What Followed From Eight Sentences

The declaration is not a treaty and it created no obligation enforceable anywhere. What it did was remove the doctrinal footing from a set of practices, and the practices went with it. The Good Friday liturgy had prayed for the perfidious Jews within living memory; the wording had already been altered under John XXIII and was fully replaced in the reformed rite. Catechisms and preaching manuals across the Latin Church were revised. The charge of deicide, which had run through European Christian teaching for well over a millennium and had been the standing pretext for expulsion and massacre, ceased to be teachable.

The institutional consequences accumulated over decades. A Vatican commission for religious relations with Jews was created in 1974 and issued guidelines in 1974 and 1985. John Paul II visited the synagogue of Rome in 1986 and Israel in 2000, and the Holy See and Israel established diplomatic relations in 1993. The same declaration is the reference point of every subsequent Catholic document on Islam.

Its limits are also on the record. It does not address the Shoah directly, which the Church did in 1998 in a separate document, and it left open questions about mission to Jews that later Vatican texts have taken up without closing. The atlas files it as an instrument because of what it repealed in practice rather than what it enacted in law.