself. In Searching Her Own Mystery, noted Messianic Jewish theologian Mark S. Kinzer argues that the Church has yet to explore adequately the implications of Nostra Aetate for Christian self-understanding. The new Catholic teaching concerning Israel should produce fresh perspectives on the entire range of Christian theology, including Christology, ecclesiology, and the theology of the sacraments. To this end, Kinzer proposes an Israel-ecclesiology rooted in Israel-Christology in which a restored ecclesia ex circumcisione--the "church from the circumcision"--assumes a crucial role as a sacramental sign of the Church's bond with the Jewish people and genealogical-Israel's irrevocable election.

The sixteen official documents—constitutions, decrees, and declarations—of the Second Vatican Council are now available from Liturgical Press in the most popular and widely used inclusive-language edition translated by Irish Dominican Austin Flannery (+October 21, 2008). As the worldwide Church continues to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Council (1962–65), there is a great need in college classrooms and parish faith formation groups—as well as for individuals—to again have access to these documents in contemporary English. As Flannery wrote in his introduction to the 1996 edition, “The translation of the texts of the Vatican documents in the present volume differs from that in the previous publication in two respects. It has been very considerably revised and, in place, corrected. It is also, to a very large extent, in inclusive language. “I say ‘to a very large extent,’ because we have used inclusive language in passages about men and women but not, however, in passages about God, except where the use of the masculine pronoun was easily avoidable.”