The Church Is Still Decades Away From Full Recognition of Israel

Gavin D’Costa deserves great credit for his essay in Mosaic investigating the theological basis for a Catholic Zionism. I admire his careful construction of a bold and suggestive narrative, which begins in the early 1960s with the Second Vatican Council’s epochal document Nostra Aetate, proceeds through an evolving high-level Jewish-Catholic dialogue, and culminates in recent progress toward anchoring these efforts in a definitive affirmation by the Church of the Jewish homeland in the state of Israel.

Also welcome is D’Costa’s account of the prehistory of this coming-together of Catholics and Jews: a remarkable chapter of intellectual history about which I, too, have written in a review-essay on John Connelly’s From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews 1933-1965. The emergence of a Zionist movement within the Church can only be predicated on the latter’s deep excavation of its past and a frank admission of its culpability. The long and shameful history of Catholic anti-Judaism has been acknowledged by the Magisterium, the Church’s teaching authority, but the consequences that should flow from it have yet to be followed through on.

Finally, that Catholic doctrine is not static but dynamic, developing, and irreversible has been accepted ever since the time of John Henry Newman (who will be canonized next month). So it is, too, with Church teaching on the Jewish people and the land of Israel. I agree with D’Costa that “when popes repeat teachings, those teachings slowly enter the bloodstream of the Church”; hence, in his words, “there can be no going back.”