The Wrong Prayer

During the August 9 Sunday Mass, the second reading from Romans 9:1–5 featured St. Paul expressing anguish over the failure of fellow Jews to accept Christ. John Connelly of Commonweal notes that Paul later concludes that the divine calling of the Jewish people remains untouched because God's gifts and call are irrevocable.

These biblical passages served as inspiration for the Second Vatican Council when bishops sought new language to address the Jewish people following the Holocaust. In the 1965 declaration Nostra aetate, the bishops affirmed Christ as the way, truth, and life but chose not to express hope for the conversion of the Jewish people.

The Council rejected an early draft that stated the Church waited with longing for the Jewish people to enter the fullness of the people of God established by Christ. Instead, the bishops replaced that text with a statement that the Church awaits a day known only to God when all peoples will serve the Lord together. This change occurred because the bishops viewed praying for the assimilation of the Jewish people as obscene in the decades following the attempt to annihilate them in Europe.