“The Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews,” the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews said in a statement last week. Photograph by Giulio Origlia / Getty

Since the time of St. Paul, the conversion of the Jews has been, for many Christians, a longed-for mark of the end of history, the prelude to the Messianic Age. Last week, however, the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued a solemn renunciation: “the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.” The statement was taken as a blithe reassurance that, in the words of a Slate headline, “Jews Can Go to Heaven,” but in fact it represented a historic shift, with implications as much for politics as for religion.

Across the centuries, the mad Christian impulse to convert Jews has erected not only pillars of anti-Semitism but also underlying structures of biological racism, white supremacy, and Western contempt for, among others, Arabs and Muslims. After the Holocaust, at the Second Vatican Council, the Church began to reckon with this legacy, especially in Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”), a declaration from 1965, which condemned anti-Semitism and disavowed the notion that Jews had been responsible for Christ’s death. Now, though, humane new Church attitudes that were only hinted at before are being made explicit. The Catholic Church, under Pope Francis, is attempting to cure Western civilization of the illness that it caused.

The Christian obsession with Jewish conversion may have been tied to end-time theology (“And so all Israel will be saved,” St. Paul wrote, in Romans), but a far more potent source of this impulse lay in a profound, if subliminal, insecurity. Christian claims for Jesus are based on ancient Jewish expectations and hopes. That the surviving custodians of those expectations and hopes resolutely reject the claims calls the faith radically into question. Can Jesus really be God? Can he really be raised from the dead? The Jewish “No!” rings far more loudly than any other negation, whether from Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists. That is why the effort to change “No!” into “Yes!” has been an engine of Christian identity for two thousand years.

The many manifestations of Christian contempt for Jews—medieval disputations; forced sermons; ghetto imprisonment; restrictions on employment, ownership, and social status—were actually intended as pressures to bring about conversion. Inevitably, such coercive measures turned violent, starting with Crusader mobs crying “Convert or die!” Jews mainly resisted, and nobly so. But a decisive turn in the story occurred in Iberia in the late fourteenth century, when massacres of Jews inspired huge numbers to accept baptism. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Catholics had concluded that coerced conversions cannot be trusted (hello!), and a new category of Christian was invented, the conversos, also known as New Christians. It was to investigate the authenticity of Jewish conversions that the Inquisition was established, and those whom the Inquisition ordered burned to death were being punished not for being Jewish but for being, in their insincerity, Christian heretics. Jewish converts, and their progeny, were suspect, and soon enough they were regarded as second-class citizens. Until now, acceptance of baptism had opened the way to full membership in society, but no longer.

In 1449, the city council of Toledo, Spain, passed an ordinance decreeing “that no converso of Jewish descent may have or hold any office or benefice in the said city of Toledo.” The papacy promptly condemned the so-called limpieza de sangre, or “blood purity,” requirement, but soon enough such restrictions spread, taking firm hold on the Catholic imagination. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits, to take an egregious example, declared that “no one will hereafter be admitted to this Society who is descended of Hebrew or Saracen stock … to the fifth degree of family lineage.” Although the exclusion of “Saracens”—that is, Muslims—later dropped away, Jesuit authorities allowed the restriction against converted Jews, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to stand until 1946.

This embrace of the blood-purity standard marked the epoch-shaping move from religious anti-Judaism to racial anti-Semitism. Indeed, the assumption of Jewish biological inferiority amounted to the invention of racism, and it gripped the European mind just as adventurer-explorers were setting sail for Africa, Asia, and the New World. A religion-based white supremacy defined European encounters with people of color everywhere. The totemic date for this fateful turn in the story of the West is 1492—the year of Columbus, but also the year of the expulsion of Jews from Spain.

The clock of history cannot be turned back, but the defining events of the past can be more clearly understood, and their tragic outcomes directly reckoned with. The Catholic Church has been attempting, in fits and starts, to confront its own complicity in terrible crimes, and Francis has continued this tradition. Last week’s renunciation may seem like a routine religious matter, of little interest outside the circle of Jewish-Catholic dialogue, but a basic principle of pluralism—other people have the right to be other people—is being affirmed. The absolute claims to religious superiority that have long been part of Catholic identity are being mitigated, if not dismantled.

The theological magnanimity implied by the Vatican pronouncement raises serious problems for the Catholic faith, which continues to put Christ at the center of all salvation. But that faith is clearly undergoing a change, as dogma gives way to experience. Because the theological contradictions reside in, as the pronouncement puts it, “an unfathomable divine mystery,” the Church can live with them, for now. And the new openness shown in this instance may expand. The relationship with Judaism, the decree says, can “be seen as the catalyst for the determination of the relationship with the other world religions.” If Jews can be understood by the Catholic Church as having their independent religious integrity, wholly deserving of respect, so can other faiths. Of particular moment for the United States, perhaps, is the way this positive regard must decidedly extend to Islam, which, in the words of Nostra Aetate, “the Church regards with esteem.” As the Jesuits’ anti-“Saracen” ordinance suggests, Muslims suffered from the bigotries that were attached to the millennial dream of Jewish conversion. The dream is over. Let the nightmare be finished with, too.