issue 28 - July / August 2015
In 1965, under the direction of Pope Paul VI, the Second Vatican Council made historic changes to the Church’s policies and theology. These changes were crystallised in a document known as Nostra Aetate, Latin for ‘In Our Time,’ a document that revolutionised the Catholic Church’s approach towards other religions. For the first time it acknowledged the possibility that other religions ‘reflect rays of that Truth which enlightens all men’. In this document the Catholic Church attempted to introduce new terms for dialogue with specific references to Judaism and Islam. The church was attempting to redress a centuries-long painful relationship.
The Nostra Aetate was an open call to the Church to dialogue with other world religions from a premise of an acknowledged existence of common grounds especially in relation to the other monotheistic faiths of the Abrahamic branch; Judaism and Islam. In relation to Islam we read:
‘The Church regards with esteem also the Muslims. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not >>