The declaration Nostra Etate of the Second Vatican Council recognizes that many of the church fathers espoused supersessionist theology until it became the standard formulation of Catholicism’s relationship with Judaism in the Middle Ages. This theological position is described as such:

the promises and commitments of God would no longer apply to Israel because it had not recognized Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God but had been transferred to the Church of Jesus Christ which was now the true ‘new Israel’, the new chosen people of God (Cunningham, 2017, p. 12-13).

Nostra Etate presented the relationship between the Catholic church and the Jewish people in a new theological framework. Previously there were great reservations between the Catholic church and Judaism due to the history of Catholic antisemitism, forced conversion, pogroms and the holocaust that occurred in Christian Europe (Cunningham, 2017, p. 3). But the holocaust prompted the Catholic church to reevaluate their relationship to the Jewish people. Since Vatican II these two mutually skeptical communities made progress towards friendship and partnership. In 1974, pope John Paul VI established the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews entrusted with the task of “accompanying and fostering religious dialogue with Judaism”. This endeavor is theologically connected with the Council for Promoting Christian Unity considering the perception that this is the “first and most far-reaching breach among the chosen people” (Cunningham, 2017, p. 3).

Crucially, Nostra Etate declares the intention of the Catholic church to “become acquainted with Judaism as it defines itself, giving expression to the high esteem in which Christianity holds Judaism and stressing the great significance for the Catholic Church of dialogue with the Jews” (Cunningham, 2017, p. 4). The Catholic-Jewish dialogue that has developed has led to an awareness that:

Christians and Jews are irrevocably inter-dependent, and that the dialogue between the two is not a matter of choice but of duty as far as theology is concerned. Jews and Christians can enrich one another in mutual friendship. Without her Jewish roots the Church would be in danger of losing its soteriological anchoring in salvation history and would slide into an ultimately unhistorical Gnosis. Pope Francis states that “while it is true that certain Christian beliefs are unacceptable to Judaism, and that the Church cannot refrain from proclaiming Jesus as Lord and Messiah, there exists as well a rich complementarity which allows us to read the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures together and to help one another to mine the riches of God’s word. We can also share many ethical convictions and a common concern for justice and the development of peoples. (Cunningham, 2017, p. 8).

In Majority Catholic Portugal where I live, Catholic supersessionism represents not only a theological problem for the church but is linked to postcolonial racism. Willie Jennings posits that the church replaced a rejected Israel leading to a Western ethnocentrism which coopted the gospel for colonialist ends (Jennings, 2010, p. 10). During the 15th century, blood purity laws related to Jewish “New Christians” eradicated the notion of “Gentiles” in Iberian Catholicism. During the subsequent colonial period, Western Christianity simply understood itself as the “people of God” (Supersessionism, Nations, and Race: Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology 2021 Annual Meeting – YouTube, n.d.). This attitude was an essential aspect of the justification for Western colonialism and the construction of racial theory with its continuous negative effects on Portuguese society.

Analysis of Supersessionism in Portugal through Postcolonial Theory, and this Theories Limitations

One of the earliest theories of decolonization and postcolonial theory emerged from French Algerian Frantz Fanon. Fanon described the “racialized subjectivity and the structural conditions that sustain racial domination” (Kohn & Reddy, 2024). According to Fanon, “nothing but a clear break would solve the psychological as well as social, political, and economic problems brought by the colonizer to the colonized” (Rynkiewich, 2011, p. 135). Violent uprising by the colonized against the colonizer was posited as the only solution. The rationale being that it was the colonizer who had created the native’s prohibitive world (Rynkiewich, 2011, p. 135). And Fanon placed the church in a position as fully complicit in the colonial relationship.

Following Fanon, several other theories were developed addressing the racial tensions that existed after decolonization. The Tunisian Jew Albert Memmi argued that the colonizer and colonized have “created each other, and thus the colonizer is as much caught in trap as the colonized”. Therefore, the only way to resolve the situation is for the colonizer to join forces with the colonized in the fight for independence (Rynkiewich, 2011, p. 136-7). Memmi argued that the entrapped colonizer could only be freed through a process he described as repentance (p. 137). Prospero and Caliban argued that over generations colonialism had produced two groups of people with character traits that made independence and development impossible. This was because both had been educated into a state of interdependence but simultaneously incapable of working together” (p. 137). Andre Gunter Frank proposed that the original condition of the indigenous peoples before colonialism was preferable, i.e. more “developed”. This countered the idea that the situation after colonialism was an underdeveloped native population, unless the term referred to a state caused by colonialism itself (p. 138). Wallerstein theorized that colonialism resulted in a paradigm of economic development consisting of “commodification of land, labor, and resources”, a formulation of value completely incompatible with premodern traditional cultures (p. 138).

Majority Roman Catholic Portuguese society must come to grips with the residual effects of colonialism that still affect race relations there today. Although one of the smaller Western European countries, Portugal has an oversized colonial legacy. It is still the focus of immigration from former colonies in Africa, Asia, and South America. The notion that the Western colonizer rightly educated and civilized the inferior indigenous peoples is something that Portuguese Christians need to face. Acknowledging and denouncing this historical attitude and action would do much good for race relations by acknowledging and denouncing. The Catholic Church should recognize that missionaries in their former colonies were complicit in imperial interests which were subsequently discarded as soon as hegemony was established over indigenous peoples (p. 142).

However, extreme ideologies such as settler colonialism promoted by Patrick Wolf (2006) are not a way forward for majority Catholic Portugal. Wolf argued that invasion is a structure, not an event. Therefore, all citizens of nations resulting from colonial endeavors actively participate in exploitation. The only apparent alternative is revolution and national reset, as Wolf elaborates:

As practiced by Europeans, both genocide and settler colonialism have typically employed the organizing grammar of race. European xenophobic traditions such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or Negrophobia are considerably older than race, which, as many have shown, became discursively consolidated fairly late in the eighteenth century. But the mere fact that race is a social construct does not of itself tell us very much. As I have argued, different racial regimes encode and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans coerced the populations concerned. (Wolfe, 2006)

Postcolonial theory rightly denounces historical offenses committed with the Catholic church’s involvement that contributed to current racial tensions in Portuguese society. However, the idea that only the inheritors of oppression and systemic racism have an objective and helpful voice is not a promising approach. To remedy problems related to race in Portugal such as immigration and class struggles all inheritors of the postcolonial situation must speak and be heard. It should be obvious that extra attention should be given to hearing the colonized as the greater victim in a decolonized society.

References

Cunningham, P. A. (2017). The Sources behind “The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable” (Rom 11:29): A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate (No. 4). Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 12(1), 1–39.

Jennings, W. J. (2010). The Christian imagination: Theology and the origins of race. Yale University Press; Biola Library ebooks.

Kohn, M., & Reddy, K. (2024). Colonialism. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Rynkiewich, M. A. (2011). Soul, Self, and Society: A Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World. Cascade Books.

Supersessionism, Nations, and Race: Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology 2021 Annual Meeting—YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved April 22, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDlFvKAGGTo&t=2601s

Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240