30 - The Papacy and the Jews since the French Revolution

Summary

For nearly two centuries after the French Revolution, papal attitudes towards Judaism remained rooted in theological notions of the Jews as deicidal “others” whose salvation would only be achieved through repentance and conversion to Catholicism. Enlightenment notions of religious freedom and tolerance offered Jews an emancipation based on secular citizenship and assimilation, a development which repudiated the Church’s theological and eschatological views of Judaism. As a result, papal attitudes towards the Jews hardened through the nineteenth century, as popes associated emancipated Jews with liberalism, freemasonry, socialism, and democracy, the very ideologies which had undermined papal authority. It was not until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) that the Church definitely repudiated its negation of the Abrahamic Covenant and the Jewish people. The council document Nostra aetate disavowed anti-Semitism in all forms and recognized Judaism as the wellspring from which the Church emerged, creating a template of interfaith kinship and cooperation which the modern papacy has embraced and expanded upon.