In the decades and centuries to come, when scholars write the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century, October 28, 1965 will be noted, and long remembered, as the day the Roman Catholic Church made two unprecedented moves. First, in reversing the charge of deicide leveled against the Jewish people for millennia, the Church officially and there-fore publicly acknowledged its complicity in two thousand years of shameful and tragic behavior toward the Jewish people. Secondly, the Church began a long and painful process of dismantling anything in its tradition that leads to ". . . the hatred, persecutions, and displays of anti-Judaism directed against Jews at any time and from any source" (NA no. 4). On that day, October 28, 1965, the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church promulgated the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to non-Christian Religions. As with each of the sixteen documents the church issued between October 11, 1962 and December 8, 1965, this declaration is known by the first few Latin words that begin the document, Nostra Aetate, In our time . . .

Forty years after the promulgation of Nostra Aetate, it is quite commonplace to characterize it as groundbreaking. To appre-ciate its truly revolutionary character one need only walk through the turbulent and tragic history of the church and the Jewish people to discover there the church's constant and consistent anti-Jewish teaching. The rot can be found in the church's hymns, prayers, theology, worship, sacraments, prac-tice, and piety. Almost every facet of church life is stained with a steady and unswerving contempt for Judaism and the Jewish people. Indeed, the more one knows of this sinful history the more one is struck by just how remarkable is the reversal of mind and heart that Nostra Aetate called for.

In the months to come, much will be made of Nostra Aetate, and so should it be. But we Catholics would dishonor the spirit of the Council if we suppose that Nostra Aetate allows us to wash our hands . . . and our consciences . . . of our church's sinful past. The spirit of the Second Vatican Council is appro-priately honored only when Catholics understand Nostra Aetate as the beginning of our reforming ourselves in heart and mind so that we might more truly resemble that which the God of Israel has invited us to become through our acknowl-edgement of Jesus as our Christ. Rather than bask in the glory of a job well done, we Catholics need instead to see ourselves as part of an ecclesial community that is in medias res, some-where "in the middle," a church ever reforming.

One aspect of the reforming spirit begun by Nostra Aetate requires that we commit ourselves -- as individuals and as an ecclesial community -- to remain vigilant and committed to rooting out every last vestige of the church's anti-Jewish teaching, preaching, and practice, wherever we enounter it.

But I believe a second, and perhaps more daunting, challenge still awaits us. For two thousand years, supersessionism has been the glue that has held together Christian religious iden-tity. If Nostra Aetate and the teachings it has generated over the past forty years call for an end to supersessionism, where does that leave us Catholic Christians? Without a negative portrait of the Jewish people to guide our own image, who are we? If we Catholics are obedient to the teaching of Nostra Aetate and begin to re-imagine the Jewish people and the relationship between church and synagogue, what will be-come of our own self-identity? Is it possible for us Catholic Christians to construct a positive religious identity based on what God has done for us in Jesus of Nazareth rather than on the negative assertion that God no longer loves Israel? If the church has not replaced Israel as God's most beloved, who are we in the sight of God? Or is supersessionism so deeply entangled in our religious identity that without it there is no "we"?

What makes Christian supersessionism so terribly wrong is that it is built upon a foundation that requires the degradation, defamation, and de-legitimization of the Jewish people. The theological arrogance at the heart of Christian supersessionism converts a gospel of love for all who are made in the image and likeness of the living God into a theology of hate for those whom God first loved.

The church's long and devastating history of anti-Judaism distorted our understanding of Judaism and set the stage for the persecution and murder of millions of Jews throughout its history, a sin for which we Christians need to do more than make symbolic gestures and eloquent apologies. We need to acknowledge this history and the pain it has caused. We need to study the documents of our church that both decry this history and seek ways of creating a future that does not replicate the sins of the past. We need to identify the on-going challenges that remain. And together with our Jewish neighbors we need to discover ways in which we might be a blessing to one another.

Perhaps we Catholics might begin by taking our cue from the apostle Paul, as Pope John Paul II did, and reaffirm that God's promises to the Jewish people have never been revoked (Rom. 11:29), that God's covenant with Israel endures for all time, and that the church did not replace the Jewish people as God's beloved.

The legacy of Nostra Aetate and the road it forges require our discarding supersessionism and creating a new identity as Catholic Christians. That, in turn, will require of us and of our magisterium new attitudes and aptitudes. We will be awkward, unsure, and hesitant, but we will take courage, knowing that we are not required to finish the task, but only to participate in its work until that day when . . . the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; . . . the cow and the bear shall be neighbors, together their young shall rest; the lion shall eat hay like the ox; the baby shall play by the cobra's den, and the child lay its hand on the adder's lair (Isa. 11:6-8).