Candace Owens, a Catholic convert and former pundit at the Daily Wire, has come under fire for anti-Semitic rhetoric, including promoting the “blood libel” charge and linking Judaism to pedophilia. She is not alone among Jew-bashers with large online followings trying to claim the label of “Catholic right” these days (notorious anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and some lesser-knowns do the same). But Owens stands out because her recent conversion in April through London’s fabled Brompton Oratory has coincided with her increasingly impassioned attacks on Jews qua Jews, creating the impression that the two are linked.
They aren't. Neither she nor other Catholics inexplicably stirring up ancient hatreds can speak for Church teaching toward those whom Pope John Paul II called “our elder brothers in the faith of Abraham.”
The obvious hurdle to Catholic anti-Semitism is that Jesus was a Jew. In each of the four Gospel accounts of the Last Supper, Jesus calls his blood the “everlasting covenant”—the same phrase used to describe God’s covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David. He also said that he had not come “to abolish the law or the prophets,” but “to fulfill.”
Though the Church was slow to respond to the violence of everyday Christians against Jews in the Middle Ages, pontiffs forcefully condemned anti-Semitic violence starting with the papal bull Sicut Judaeis (1120), issued after the First Crusade in Europe and reaffirmed by eighteen popes during the subsequent three centuries. Of critical importance, the bull permitted excommunication for mistreatment of Jews through forcible conversion, property seizures, or religious interference, as well as violence—which meant an eternity in hell for unrepentant anti-Semites.
The 1566 Catechism of the Council of Trent authoritatively states:
This guilt [for the death of Christ] seems more enormous in us than in the Jews, since according to the testimony of the same Apostle: If they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; while we, on the contrary, professing to know Him, yet denying Him by our actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on him.
More recently, the Second Vatican Council’s document Nostra Aetate (1965) holds that the covenant with the Jewish people remains intact:
[T]he Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God's saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets . . . [t]he Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles, making both one in Himself.
Pope Saint John Paul II called consistently throughout his life for solidarity between Christians and Jews, observing in 1982 that “the links between the Church and the Jewish people are grounded in the design of the God of the Covenant.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that hatred of anyone is a sin and notes the unique place of the Jewish people in history: “When she delves into her own mystery, the Church, the People of God in the New Covenant, discovers her link with the Jewish People, ‘the first to hear the Word of God.’”
Outside the institutional Church, Catholic heroes and villains over the centuries have been legion. One of the heroes was a Hungarian, Tibor Baranski, who saved three thousand Hungarian Jews during World War II. When a Nazi held a gun to his head and asked why he, a Catholic, was helping Jews, Baranski replied, “You are either silly or an idiot. It is because I am Christian that I help the Jews.” Baranski was restating the teaching of Pope Pius XI, who six years earlier had said:
Abraham is called our patriarch, our ancestor. Anti-Semitism . . . is alien to us, a movement in which we Christians can have no part . . . through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual descendants of Abraham. No, it is not possible for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism. . . . [A]nti-Semitism is inadmissible.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously observed, and as the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations agree, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. But the maxim that sins can be forgiven isn’t a license to commit them. The Church also teaches that “scandal,” misleading the faithful about the truth and leading others into sin, is a grave offense.
Catholics should turn to the example of Jacques Maritain, perhaps the most prophetic and influential Catholic voice in the twentieth century. As Richard Crane, a scholar of Maritain and Catholic-Jewish history, recently noted, this pivotal thinker underwent profound change, ultimately rejecting Jew-hatred. Through his faith, Maritain came to see that anti-Semitism was essentially pagan, and that this paganism wasn’t merely the enemy of Judaism, but also Christianity.
No one can out-tradition Maritain, whose activism included efforts to preserve the Latin liturgy. He reminds all concerned with the Church’s patrimony to reflect humbly on Christianity’s Hebraic roots. “Catholic anti-Semite” isn’t just an error. It’s an oxymoron.
Andrew Doran and Mary Eberstadt are founding members of the Coalition of Catholics Against Anti-Semitism, sponsored by the Philos Project.
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Image by Gage Skidmore, provided by Flickr, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
