An Unbreakable Covenant

Upon his resignation from the pontifical office in 2013, Benedict XVI largely retreated from public view to avoid becoming a distraction to his successor’s leadership of the Catholic Church. Benedict’s public writings during the last decade of his life were therefore limited. Of his few post-retirement works, one, an article published in 2018 in the scholarly journal Communio, was a theologically rich reflection on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. 

In the article, the pope emeritus addressed some long-standing questions — aspects of which were authoritatively settled by the Second Vatican Council and by consistent papal teaching in the Council’s aftermath, but that are nonetheless still litigated by Catholics who dissent from conciliar and postconciliar teaching — pertaining to the Catholic Church’s theological understanding of the Jewish people as a corporate body. Specifically, Benedict criticized, in light of Catholic doctrine, what he called the “theory of substitution” — the idea, also referred to as “supersessionism,” that the Jewish people “ceased to be the bearer of the promises of God” after many Jews failed to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the scripturally foretold Messiah. Instead, Benedict offered a defense of God’s enduring covenant with the Jewish people, which, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “has never been revoked.”  

One might be forgiven for wondering why, from a Catholic perspective, these questions are still discussed as if they are controversial — and why, even from retirement, Benedict felt a need to speak up in defense of the Catholic Church’s understanding of its unique and mystical relationship with the Jewish people. After all, it was Saint John Paul II, his predecessor as pope, who declared that with Judaism, the Church has “a relationship which we do not have with any other religion”; that Judaism is “intrinsic” — not “extrinsic” — to Christianity; and that Jews are Christians’ “elder brothers” in faith (mindful of the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, Benedict later changed this well-intended, though potentially misleading, metaphor to “fathers in the faith”).

Lumen gentium, the Church’s dogmatic constitution promulgated at Vatican II, taught that while Christ instituted a New Covenant with himself as mediator, God’s covenant with the Jews continues to remain in effect — it is unbroken and indeed unbreakable. And Nostra aetate, the Vatican II document outlining the Church’s authoritative teaching on her relationship with Judaism and other non-Christian religions, explicitly repudiates all forms of antisemitism — along with the many slanders and crimes that have been historically perpetrated against the Jewish people, often by individuals and nation-states acting under the banner of Christianity (including under the banner of the Catholic Church). 

Sadly, we are today witnessing a resurgence of antisemitic beliefs and attitudes, including among people who claim to be faithful Christians and orthodox Catholics — from celebrity influencers, political commentators, and fringe priests to legions of anonymous social media users. Videos produced by the respected Catholic apologist Trent Horn and his organization Catholic Answers related to Jews and Judaism, including a video criticizing Holocaust denial as gravely immoral and a video explaining why faithful Christians cannot be antisemitic, are flooded with comments attacking, at times in quite vicious terms, Judaism and Jewish people. Bishop Robert Barron, perhaps the most prominent Catholic clergyman in America, was inundated with vile comments after he posted a photo of a menorah to commemorate the beginning of Hanukkah. In a follow-up essay reflecting on the rise in antisemitism among self-professed Catholics and other Christians, Barron shared a few of the diabolical comments he received: “Did they fill your pockets with shekels to say this?,” “Judaism is the anti-Christ religion,” “Sin-o-gogue of Satan anyone?” My own tweets speaking positively of Jewish people, reflecting on the Jewish roots — and indeed the Jewishness — of Christianity, and calling out antisemitism, have similarly been overrun with (mostly anonymous) users spreading anti-Jewish messages.  

Considering the troubled times in which we find ourselves, I will follow the late Pope Benedict in reflecting on the authentic Catholic understanding of Jews and Judaism. Specifically, I want to share some reflections, in light of authoritative Catholic teaching, on God’s covenant with the Jewish people as unbroken and unbreakable, along with some conclusions that follow. My claim here is simple: Any attempt to deny or undermine God’s unique and mysterious bond with the Jewish people — a bond that was never abrogated and that reflects God’s special and continued care for them — is both antithetical to Christianity (it denies Christianity’s fundamentally Jewish roots) and opposed to the Catholic Church’s teachings. This includes all efforts, largely motivated by gravely sinful prejudice against Jewish people and Judaism, to delegitimize, dishonor, or vilify Jewish faith and practice. 

It is true that the Catholic Church emphatically rejects religious indifferentism — the idea that all religions and religious traditions are the same, contain equal elements of the truth, and are equally authentic or efficacious paths to communion with God and eternal salvation. The 2000 doctrinal document Dominus Iesus reaffirmed the Catholic dogma that “with the coming of the Savior Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for salvation of all humanity.” In rearticulating the Catholic Church’s teaching that it alone contains the fullness of the truth — following Jesus’s own teaching in the Gospels, when he said that he was “the way, the truth, and the life” — Dominus Iesus once again ruled out relativism, subjectivism, and indifferentism in religious matters.

But the same document also reaffirmed the Catholic teaching, earlier expressed in Nostra aetate, that the Catholic Church “rejects nothing of what is true and holy” in non-Catholic religions — and, indeed, that the Church “has a high regard for the manner of life and conduct, the precepts and teachings, which, although differing in many ways from [the Church’s] own teaching, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men.” The concrete applications of this principle are clear: The agnostic who in good faith ponders existential and transcendental questions, the theist who recognizes the existence of God, the Buddhist who engages in prayer and meditation in a sincere effort to commune with the divine, the Muslim who honors God with prayer and fasting, and the non-Catholic Christian who conforms his life to the Gospel to the best of his ability all realize value from the aspects of the truth they grasp — even if their recognition of the truth is, from a Catholic perspective, limited or incomplete to varying degrees. 

The Jewish people and modern Rabbinic Judaism (particularly Orthodox Judaism, whose faithful strive to adhere to biblical precepts without compromising with modern secular culture on the law’s demands) present a unique case. From a Catholic perspective, Judaism is not simply a religious tradition external to the Catholic Church that contains some elements of the truth; it is, as John Paul II said, “intrinsic” to Christianity and the Catholic Church. Put another way: “Because of the Jewish roots of Christianity, all Christians have a special relationship with Judaism,” as the new pontiff Leo XIV stated in a recent address. There was neither a schism nor an additional piece of claimed revelation that led to the existence of the Jewish religion. Quite the opposite, for God uniquely chose the Jewish people to be a “light unto the nations,” as the prophet Isaiah famously proclaimed. Jewish faith and practice thus have a unique theological consistency and legitimacy. Still, the question might remain: If Jesus Christ is, as the Catholic Church proclaims, the fulfillment of God’s promises in the Old Testament and the universal redeemer of mankind, how can a covenant with the Jewish people endure? 

The precise contours of the relationship are perennially difficult to grasp — and the Catholic Church herself acknowledges that there are elements of the relationship between the Old and New Covenants, between Synagoga and Ecclesia, that remain mysterious and perhaps are known only to God. As a landmark 2015 Vatican document on Catholic–Jewish relations states, even Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans engaged in a “passionate struggle” to articulate the “dual fact that while the Old Covenant from God continues to be in force, Israel has not adopted the New Covenant.” The document — a comprehensive theological reflection on Nostra aetate’s 50th anniversary that I commend to all readers interested in this subject — explains that “in order to do justice to both facts,” the apostle coined the metaphor of the Jewish people as the “rich root of the olive tree” onto which the “wild shoot,” the Gentiles, was grafted. Turning to address the supposed conflict between the truths of “the universality of salvation in Jesus Christ” and “God’s unrevoked covenant with Israel,” the document proclaims,

So while the plan of salvation that God has for the Jewish people, from a Catholic perspective, does retain elements of mystery — and Catholics like me ought to trust in God’s mercy that he has a plan, unfathomable, perhaps, to us mere mortals, to bring Jews and Christians into perfect unity — it is clear that Catholic teaching leaves no room for the denial of Judaism’s continued validity and significance and its special role in God’s plan for the world. The purpose for which God chose the Jewish people and their mission in fulfilling that purpose continue today: Jewish fidelity, witness, and wisdom enlighten. They light the path to God.

The 2015 Vatican document stated,

The increasingly common internet slanders that true Judaism “no longer exists” or is no longer authentically practiced — whether because of the Second Temple’s destruction at the hands of the Romans in a.d. 70, because of various developments in contemporary Jewish religious practice, or any other theory that is alleged — are simply incompatible with Catholic teaching on the validity and legitimacy of God’s enduring covenant with his chosen people. And those who seek to divorce Christianity from its Jewish roots — who seek to deny or downplay that Jesus, his mother Mary, and his Twelve Apostles were faithful Jews, or who seek to set the Old and New Covenants against each other as if there was a radical rupture — should recall the heretical movement in the early Christian church known as Marcionism. In his 2018 article, Pope Benedict XVI writes that Marcion, who was active in the second century a.d., led a religious movement that sought to “break” the unity between Christianity and Judaism, such that they would become “two opposing religions.” For these efforts Marcion was excommunicated by the Church. His ideas were deemed to be heretical. And yet, as the ever-prescient late pontiff notes, “the Marcionite temptation persists and reappears in certain situations in the history of the Church.” 

It is incumbent upon Catholics to reject Marcionite and anti-semitic temptations — temptations that both stubbornly endure within the Church and seem to once again be gaining traction in the world. This is not a trivial matter. For the Catholic, it is a matter of one’s right relationship with God and one’s communion with the Church through fidelity to the Church’s authoritative teachings on God’s unbreakable covenant with our Jewish brothers and sisters — the people chosen by God himself to light our path to him.     

Furthermore, although it would be presumptuous of me to instruct the Jewish community on its engagement with Catholics and other Christians, I cannot but applaud the efforts of my beloved friends Rabbi Professor David Novak and the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, among other Jewish authorities, to think theologically about Christianity as the vehicle by which God, in his providence, brought the blessing of the Hebrew Bible, and its fundamental truths about God and man, to the world.

Those of us who claim the mantle of Christ must never forget that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, and of course the God of the faithful Jew named Jesus, is our God as well — unchanging, perfect, and never failing to be faithful to the promises he makes and the covenants he establishes with his people. In our faithfulness to the Church’s teachings, we should continue to honor and pray for the Jewish people, “first to hear the word of God,” in the words of the revised Good Friday prayer, that he “may grant them to advance in love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant.”