This article is the second of a two-part series originally posted on Katnut d'Katnut (Dec 29, 2025). Read Part 1: A Catholic Critique of Contemporary “Fulfilment Theology” and Supersessionism.
Introduction
One of the most common objections raised by Catholics sceptical of Vatican II - particularly within traditionalist circles - is the claim that the Council's teaching on the Jewish people, especially as articulated in Nostra Aetate, represents a doctrinal novelty or rupture with prior tradition. The phrase "Well, yes - Vatican II" is often invoked as a dismissal rather than an argument.
This essay seeks to demonstrate that the Council's teaching on Israel does not originate in the 1960s but is firmly grounded in Sacred Scripture, patristic theology, medieval scholasticism, and the ordinary Magisterium prior to Vatican II. What the Council accomplished was not innovation, but doctrinal clarification in response to modern historical circumstances. Far from erasing Israel, the Church has consistently affirmed her enduring role within the economy of salvation.
At stake in this discussion is not merely the interpretation of a single conciliar document, but the Catholic understanding of how doctrine develops and how the Church reads her own tradition. The question is whether fulfilment in Christ entails the revocation of Israel's election, or whether it represents its eschatological perfection in accordance with God's fidelity. The latter position has deep roots in the Pauline corpus, particularly in Romans 9-11, and was received by the Fathers and scholastics as a mystery that remains open within salvation history rather than closed by ecclesial fiat.
Finally, it must be acknowledged that resistance to Nostra Aetate often reflects a deeper unease about authority and hermeneutics rather than a genuine absence of pre-conciliar sources. This blog essay therefore proceeds on the assumption that tradition is not a static archive of isolated quotations, but a living transmission interpreted authoritatively by the Church. By retrieving and examining pre-Vatican II foundations for the Church's teaching on Israel, the aim is not to diminish legitimate concerns about continuity, but to demonstrate that fidelity to tradition, rightly understood, requires precisely the position articulated by the Council.
Scriptural Foundations: Romans 9-11 and the Irrevocability of Election
The primary biblical foundation for the Church's understanding of Israel lies in Romans 9-11, a text that has never been marginal within Catholic theology. St Paul explicitly affirms both the reality of Israel's unbelief and the enduring validity of her election:
The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable." (Rom 11:29)
Paul's argument resists two errors simultaneously: the denial of Christ as Messiah and the claim that Israel has thereby been cancelled or replaced. His image of the olive tree (Rom 11:16-24) is decisive. The Gentiles are grafted into Israel's own covenantal root; they do not replace it.
This text was received throughout the patristic and medieval periods as teaching a continuing mystery concerning Israel. Notably, the Church never formally reinterpreted Romans 11 as merely symbolic or obsolete. The eschatological openness of Paul's argument remained intact across centuries of Catholic exegesis.
Paul's treatment of Israel in Romans 9-11 is not an incidental excursus but a carefully constructed theological argument that safeguards both divine sovereignty and divine fidelity. Israel's present unbelief is understood neither as total nor as final, but as a paradox permitted within God's salvific economy. Paul's insistence that "a hardening has come upon part of Israel" (Rom 11:25) is crucial: the limitation is both partial and temporal.
The apostle explicitly situates Israel's present state within an eschatological horizon that remains open, culminating in the enigmatic affirmation that "all Israel will be saved" (Rom 11:26). This claim resists reduction to a merely spiritualised or allegorical reading without doing violence to Paul's own argument.
Moreover, Paul frames the relationship between Israel and the Gentiles in terms of mutual dependence rather than replacement. The Gentiles are warned against presumption precisely because their inclusion is derivative and contingent: "do not boast over the branches" (Rom 11:18). This admonition has enduring theological force, as it presupposes the ongoing identity of Israel as Israel, not as a dissolved category subsumed into the Church.
The covenantal root remains Jewish, and the Gentile believer's participation in salvation is inseparable from that root. The continuity Paul describes is therefore organic rather than juridical, marked by grafting, pruning, and restoration rather than annulment. Such imagery, consistently received by the Church prior to Vatican II, establishes fulfilment as participation in Israel's promises, not their confiscation or negation.
Patristic Witness: Israel as a Preserved People
Among the Fathers, St Augustine of Hippo provides the most influential and enduring synthesis. In Contra Faustum and The City of God (Book XVIII), Augustine teaches that the Jewish people persist in history as witnesses to God's fidelity. Their continued existence is not accidental but providential.
Augustine explicitly rejects the idea that Israel is simply erased from salvation history. While he affirms that the Church possesses the fullness of revelation in Christ, he insists that Israel's survival testifies to the truth of the Scriptures and the reliability of God's promises. This doctrine of testimonium Judaeorum shaped Western theology for over a millennium.
Even St John Chrysostom, whose homilies against Judaizing practices are often cited polemically, does not teach the abolition of Israel's election. His rhetoric targets religious error and pastoral confusion, not the ontological status of the Jewish people as such. Polemic must not be mistaken for dogma.
Augustine's position is particularly significant because it establishes a theological rationale for Israel's continued historical existence that does not depend upon her present acceptance of Christ. For Augustine, the Jewish people function as a living archive of revelation: guardians of the Scriptures, transmitters of the prophetic tradition, and unwilling yet indispensable witnesses to the truth claims of Christianity. This role is not merely pragmatic but theological, rooted in divine providence rather than human contingency. The Jews, in Augustine's view, remain under God's protection precisely because their preservation serves the integrity of salvation history itself.
Beyond Augustine, the broader patristic corpus reflects a similar tension between sharp polemic against unbelief and an underlying affirmation of Israel's enduring place within God's economy. Fathers such as Origen, Ambrose, and Jerome frequently interpret Israel's present condition as a form of chastisement rather than rejection, oriented towards eventual restoration rather than permanent exclusion. Their exegesis of Pauline texts, especially Romans 11, consistently avoids the conclusion that God has revoked His covenant with Israel.
While their language is often shaped by the apologetic pressures of their time, their theological assumptions presuppose continuity rather than cancellation. This patristic consensus, though expressed unevenly, provides a stable pre-conciliar foundation for understanding fulfilment in Christ as compatible with the preservation of Israel as a people within the unfolding mystery of redemption.
Medieval Theology: Fulfilment Without Revocation
The medieval scholastic tradition, far from introducing supersessionist absolutism, largely preserves the Pauline and Augustinian framework. St Thomas Aquinas, in his Commentary on Romans (chapter 11), explicitly affirms the continuing validity of Paul's teaching regarding Israel.
Aquinas understands fulfilment as perfection rather than negation. The Old Covenant is fulfilled in Christ, yet its election is not revoked. The mystery of Israel's future remains open, precisely because divine election operates according to God's fidelity rather than human merit.
Importantly, Aquinas never teaches that Israel becomes a mere abstraction or that her historical peoplehood dissolves into the Church. Such ideas emerge later, often under the pressure of polemical or political contexts rather than theological necessity.
Aquinas's position must be read within his broader theology of covenant, law, and grace. In the Summa Theologiae, he distinguishes carefully between the ceremonial, judicial, and moral precepts of the Mosaic Law, affirming that while the ceremonial observances cease in their obligatory force with the advent of Christ, the divine intentions they signified are not rendered void.
This distinction allows Aquinas to maintain both the genuine novelty of the New Covenant and the enduring intelligibility of Israel's election. The cessation of ritual obligation does not entail the abrogation of God's promises, nor does it imply that Israel's historical vocation is reduced to a temporary scaffolding discarded once Christianity emerges.
Moreover, medieval theology as a whole exhibits a marked restraint in drawing definitive conclusions about Israel's ultimate destiny. Commentators influenced by Augustine and Aquinas consistently treat Paul's statements in Romans 11 as eschatologically oriented rather than ecclesiologically exhausted. The possibility of Israel's restoration is left deliberately open, not as a speculative indulgence, but as an act of theological humility before divine mystery.
This restraint stands in contrast to later systematic tendencies that sought to close what Paul leaves unresolved. Within the medieval framework, fulfilment is thus conceived as organic continuity brought to perfection, not as a juridical replacement or historical supersession. The scholastic tradition, at its best, safeguards the integrity of Israel's peoplehood while affirming without compromise the universality of salvation in Christ.
The Pre-Conciliar Magisterium and the Condemnation of Antisemitism
Contrary to frequent assertions, Vatican II was not the first moment at which the Magisterium addressed Jewish-Christian relations with clarity. Popes Benedict XIV, Leo XIII, and Pius XI repeatedly condemned antisemitism and racialised hatred of Jews.
Pius XI's 1938 statement, "Spiritually, we are Semites," is particularly revealing. While not a dogmatic definition, it expresses a theological intuition deeply rooted in Scripture: Christianity cannot sever itself from Israel without severing itself from its own roots.
These teachings demonstrate continuity rather than rupture. The Church consistently rejected racial antisemitism and affirmed the Jewish people's unique relationship to the biblical revelation long before Vatican II.
The pre-conciliar Magisterium consistently distinguished between theological disagreement and racial or collective condemnation, a distinction that is often obscured in retrospective polemics. Papal interventions against antisemitism were not concessions to modern sensibilities but expressions of long-standing Christian moral teaching rooted in the universality of human dignity and the unity of the human race under God.
Leo XIII, in particular, repeatedly affirmed the moral continuity between the Old and New Testaments and rejected any attempt to oppose them as rival religious systems. Such interventions presuppose the enduring theological significance of Israel rather than her reduction to a purely historical precursor.
Furthermore, the Holy See's responses to the rise of racial ideology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal an implicit theology of election that resists biological or national absolutism. The Church's opposition to antisemitism did not rest merely on humanitarian grounds, but on the recognition that hatred of the Jewish people entails a distortion of Christianity's own self-understanding.
By insisting on the spiritual kinship between Christians and Jews, pre-conciliar popes safeguarded the integrity of biblical revelation against racial mythologies that sought to detach Christianity from its Israelite matrix. Vatican II's teaching thus emerges as the organic maturation of this magisterial trajectory, articulating with greater explicitness what had already been defended in principle: that the Church cannot affirm Christ while denying the people from whom He came according to the flesh.
Vatican II as Doctrinal Clarification, Not Innovation
What Vatican II accomplished in Nostra Aetate was the authoritative synthesis of these strands in response to the moral catastrophe of modern antisemitism and the theological distortions that had accompanied it. The Council did not reverse doctrine; it made explicit what had long been implicit.
The rejection of collective Jewish guilt, the affirmation of Israel's enduring election, and the insistence that God does not repent of His promises all follow directly from Scripture and tradition. To label these teachings "novelties" is to misunderstand the nature of doctrinal development as articulated by figures such as St Vincent of Lérins and St John Henry Newman.
The hermeneutical key to understanding Nostra Aetate lies in the Church's own account of doctrinal development. St Vincent of Lérins famously articulated the principle that authentic development preserves identity while allowing for growth: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus . Vatican II operates within this framework, not by introducing new articles of faith, but by purifying and stabilising the Church's articulation of truths already present within the deposit of faith. The Council's language regarding Israel reflects a maturation of theological precision, prompted by historical circumstances that demanded greater clarity and pastoral responsibility.
Similarly, St John Henry Newman's account of doctrinal development provides a useful lens through which to interpret the Council's teaching. Newman emphasised that true developments unfold organically from prior principles, often becoming explicit only when challenged by error or misunderstanding. In this light, Nostra Aetate may be understood as a necessary response to distortions that had arisen when partial or polemical readings of tradition were elevated into absolute claims.
By reaffirming Israel's enduring election and rejecting collective guilt, the Council safeguarded the internal coherence of Catholic theology, ensuring that the Church's confession of Christ remains inseparable from the fidelity of God to His covenantal promises. Far from diluting tradition, Vatican II clarified its contours, preserving continuity while correcting accretions that threatened to obscure the Gospel itself.
The Real Point of Disagreement: Authority and Hermeneutics
In practice, objections to Nostra Aetate are rarely resolved by additional citations. The disagreement is not primarily about sources but about hermeneutics and authority. One can read tradition as a living, coherent whole guided by the Magisterium, or one can absolutise selective polemical moments and treat them as normative.
The Church herself has chosen the former path. To reject the Council's teaching is not merely to dispute a document of the 1960s; it is to reject the Church's authoritative interpretation of her own tradition. This hermeneutical divide often manifests as a tendency to conflate historical theology with dogmatic definition. Polemical statements, pastoral admonitions, or context-bound rhetoric are sometimes elevated to the status of immutable doctrine, while the Church's later authoritative clarifications are dismissed as concessions to modernity.
Such an approach risks fragmenting tradition into disconnected proof-texts rather than receiving it as an organic and internally coherent whole. Catholic theology, however, has never understood tradition as a static repository of isolated utterances, but as a living transmission safeguarded by the Magisterium and ordered towards the faithful interpretation of revelation across time.
At its core, resistance to Nostra Aetate raises the question of ecclesial obedience. The Catholic understanding of authority does not permit the faithful to accept earlier magisterial acts while rejecting later ones that interpret them authoritatively. The Second Vatican Council, as an exercise of the authentic ordinary Magisterium, requires religious submission of intellect and will, even where theological nuances remain open for discussion.
To deny this is not to defend tradition but to substitute a private hermeneutic for the Church's own. Fidelity to Catholic tradition, rightly understood, entails trust that the same Holy Spirit who guided the Church in earlier centuries continues to guide her in the present, preserving continuity while leading the faithful into a deeper articulation of the truth.
St. Lawrence of Brindisi: Jewish Sources and the Continuity of Revelation
Among the Doctors of the Church, St Lawrence of Brindisi (1559-1619) occupies a distinctive and often underappreciated place in the history of Catholic theology due to his exceptional command of Hebrew and his extensive engagement with Jewish exegetical sources. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lawrence did not treat post-biblical Jewish learning as a mere polemical foil, but as a genuine witness to the textual and linguistic depth of the Old Testament. His sermons and commentaries reveal a sustained reliance upon the Hebrew text of Scripture and frequent reference to rabbinic interpretations, which he employed not to relativise Christian doctrine, but to illuminate it from within its Israelite matrix.
Lawrence's method presupposes a theological continuity between Israel and the Church that is incompatible with any notion of absolute supersession. By engaging Jewish sources as authoritative witnesses to the meaning of Scripture - albeit witnesses who had not yet recognised its fulfilment in Christ - he implicitly affirmed the ongoing theological significance of the Jewish people and their interpretive tradition.
His confidence that rabbinic exegesis could clarify Christian proclamation rests upon the conviction that God's revelation to Israel remains intelligible and trustworthy, even when received apart from explicit faith in Christ. Such an approach anticipates the later magisterial insistence that Christianity cannot understand itself apart from its Jewish roots.
Moreover, St Lawrence's work demonstrates that serious theological engagement with Judaism long predates the modern period and cannot be dismissed as a post-Vatican II novelty. His example shows that fidelity to Catholic orthodoxy has historically included respectful, learned, and substantive dialogue with Jewish sources, undertaken in the service of evangelisation rather than hostility.
In this sense, Lawrence stands as a bridge figure: fully pre-conciliar, rigorously orthodox, and yet operating with a hermeneutic that recognises Israel not as a superseded relic, but as a living bearer of the language, categories, and promises through which divine revelation continues to be understood. Vatican II did not invent this posture; it retrieved and universalised a mode of engagement already exemplified by one of the Church's Doctors.
Conclusion
The Catholic teaching that Christ fulfils Israel without erasing her is not a Vatican II invention. It is grounded in St Paul, articulated by the Fathers, preserved by the medieval scholastics, and affirmed by the pre-conciliar Magisterium. Vatican II did not introduce a new theology of Israel; it clarified an ancient one in response to new historical conditions.
A Catholic fidelity to tradition must therefore include fidelity to the Church's living authority. Any theology that requires the effective cancellation of Israel cannot be reconciled with Scripture, the Fathers, or the Church's own teaching office. Fulfilment without erasure is not a concession to modernity; it is a demand of Catholic orthodoxy.
To insist upon the erasure of Israel as a people within salvation history is not merely to misread a single conciliar document, but to unravel the internal coherence of Catholic theology itself. The God revealed in Scripture is defined by covenantal fidelity, not expediency; His promises are fulfilled through deepening and transfiguration, not revocation.
Any theological system that requires God to abandon His prior election in order to establish the New Covenant ultimately compromises the unity of divine action across history. The Church's confession of Christ as the fulfilment of Israel presupposes, rather than negates, the enduring reality of Israel as the people to whom the promises were first entrusted.
In this light, Nostra Aetate stands not as an accommodation to modern sensibilities, but as a reaffirmation of the Church's deepest theological instincts when tested by historical crisis. The Council's teaching calls Catholics not to a selective traditionalism that freezes doctrine at moments of polemical intensity, but to a mature fidelity capable of receiving clarification without fear.
To affirm fulfilment without erasure is therefore to stand within the mainstream of Catholic orthodoxy, faithful both to the past and to the Church's present authority. Such fidelity does not weaken the Church's proclamation of Christ; it strengthens it, by bearing witness to a God whose truth is consistent, whose mercy is irrevocable, and whose purposes in history are never nullified.
Some References
Patristic Sources
Augustine of Hippo. Contra Faustum Manichaeum. In Patrologia Latina , vol. 42. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1845.
Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Chrysostom, John. Adversus Judaeos. In Patrologia Graeca, vol. 48. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1862.
Origen. Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Thomas P. Scheck. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002.
Vincent of Lérins. Commonitorium. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , Second Series, vol. 11. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994.
Medieval Theology
Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Fabian Larcher, OP. Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute, 2012.
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947.
Doctors of the Church
Lawrence of Brindisi. Opera Omnia. 15 vols. Florence: Typographia Barbera, 1928-1956.
Newman, John Henry. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine . Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989.
Magisterial Documents
Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Donum Veritatis. Vatican City, 1990.
Second Vatican Council. Dei Verbum. In Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents . Edited by Austin Flannery, OP. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1975.
Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium. In Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents . Edited by Austin Flannery, OP. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1975.
Second Vatican Council. Nostra Aetate. In Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents . Edited by Austin Flannery, OP. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1975.
Pontifical Biblical Commission. The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible . Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2001.
Papal Teaching (Pre-Conciliar)
Benedict XIV. A Quo Primum. Rome, 1751.
Leo XIII. Providentissimus Deus. Rome, 1893.
Pius XI. Address to Belgian Pilgrims, 6 September 1938. Quoted in La Civiltà Cattolica 89 (1938).
Modern Scholarship
Cohen, Jeremy. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Connelly, John. From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Fastiggi, Robert. "St. Lawrence of Brindisi and the Jewish Roots of Christian Theology." The Thomist 74, no. 2 (2010): 253-276.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary . Anchor Bible 33. New York: Doubleday, 1993.
Fredriksen, Paula. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Levering, Matthew. Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation . Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Schreiner, Thomas R. Romans. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998.
