December 2015 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

Nostra Aetate (In our time)

One of the many documents to come out of the Second Vatican Council is the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian religions - in Latin, Nostra Aetate (In our time), October 28, 1965.

For the first time in Church history, there was acknowledgement that there is truth contained in other religions of the world and a path of dialogue began with other religions. For centuries, especially after the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent, there was a persistent teaching that “outside the Church there could be no salvation” which at times led to persecution of people of other faiths. This is historically true even if it does not reflect the majority of Catholics, rather a fact of ecclesial history.

Nostra Aetate makes plain that the seeds of the truth of Christian revelation can be found in other religions, seeds that do not contradict but complement the truth of Christian revelation.

John XXIII at the Council called for the Church to enter into dialogue with the modern world, since there are many millions of people who are not Catholics, in a spirit of dialogues and co-operation. One remembers that John XXIII served in Turkey where he would have interacted with Muslims. [Excerpted from comments of Bishop Rozanski, in Our Sunday Visitor, May 17, 2015].

In order to commemorate the fifty years since the proclamation of Nostra Aetate, various conferences are being held. One was held in May at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., The keynote address concerning Islam was “The Catholic Church in Dialogue with Islam since the Promulgation of Nostra Aetate,” presented by Cardinal Jean-Luis Tauran, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. A response was made by Seyyed Nasr, world renowned scholar of Islam. The Roman Catholic respondent to Nasr was Sydney Griffith, an historian of Christian/ Muslim relations, especially in the

early Islamic period. As an historian, Griffith is sensitive to what goes beyond the state of current affairs between Muslims and Christians, i.e., the historical co-dependency of our community’s ‘both for weal and for woe.’

Fifty years ago many Muslim thinkers and leaders welcomed the appearance of Nostra Aetate. Now is the time to evaluate what has been achieved, in the current atmosphere of increased Islamophobia next to an increased anti- Christian hostility.

Although there is little historical evidence to previous Church teaching or papal statements on Church relations with Muslims, Griffith cites one from the 11th century by Pope Gregory. He also mentions one from an encyclical letter of Pope Paul VI: “We do well to admire these people for all that is good and true in their worship of God.” Griffith then develops other evidence from Lewis Massignon and Thomas Merton.

“Louis Massignon stands as the iconic figure of pre-Vatican II Catholicism’s interaction with Islam. His was a lived, inner experience of Muslim life, fortified by the seminal thinkers of Islamic Sufism. Massignon sensed

that his own personal conversion to the earlier Catholic faith of his mother, rejected at age 25, was due at least in part to the intercession of Man-r al-Hallaj (d. 922), the Muslim thinker, the study of whose life and thought was the focus of Massignon’s life-long scholarship. It was a course of inquiry that led him to the recognition of a deep substratum of transcendental knowing that underlay both Islam and Christianity in their shared scriptural roots, their faith/belief in the one God of Abraham, Isaac/Ishmael, Jacob and the Tribes, as an Qur’an puts it. It seems to me that such a strong spiritual communion with the ‘other’s’ experience of the transcendent, as Massignon had, is crucial for Nostra Aetate to have a life in the church beyond just that of a conciliar document.”

“In this connection, one might profitably recall the example set by Thomas Merton (d. 1968), the one hundredth anniversary of whose birth we celebrate this year. During the very years when Nostra Aetate was coming to be, initially through the good offices of Louis Massignon, Merton began an on-going correspondence by letter with a Pakistani Muslim man whom we know only by the name Abd al-Aziz. It continued from an uncertain date in 1962 and lasted until 1968, the year of Merton’s death. It was anything but a perfunctory correspondence. In the very first of the 15 or so letters he wrote, Merton said to Abd al-Aziz, ‘as one spiritual man to another (if I may speak in all humility), I speak from my heart of our obligation to study the truth in deep prayer and meditation, and bear witness to the light that comes from the All-Holy God into this world of darkness where He is not known and not remembered,’ (Hidden Ground of Love, p. 45). They went on to talk to one another about their own lives of prayer as well as about the creedal matters about which Muslims and Christians differ.”

Griffith concluded his lecture in May by saying: “Fifty years of interreligious dialogue on many levels have done much to begin conversation between Christians and Muslims. One wonders if the time has not come to try another way to reach a measure of rapprochement, namely long term Muslim-Christian study circles. It may be the case that a longer, more intense method of inter-religious colloquy would in the end be the shorter route to a measure of intellectual accord that could in due course make interreligious harmony a force against inter-communal war, violence, and foreign invasion.”

What has occurred is only a beginning. Griffith suggests that in this longer, more intense dialogue between Catholics and Muslims, “one might be able to recognize the Holy as each tradition experiences it.”

Mary Hansbury, PhD

Mary, a member of CPF, is a Syriac Scholar and has translated seven books & numerous articles.

.