You are perfectly correct Gil, but admitting that the charge of deicide was false would go against Christian (not just Catholic) dogma and undermine Christian belief in supersession, being the new chosen of God. The best we can expect is that after the Shoah showing how shallow Christian professions of love and forgiveness are, those who survived are no longer condemned as guilty of killing their God and hence subject to punishment.

The problem is that these interfaith meetings are meaningless. All people should respect the beliefs of others (as long as they conform to Western norms i.e. to Jewish standards), but interfaith meetings should cease. As a Jew, I hold Jewish dogma to be as true (as any unquestionable set of beliefs is true) and I reject all non-Jewish beliefs as others reject mine.

The point about deicide, which Nostra Aetate, did not repudiate, is that even if it was true, it was the decree of their God who chose to sacrifice his son to take on the sins of those who believed in that mystery and through that death and belief gain eternal life. That makes the Jews of Jesus’ time the agents of the Christian God and the persecution of their descendants a sin against their God’s plan to save believers and an unforgivable act of ingratitude for gaining eternal life, at least, according to their faith.

It is crystal clear.
Under Catholicism Jews are guilty of deicide, the killing of “God”!!
Until the Catholic Church comes out and repudiates this dogma in clear unambiguous language, all the good and pleasant talk about inter-faith harmony is just that, all talk, meaningless chatter.

That duplicitous piece of work the “Nostra Aetate” simply states that Jews of today are not guilty of what their ancestors did, thereby making Jews in general, in the eyes of the average gentile, still believe that “Jews killed Jesus”. The reality is that the actions attributed by Catholicism against the biblical Sanhedrin is a work of anti-Semitic fiction and the Catholic hierarchy needs to come to grips with this and publicly say so.