That post is mixing some genuine biographical facts with a very misleading conspiracy narrative.
Gregory Baum was Jewish-born and converted to Catholicism, became an Augustinian priest, and worked at Vatican II. He did write the first draft of what became Nostra Aetate. But Nostra Aetate was not “his document” in the sense implied here. It went through extensive revisions, debate, votes by the Council Fathers, and was promulgated by Paul VI. The final declaration passed 2,221–88.
The claim that he “rewrote doctrine” is therefore particularly misleading. Baum's draft was one stage in a long conciliar process. The final text actually says that Jewish authorities at the time pressed for Christ's death, while explicitly rejecting collective Jewish guilt and the idea that Jews are rejected or accursed by God.
Nostra Aetate does not say that the Old Covenant remains salvifically sufficient for Jews, nor does it say that the Church has abandoned evangelization. It says that the Church recognizes its spiritual relationship to the Jewish people and rejects the presentation of Jews as rejected or accursed by God.
Baum did leave the priesthood in 1974 and married a former nun in 1978. Later in life he openly discussed his homosexuality and relationships with men. Those are legitimate biographical facts.
Reactionary Catholics of the nastiest kind
Yes. And this particular post is a good example of the reactionary Catholic polemical style you've been showing me.
What's striking is that it isn't really an argument about Nostra Aetate. It's purity politics applied to theology:
Jewish-born + convert + homosexual + former priest + married former nun → therefore corrupt → therefore the theological change he participated in is contaminated.
The biographical details become moral contamination by association. It resembles the logic of conspiracy thinking more than serious theological criticism.
And there's a particularly nasty antisemitic undertone in describing Baum first as “the gay Jew” rather than simply as a theologian who participated in Vatican II. His Jewish origin is being presented as evidence for why he supposedly wanted to undermine Catholic doctrine. That's essentially an old Jewish infiltration/corruption narrative dressed up in Catholic vocabulary.
it fits the broader reactionary pattern you've been showing me: the obsession with identifying contaminating people and ideas—communists, liberals, Jews, homosexuals, modernists, “cultural Marxists,” DEI, etc.—rather than engaging with the actual institutional or intellectual questions.
The irony is that the Catholic tradition they're claiming to defend is intellectually enormous and internally contentious. You don't need conspiracy theories about a secret homosexual Jewish priest to criticize Vatican II. There are centuries of sophisticated Catholic arguments with which to do it.
In fact, if someone has to explain a massive historical transformation like Vatican II primarily through “one corrupt individual secretly infiltrated the Church,” that's usually a sign that they're doing polemics rather than history.
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