One learned long ago that Vatican documents are read twice, once for the text and once for the notes, and that the second reading is usually the one that counts. The document with which three dicasteries mark the sixtieth anniversary of Nostra aetate rewards that custom like few others. It cites its sources generously and stops, with clockmaker’s punctuality, just before the sentence in which those sources spoke of the truth. It then declares the firmness once sustained by that truth to be obsolete. And in the end it proposes as a pastoral path a practice that the same sources excluded. Three movements, a single gesture.
It is titled “A Path of Hope”, dated 16 September and signed by Cardinals Fernández (whom, the enthusiasts told us, Leo was going to dismiss within hours after the habemus papam), Koch and Koovakad, heads of the Dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith, Christian Unity and Interreligious Dialogue, together with their three secretaries. Beneath the signatures are two further lines: “Ex Audientia, 22 June 2026″ and “Leo PP. XIV”. It follows the same pattern Francis used to promulgate Fiducia supplicans, and there is no reason to forget it now that the signatory is another. The Pope approved the text and ordered its publication, and Donum veritatis teaches that documents of the Doctrine of the Faith expressly approved by the Pope share in his ordinary magisterium. The same instruction admits that some magisterial documents may not be free of deficiencies. One takes refuge in that admission. What the document does not contain must be stated at once, because one does not write for the heresy-hunter. It denies nothing expressly. It affirms that Christ is the only redeemer, calls for a dialogue “free of ambiguities” that avoids “relativism and syncretism,” and rules out a single world religion in which all beliefs are levelled. It rules it out, to be sure, “out of respect for oneself and for others,” which is a very courteous reason for rejecting what was once rejected as false. The problem with the Note lies not in what it says, but in what it does with what others said.
It begins with the Council itself. The Note recalls that the Church “rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions” and looks with esteem on their “ways of acting and living, their precepts and doctrines.” There it places the period. Nostra aetate did not stop there: it added that those precepts and doctrines are considered with respect “even though they differ in many things from what she herself professes and teaches,” and immediately afterwards that the Church “has the duty constantly to proclaim Christ”. When the Note returns later to that paragraph, the duty to proclaim has become “the demand of fidelity to Jesus Christ.” Fidelity and proclamation are not synonyms. One can be faithful in silence, and the Council did not ask for silence.
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