Can the Catholic Church’s Official Rejection of Anti-Semitism Serve as a Model for Religious Tolerance? https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/religion-holidays/2015/10/can-the-catholic-churchs-official-rejection-of-anti-semitism-serve-as-a-model-for-religious-tolerance/

October 29, 2015 | Jonathan Sacks
About the author: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is a British Orthodox rabbi, philosopher, theologian, author and politician. He served as the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013.

Fifty years ago, the Catholic Church released an official statement, Nostra Aetate, delineating its attitudes toward non-Christian religions. Most significantly, Nostra Aetate condemned anti-Semitism and rejected previous Christian teachings that encouraged it. Jonathan Sacks sees it as a model for all religious leaders today to heed and emulate:

Religiously motivated violence has brought chaos and destruction to great swaths of the Middle East [as well as] parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Christians are suffering the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing in countries where they have been a presence for centuries. Peaceful Islam is being subverted by radical jihadists, leading to barbarism and slaughter, often of other Muslims, on an ever-widening scale. Meanwhile anti-Semitism has returned in full force within living memory of the Holocaust. . . .

We need, if anything, another and larger Nostra Aetate, binding together the great world religions in a covenant of mutuality and responsibility. The freedom and respect we seek for our own faith we must be prepared to grant to others. We need a global coalition of respected religious leaders with the vision [Pope] John XXIII had in his day and the honesty to admit that much that is done in the name of faith is in fact a desecration of faith and a violation of its most sacred principles.

It took the Holocaust to bring about Nostra Aetate. What will it take now for religious leaders to stand together in opposition to the religiously motivated hatreds spreading like contagion through our interconnected world?

Read more on First Things: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/10/nostra-aetate-fifty-years-on