The Church and the Jews, 1: Beyond the Platitudes

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 25, 2025

This is the first article in a four-part series.

In 2018, five years after his resignation from the papal office, Benedict XVI wrote an essay for Communio about the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people. In it, he assessed certain aspects of the modern Catholic consensus on this question, as this consensus had been summed up in a 2015 document by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. Benedict wrote that “the new view of Judaism that developed after the Council can be summarized in two statements”:

1) The “theory of substitution,” which has hitherto determined theological reflection on this question, should be rejected. This view holds that after the rejection of Jesus Christ, Israel ceased to be the bearer of the promises of God, so that it could now be called the people “who were once your chosen people” (Prayer for the Consecration of the Human Race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus).

2) Instead, it is more correct to speak of the never-revoked covenant—a theme that was developed after the Council in connection with Romans 9–11.

Benedict wrote that “Both of these theses—that Israel is not replaced by the Church, and that the covenant was never revoked—are basically correct, but are in many ways imprecise and need to be given further critical consideration.” Indeed, Benedict went on to critique these formulas as insufficient in important ways.

As for the first thesis, Benedict found that it was responding to something of a myth or strawman: “there was no ‘theory of substitution’ as such before the Council.”* Nonetheless he discussed some senses in which we can deny that a substitution takes place, but noted that, for instance, when it comes to the question of Jewish ritual sacrifices, “the static view of law and promise, which stands behind the unqualified no to the ‘theory of substitution,’ necessarily breaks down.” “Instead of a static view of substitution or nonsubstitution,” he wrote, “there is a dynamic consideration of the whole of salvation history.”

As for the second, Benedict deemed it inadequate: “The formula of the ‘never-revoked covenant’ may have been helpful in a first phase of the new dialogue between Jews and Christians. But it is not suited in the long run to express in an adequate way the magnitude of reality.”

Benedict’s essay provoked a storm of controversy. Liberal German theologians, and some Jews, were angry that the retired pope had upheld the Church’s traditional teachings that the Jews must learn from Christians how to interpret the Hebrew Bible, and that the Jews cannot be faithful to their covenant without accepting Christ.

Benedict was accused of having damaged the progress in friendly Catholic-Jewish relations that had been made since Vatican II. One hostile German theologian responded, “After Auschwitz, I would not have expected that I would have to read something like this by a German theologian”—as though Catholic doctrine could be changed by any historical event.

The celebrated Catholic professor at Princeton, Robert P. George, begins his recent article in the Jewish journal Sapir by recalling Benedict’s great essay. George, however, portrays Benedict’s essay as a full-throated apologetic for the postconciliar quo, against “Catholics who dissent from conciliar and postconciliar teaching.”

In George’s telling, Benedict only criticized the “theory of substitution” (no mention that Benedict considered this theory something of a myth), while defending the irrevocability of God’s covenant with the Jews. In what I consider to be a truly dishonest summary, George completely omits Benedict’s conclusion on the latter point.

Nor does George, in “wondering why…these questions are still discussed as if they are controversial,” mention the actual controversy which ensued over Benedict’s essay, for then he would have to acknowledge that not everything Benedict said was congenial to the widespread postconciliar complacency on this question.

Not only does George misrepresent Benedict’s thought, he misrepresents the teaching of the Church—even after the Council, let alone before it. A basic error which he repeats over and over again is to conflate “the Jewish people” with “Judaism.” He confuses the particular love we owe to the Jewish people, and God’s abiding call for them to find the fulfillment of their covenants in Christ, with his unqualified claim that the Church requires us to affirm the validity of “Judaism” as a post-Christian religious system. And he attempts to wield the authority of the magisterium against anyone who would disagree, treating questions as “authoritatively settled” which are either up for debate or have even been settled contrary to George’s position.

Before proceeding further, I must acknowledge that George’s article (like others he has written on this subject) is motivated by a very legitimate concern about rising antisemitism within the Church, especially among young men online. I too am deeply concerned about this problem, especially about the “groypers,” devoted followers of the Jew-hating influencer Nick Fuentes. However, misrepresenting Church teaching to the point that the genuine Catholic tradition on this question would be suppressed as “antisemitic,” only worsens the problem by making it seem like opposing antisemitism requires us to deny articles of the Catholic faith.

Beyond the platitudes

In the past several decades, due both to the general postconciliar emphasis on ecumenism and to a new sensitivity because of the horrors of the Holocaust, Church leaders have been so eager to “reset” and maintain a positive and friendly relationship with the Jews that the fulness of traditional (i.e., permanent) Catholic teaching on this question is now obscured, if not always denied.

Indeed, of all the de facto doctrinal ruptures that occurred after the Council, the teaching on the Jews is one of the clearest instances in which common opinion and official-but-not-magisterial statements, from liberals and conservatives alike, are in contradiction to what the magisterium, the Fathers, and the Doctors of the Church taught for two millennia.

It is common to hear Church leaders making statements that sound very much like dual covenant theology, the heretical view that while Christ brought about the New Covenant by which Christians are saved, Jews may still be saved by fidelity to their old covenant and laws. See, for instance, a 2021 statement by Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews: “The abiding Christian conviction is that Jesus Christ is the way of salvation. However, this does not mean that the Torah is diminished or no longer recognized as the ‘way of salvation for Jews.’“

So Robert George is not uniquely blameworthy in this respect. I have written about this problem before and was already working on a version of this essay before his Sapir piece came out. But the case of a prominent conservative Catholic intellectual writing a theologically erroneous article about the Jews in a Jewish publication calls for special correction.

Phrases like “irrevocable covenant” and “beloved elder brothers” have become not so much points to be held within the balance of a greater system of doctrine, as slogans to be used defensively whenever the more sobering aspects of Catholic teaching on the Jews threaten to come into view. For Catholics to have a fully orthodox and Scriptural view of these questions, we must, as Pope Benedict’s essay encouraged, move beyond the two or three sound bites which Catholics have repeated for decades in order to prove that the Church is not antisemitic. Or perhaps these very phrases, if we begin to take them seriously in their full Scriptural resonance, will lead us to a reality much deeper and more complex than their facile deployment suggests.

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*Responding in German to a critic of his essay, Benedict wrote:

“First of all, it seemed to me necessary to clarify the term ‘substitution’ and to get to know the ‘substitution theory’ more precisely, since the answer to the essential questions of the dialogue between Jews and Christians seemed to depend on it. Now it had always been astonishing to me that I myself had never heard anything about this ‘substitution theory.’ Even if I had never dealt directly thematically with the question of Christianity and Judaism, it was still astonishing to me that I did not know the most important theory about it. Therefore, I went in search of it and had to find out that a theory explicitly existing as such did not exist before the Council.

I would still find it important to find out how subsequently the idea of a ‘substitution theory,’ which now has to be overcome, came into being. In any case, I have not denounced any consensus on this essential point, but only determined that there has not been an articulated ‘substitution theory’ as such.”