It is noteworthy that one of the rising stars in the American Episcopacy felt the need to release a video message against antisemitism in the run-up to Holy Week. Of course, given the bad ways the Catholic Church has marked the Lord’s Passion over its long history and until very recently, a reminder might be in order. Yet, while Archbishop Alexander K. Sample of Portland, Oregon notes that history, it is clear that he is responding to a current and urgent problem. He feels the need to remind his viewers that the death of Jesus is not to be attributed to the Jewish people but rather to human sin, especially our own. That specific teaching goes back to the Catechism of the Council of Trent, and is affirmed most clearly at Vatican II.
The archbishop quotes section four of Nostra Aetate that Christ’s “passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.” It follows, therefore, that:
Good Friday ought to be an occasion for us to return to the Lord, not to scapegoat others. Holding the Jews collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus represents a profound misunderstanding of what took place on Good Friday. It is also one of the causes of a great deal of the hatred for the Jewish people that we have seen in history, and continue to see today. As Catholics, we are called to walk in the truth, and so to reject the conspiracies and lies that lead to harassment and even violence against our Jewish brothers and sisters.
For those of a certain age, the fact that a Catholic leader needs to say such a thing more than sixty years after the Council both shocks and appalls. Yet here we are. Antisemitism, what Andrew Klavan calls “the devil’s flagpole,” has returned both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Tragically, the problem is especially acute among some of the traditionally minded young men and women now drawn to Catholicism.
Given the persistence of Jew hatred in the West, its reemergence perhaps should not overly astonish, but it does, at least for me. If there was a consensus view among young conservatives in the last decades of the twentieth century—the kind who read First Things—it was support for the state of Israel, along with a more than a dose of philosemitism. It was simply part of what we had signed up for. We read Jewish novelists, watched Jewish comedies on television, and subscribed to political magazines with a plethora of Jewish commentators. I never questioned it. I had no trouble accepting the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East nor the idea that the United States and Israel were natural allies. I was open to a number of possible solutions to the Palestinian question, but all of them included a safe and independent Israel. In sum, I, and virtually everyone I knew, saw the creation of the modern state of Israel after World War II as a good action given the horrors of the Holocaust and the history of antisemitism. Whatever problems it caused, I was confident they were soluble by a combination of smart diplomacy, some warring, and, most of all, acceptance of the fact of Israel by its Arab neighbors.
We were, of course, aware of the typical prejudices against Jewish people in the form of negative stereotypes and jokes. It being a more sensible time, we were not browbeaten into denying that ethnic tropes, good or bad, have absolutely zero connection to reality. Yet we also understood that in this case they had led to the worst crime in human history. The Holocaust loomed large in our minds. We learned about it in school. In addition to the historical sections of our textbooks, we read Elie Wiesel’s Night or Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl or Viktor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning or Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, among others. We watched the seemingly endless parade of movies on the topic, e.g., Playing for Time (1980), Sophie’s Choice (1982), Shoah (1985), Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987), Europa, Europa (1990), and Schindler’s List (1993). Indeed, we got so much of the Holocaust, a young person at the time would have been forgiven for thinking that it happened in America instead of a country we defeated in war.
Whether overdone or not, the effort of our teachers, both in and outside the classroom, worked. Our moral imaginations were formed, in large part, by the Holocaust. We learned to see anti-Jewishness, no matter how casual, as dangerous and demonstrably catastrophic. Talking about Jewish conspiracies was something that bad and stupid people did. This included suspicions about the outsized influence of AIPAC or the dual loyalties of Jewish commentators and members of Congress. We lived in what Alec Ryrie calls “The End of the Age of Hitler.” Hitler and his crimes against the Jews served for us, as they did for the wider culture, as an objective evil. They had attained a wickedness so obvious as to be immune to the corrosives of moral relativism. Yet, as Ryrie notes, the memory of Hitler is beginning to fade and with it the post-World War II moral framework.
As impossible as it once seemed, the bulwark against antisemitism carefully wrought after the War has weakened if not fallen altogether. Not surprisingly, the resurgence of the old sin is strongest among those under thirty-five. While 69 percent of those sixty-five and older believe American Jews have a positive impact on the country, only 37 percent of those between thirty-five and forty-four do. More troubling, almost a fifth of those between eighteen and twenty-two hold Jewish influence to be a bad thing. Another survey found that a fourth of all Americans have negative views of Jewish people. For example, an eighteen-year-old is five times as likely to be anti-Jewish as a sixty-five-year-old.
It will come as no surprise that how one views Zionism plays a crucial role. It is true, of course, that antisemitism should not be equated with criticism of Israel or even with rejecting the idea of a Jewish state. It is also true that passionate anti-Zionism, especially when performed by non-Palestinians, often deals in antisemitic tropes. Anyone who witnessed the recent uprisings at elite college campuses against Israel last year can attest to that.
In any case, there can be no doubt that a rise in anti-Israel sentiment correlates with a rise in antisemitism. In the Yale Youth Poll, older Americans, whether Democrat or Republican, tend to describe Zionism in positive or neutral terms, e.g., “self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people” or “the continued existence of Israel in the face of calls for its destruction.” Americans between ages eighteen to twenty-two, however, equate the term with “maintaining a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine by driving out the native Palestinian population” or “a form of racism and apartheid against Palestinians.”
While the trend of anti-Israel sentiment is common to both self-described progressives and conservatives, their reasoning is different. The main issue for those on the left is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, a concern heightened by Israel’s aggressive response to the massacre of October 7, 2023. For those who lean right, it is the role Israel plays in the Trump administration’s foreign policy, including, of course, the current war in Iran. It is worth noting that anti-Israel sentiments are strongest amongst young men who describe themselves as “extremely conservative.” Only 35 percent disagree with commonly expressed anti-Jewish ideas, with 20 percent agreeing with the statement “Jews in the United States have too much power.” There is little doubt that this can be traced to the popularity among this group of such influencers as Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owns. For the sordid details of the last of these, consult the recent essay of frequent First Things contributor, Mary Eberstadt.
As alarming as this is, the trend is especially worrisome among young Catholics. While I could find no polling on this, there is plenty of evidence at hand. Both Fuentes and Owens are Catholic and often connect their Catholic faith to their highly negative views of Israel and Jewish people. The weird episode of Carrie Prejean Boller is emblematic. A former beauty contestant who once garnered controversy for her support of traditional marriage, Prejean Boller was ousted from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission because of her aggressive exchanges with Jewish members of the panel. While pressing them on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, she connected her quite fierce anti-Zionism with being a Catholic: “I am a Catholic, and Catholics don’t embrace Zionism.” After being removed, she claimed that she was being persecuted for “faithfully articulating the Church’s teaching” and refusing to be a coward “before an enemy.”
Prejean Boller, who entered the Catholic Church last year, revealed not only a hot temper but a less-than-complete understanding of her Church’s view on Zionism. While she is correct that the Catholic Church does not hold the founding of the modern state of Israel to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, it is perfectly possible to be a Catholic Zionist in the sense of upholding Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state. When she criticized other Catholics on the Commission for not coming to her defense, Bishop Robert Barron shot back:
Mrs. Prejean Boller was not dismissed for her religious convictions but rather for her behavior at a gathering of the Commission last month: browbeating witnesses, aggressively asserting her point of view, hijacking the meeting for her own political purposes. The Catholic position on matters of “Zionism,” to which I fully subscribe, is as follows: all forms of antisemitism are to be unequivocally condemned; the state of Israel has a right to exist; but the modern nation of Israel does not represent the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism. If Mrs. Prejean Boller were dismissed for holding these beliefs, it is difficult to understand why I am still a member of the Commission. To paint herself as a victim of anti-Catholic prejudice or to claim that her religious liberty has been denied is simply preposterous.
While one might be tempted to dismiss this episode as a mere matter of the fervency of a new convert without much theological background, it is, to my mind, revelatory of the pressing pastoral need to reaffirm and rearticulate the Church’s current teaching on the Jewish people and the state of Israel.
For those coming to this question for the first time or those in need of a refresher, a good place to start is with St. John Paul II’s speech during his historic visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome. Remarkable in every way, the pope both solidified the development in Church teaching on the Jewish people represented by Nostra Aetate and built upon it. He began with a three-point explanation of the new teaching:
The first is that the Church of Christ discovers her “bond” with Judaism by “searching into her own mystery” (cf. Nostra Aetate, ibid.) The Jewish religion is not “extrinsic” to us, but in a certain way is “intrinsic” to our own religion. With Judaism therefore we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.
The second point noted by the Council is that no ancestral or collective blame can be imputed to the Jews as a people for “what happened in Christ’s passion” (cf. Nostra Aetate, ibid.) Not indiscriminately to the Jews of that time, nor to those who came afterwards, nor to those of today. So any alleged theological justification for discriminatory measures or, worse still, for acts of persecution is unfounded. The Lord will judge each one “according to his own works,” Jews and Christians alike (cf. Rom 2:6)
The third point that I would like to emphasize in the Council’s Declaration is a consequence of the second. Notwithstanding the Church’s awareness of her own identity, it is not lawful to say that the Jews are “repudiated or cursed,” as if this were taught or could be deduced from the Sacred Scriptures of the Old or the New Testament (cf. Nostra Aetate, ibid.). Indeed, the Council had already said in this same text of Nostra Aetate, but also in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, no. 16, referring to Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans (11:28-29), that the Jews are beloved of God, who has called them with an irrevocable calling.
Although a summary, John Paul II’s repeating these points in a synagogue made clear, in a way the original teaching had not, that God’s irrevocable covenant refers not only to the religion of ancient Israel, but the form of the religion that arose after the death and resurrection of Jesus. In other words, contemporary Judaism is an expression of God’s covenantal faithfulness. The pope had first made this point during a meeting with Jewish representatives in Mainz in 1980 when he referred to Judaism as “a living heritage which we, as Catholic Christians, must understand and cherish in all its depth and richness.”
For those interested in something more detailed, I suggest reading the 2015 document issued by the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews: The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable (Rom 11:29)—A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of ‘Nostra Aetate’ (no. 4). There is also the 2001 The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible from the Pontifical Biblical Commission. The latter is important for a number of reasons, not least because of its reminder to Christians considering God’s irrevocable promises to Abraham and his descendants “that a specific land was promised by God to Israel and received as a heritage; this gift of the land was on condition of fidelity to the covenant (Lv 26; Dt 28).”
For Gavin D’Costa, the logic of holding that God’s gifts to the Jewish people are irrevocable and that those gifts include the land of Israel allows, perhaps pushes towards, a Catholic Zionism. In an essay for First Things, D’Costa summarizes his position:
My Catholic Zionism follows this line of theological analysis. It affirms that the Jewish people rightly seek a form of governance suited to their well-being in the land of Israel, though what that form should be is a matter of legitimate debate. The flourishing of the Jewish people in the land of Israel is providentially willed by God, but that flourishing need not entail the particular political forms currently in place. This tentative stance toward the State of Israel does not mean ambivalence or lack of support when Israel’s existence is threatened. Drawing upon the moral resources of the Catholic tradition, a Catholic Zionist can engage controverted questions of politics and policy in contemporary Israel with an attitude of affirmation. Catholic social doctrine favors democracies—and the present mode of governance in Israel makes it one of the few democracies in the region.
Catholic Zionism differs from the forms of Protestant Zionism that require a literalist exegesis of Revelation 20:2, which describes a thousand-year period of Messianic rule during which Satan is “bound” and his power restrained. Catholic Zionism does not see the creation of Israel in 1948 as inaugurating the end times. The death and resurrection of Jesus did that. Catholic Zionism does not support an “apocalyptic” showdown in the Middle East. Nor does it partake of the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, or anti-Palestinian sentiments sometimes found among Christian Zionists. Finally and most importantly, the Catholic Zionism I endorse supports the right of Palestinians to their sovereignty and self-determination, regardless of the failings and bad faith of some Palestinian leaders.
Catholic Zionism shares one central feature of Protestant Zionism, however: It affirms that the promise made to Abraham in Genesis matters in our time. The foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 has theological significance.
If this interests you, I recommend reading D’Costa’s Catholic Doctrines on the Jews after the Second Vatican Council (2019). In any case, his proposal leaves Catholics plenty of room to disagree and debate.
Archbishop Sample knows what all Catholics should now know. The Devil’s Flagpole of antisemitism has returned and in a Catholic form. It is up to all of us to respond with charity but also with a grounding in Catholic teaching.
