The Church’s Teaching on Supersessionism

For Catholics, the era in which it was possible to espouse any theory that the Christian Church has “superseded” or “replaced” the Jewish people as God’s Chosen People in the history of salvation ended definitively on October 28, 1965. On that day the world’s Catholic bishops, together with the bishop of Rome, Pope Paul VI, signed the declaration, Nostra Aetate (In Our Time), of the Second Vatican Council. Nostra Aetate took the first official, authoritative look at the various supersessionist theories of earlier ages in the centuries-long history of the Church. Though these theories were presumed by many Christians over the ages, no previous Council or Pope ever declared them official Church teaching.

The Council Fathers, rejecting any sense of collective guilt of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus, established a stringent official hermeneutic (principle of biblical interpretation) for all subsequent Catholic theological understandings of Jews and Judaism: “The Jews must not be presented as repudiated or cursed by God, as if such views followed from Sacred Scripture.”¹ Since the entire structure of the ancient “teaching of contempt” against Judaism was posited on the erroneous notion that God had “repudiated” the Jews because of their so-called failure to accept Jesus as the Christ, one can no longer denigrate the Jewish people or the Jewish faith using Christian theological premises.