Candace Owens and the Sin of Anti-Semitism

According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885) was “an Italian-born businessman who was noted for his philanthropy and support of Jewish rights.” In the England to which he was brought as a child, he became an investor of such genius that he retired from the investment business at forty and dedicated himself and his wealth to other enterprises, including befriending rulers he then persuaded to deal more justly with his religious brethren. In 1840, he secured from the sultan of Egypt the release of Damascus Jews falsely accused of a blood libel, and in the same year convinced the Ottoman sultan to grant Jews the same rights as other non-Muslims in his lands. In 1844, he even managed to get the reactionary Czar Nicholas I to ease up on the persecution of Russian Jews. In all this, Montefiore embodied the maxim that great wealth confers great responsibilities.

Sir Moses was also a man with a marked talent for the zinger. His descendant, the distinguished British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, underscored the point in an August article in the London-based Spectator:

I admire how Moses coped with anti-Semitism. Attending a royal dinner, a bigot denounced him: “I just visited Japan which I loved because Japan has no Jews and no pigs!” “Then you and I should go to Japan together,” answered Montefiore. “So they have one of each.”

I thought of Sir Moses recently when considering the case of Candace Owens, one of the most influential podcasters of the day, her show averaging some 3.5 million downloads and views per episode. She has monetized this exposure to the point where estimates of her monthly income range from $200,000 to $450,000, thanks in part to speaker fees that climb from the mid-five figures to $100,000. On April 22, 2024, she announced that she had been received into full communion with the Catholic Church by the Very Rev. Julian Large, provost of London’s Brompton Oratory.

Which raises a serious question: What kind of catechesis takes place at the Oratory once led by the great hymnist Fr. Frederick Faber?

For Candace Owens is a conspiracy-theory propagandist whose most fevered rants are anti-Semitic in both tone and content. She has indulged in various forms of Holocaust denial; propagated the canard that Jews were responsible for the Atlantic slave trade; and promoted a thoroughly discredited nineteenth-century book, The Talmudic Jew, which claims that the Talmud is a secret code for a Jewish takeover of the world—which would be quite a feat for 0.2 percent of the global population.

Candace Owens indulges in all sorts of other nuttiness, including her insistence that Brigitte Macron, wife of the French president, is actually a man and that NATO expansion provoked Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. What National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry aptly described as her “malevolent brilliance” evidently has considerable appeal. Those who find her appealing, compelling, or even amusing should not include Catholics, however.

The plague of anti-Semitism, always a sure sign of cultural decay, is abroad in the Western world again. And in the face of this grotesquerie, it must be recognized that Jew-hatred and Jew-baiting are intrinsically anti-Christian. 

Any catechetical program worthy of the name, at Brompton Oratory and elsewhere, must therefore ensure that those to be baptized or received into full communion with the Catholic Church are taught, understand, and affirm that Jesus was born into a Jewish family, lived as a faithful Jew, believed himself to be the fulfillment of the messianic hopes of the People of Israel, and died with a prayer to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob on his lips—all of which truths are attested to by the revealed word of God. Those to be baptized or received into full communion with the Church must affirm, as a matter of divine revelation (Rom. 9–11), that God’s covenantal promises to the Jewish people have not been abrogated. Those to be baptized or received into full communion must affirm the teaching of the Second Vatican Council that the Catholic Church is still nourished by the Old Testament and its spiritual patrimony, “that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles.” And finally, those to be baptized or received into full communion must affirm and promise to live out the council’s condemnation of “hatred, persecutions, [and] displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

As for the rest of us, we have a spiritual and moral obligation to call to repentance and conversion Catholic “influencers” who traffic in anti-Semitism, which is a grave sin as well as a social cancer. 

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

Image by Gage Skidmore via Creative Commons. Image cropped.