http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/6/18/main-feature/1/catholics-jews-and-jewish-catholics/e
Jews and Catholics in the English-speaking world have so much in common that they ought to make common cause more often than they actually do. The friction between them that sometimes catches fire is, as often as not, based on mutual ignorance and mistrust. On the Jewish side, the mistrust is hardly surprising. For nearly two thousand years, the Church preached anti-Judaism in theory and practice. Only after the Holocaust did a small group of Catholic thinkers—most of them converts from Judaism—have any success in persuading the Church to rethink its anti-Jewish doctrine.
The State of Christianity Elliot Jager, Jewish Ideas Daily. Strangely enough, what’s “good for the Jews”—and the Jewish state—is to see Christianity thriving. SAVE
It was a process that culminated in 1965’s Nostra Aetate (“In Our Age”), the declaration of the Second Vatican Council that definitively repudiated the ancient accusation against the Jews of deicide. Further, the Council stated that God’s covenant with the Jews remained valid, that they should not be presented as “rejected or accursed by God,” and that the Church “decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed at the Jews at any time and by anyone.” Breaking with the theology of supersession, Nostra Aetatereminded Catholics of their debt to the Jews, summed up in “the words of the Apostle [Paul] about his [Jewish] kinsmen: ‘theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh.'” Thus the Church, which had always seen itself as the new Israel, at last gave the people of Israel its due place in the history of salvation: the duty of Catholics to “Abraham’s sons” was not conversion but reconciliation.
This dramatic and disturbing story forms the subject of John Connelly’s remarkable new book, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965. Connelly, who teaches history at Berkeley, has mastered a vast and obscure literature, much of it hitherto unpublished and most of it in German, in order to establish the contours of what he aptly characterizes as a “revolution” in mid-20th-century Catholic thought.