The following address by Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence & Professor of Politics at Princeton University was delivered in Toronto last month at the Simeon Initiative Summit, convened by the Canadian think tank Cardus, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and other groups. 

We are today witnessing an alarming resurgence of antisemitic beliefs and attitudes, including among people who claim to be faithful Christians—from celebrity influencers and political commentators to legions of anonymous social media users. In light of what we have been seeing from some who claim to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ, I want to share some reflections—drawing on the developed teaching of the Catholic Church—on God’s covenant with the Jewish people as unbroken and unbreakable, along with some conclusions that follow. 

Advertisement

My claim 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 relationship them — is both antithetical to Christianity (since it denies Christianity’s fundamentally Jewish roots) and opposed to Catholic teaching. 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 Catholic 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 clearly ruled out relativism, subjectivism, and indifferentism in religious matters. 

But the same document also reaffirmed the Catholic teaching, earlier expressed in the Second Vatican Council’s decree 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 truths they grasp — even if their recognition of the truth is, from a Catholic perspective, limited or incomplete.  

Advertisement

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 which contains important elements of the truth. It is, as Pope St. 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 Pope 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​. Q​uite the opposite,​ for​ ​God 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 God’s 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 St. 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 which 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 

“[t]hat the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery.” 

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: The Jewish fidelity, witness, and wisdom enlighten. They light the path to God.  

Advertisement

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 proposed — 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 one another as if there was a radical rupture — should recall the heretical movement in the early Christian church known as Marcionism. In a 2018 article, then-Pope emeritus Benedict XVI wrote that Marcion, who was active in the 2nd 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 Pope Benedict 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 antisemitic temptations — temptations that both stubbornly endure within the Church and seem to once again be gaining traction in 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 fidelity 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.”