Dialogue Document
Guidelines for Catholic-Jewish Relations (1967)
Guidelines for Catholic-Jewish Relations, Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, March 1967
In its Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions of 1965, the Second Vatican Council issued an historic statement on the Jews and summoned all Catholics to re-appraise their attitude toward and relationship with the Jewish people. The Statement was, in effect, a culminating point of initiatives and pronouncements of recent pontiffs and of numerous endeavors in the Church concerned with Catholic-Jewish harmony. [It was also the point of convergence of many insights opened by Pope Paul’s Encyclical Ecclesiam Suam and the Council’s Constitution on the Church and Decree on Ecumenism.]
The call of the Council to a fraternal encounter with Jews may be seen, [further,] as one of the more important fruits of the spirit of renewal generated by the council in its deliberations and decrees. [Was it not indeed the Council’s response to Pope John XXIII’s famous words in which he embraced the Jewish people: “I am Joseph your brother”? (Gen 45:4). More specifically,] the Council’s call is an acknowledgement of the conflicts and tensions that have separated Christians and Jews through the centuries and of the Church’s determination, as far as possible, to eliminate them. It serves both in word and action as a recognition of the manifold sufferings and injustices inflicted upon the Jewish people by Christians in our own times as well as in the past. [The Statement] speaks from the highest level of the Church’s authority to serve notice that injustices directed against the Jews at any time from any source can never receive Catholic sanction or support.