A Catholic Call to Abolish Antisemitism

Mary Eberstadt: Today, the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism takes a new step: calling Catholics to a new abolitionism – a summons to stepped-up solidarity with the Jewish people.

Simone Rizkallah, PhilosCatholic: Mary,  just two weeks after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, you delivered the keynote address at a conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville titled “Nostra Aetate and the Future of Catholic-Jewish Relations at a Time of Rising Antisemitism.” That same week, you published an article in the National Catholic Register titled “Catholics Against Antisemitism: Now More Than Ever.”

 You pointed to Nostra Aetate, promulgated in 1965: the Church’s official rejection of collective Jewish guilt; and to the personal efforts of Pope John Paul II and others to strengthen Catholic-Jewish relations.

 How has your understanding of antisemitism evolved since then?

Mary Eberstadt: My understanding of antisemitism has not evolved. As noted in my keynote at that historic conference, “anti-Semitism is a unique evil. It has nothing to do with individual Jewish people. No, it can insinuate itself, and does, into souls with peculiar, invisible cracks of some kind. These souls needn’t ever have encountered actual Jews.” What has evolved is an understanding of just how crucial it is to speak to Catholics right now, especially young Catholics, about what their Catholicism means when it comes to our “elder brothers in faith,” as St. John Paul II put it: the Jews.

I want to share three points with my fellow Catholics today. We’ve all read the Catechism. Evil walks among us. Evil is real. And for Catholics to turn a blind eye to that reality in the specific case of antisemitism is just morally unacceptable.

This point demands emphasis – because we Catholics, and many of our friends who are not Catholics, so frequently miss it. One often hears, for example, “What is the Catholic hierarchy doing about this or that problem, including antisemitism?”  One often hears, “What has the Pope said?” – as if a billion Catholics can check their powers of prudential reason at the door, just because we have a pope.

Let’s leave it to the theologians among us to explain the doctrine of infallibility. Let us non-theologians just stick with the non-theological facts. A long line of teaching instructs the laity that we have a unique role on earth, and in salvation history. And if that teaching applies anywhere, it’s here, pertaining to Catholics, and the need to step up against antisemitism.

Catholics can’t duck our individual responsibility toward Jews – or anything else. When you believe, as the Catechism and other Catholic texts teach, that you are made in the image of nothing less than God; when you believe, as some of the greatest Catholic teachers in history have instructed across the centuries, that you have been gifted with faculties of reason that allow you to approach the truths of God; you cannot avoid the injunction to “perfect the temporal order,” as it says in the 1965 Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, among other places. That includes combatting hatred and violence against Jews.

Simone Rizkallah: How would you persuade Catholics who might initially dismiss these concerns about antisemitism to recognize the reality of the issue?”

Mary Eberstadt: That’s a second point. Since October 7, 2023, two malignant ideas have quietly if unstably hovered over the Western landscape. One is that the Jews somehow brought that infamy upon themselves – classic, blame-the-victim antisemitism. It is not true, any more than it is true that the United States brought 9-11 on itself. But this smear continues to make the rounds in memes, and elsewhere online, and wherever stupid ideas are sold.

A second, pseudo-sophisticated, and even more pernicious variation of this idea, is the pox-on-all-houses moral equivalence: October 7 was a tragedy, but what Israel has done since then is worse. Both these ideas are wrong, and injurious. They are unworthy of any people with working left and right hemispheres. Catholics, of all Christians, are uniquely positioned to repel these malevolent interjections.

Specifically, we have just-war theory – a body of teaching stretching back over 1,500 years and benefiting from some of the greatest minds in Church and human history, including but not limited to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and other headliners. Just-war theory provides the only moral template we need for understanding exactly what happened on October 7, 2023, and beyond. Its applied principles demonstrate beyond a doubt who the aggressor was, who the innocent, who had the right of response in self-defense, etc.

Just-war theory smashes moral equivalence like an idol.

Our Protestant evangelical brothers and sisters have risen to the defense of the Jewish people with fighting spirit, and in admirable numbers, in part for reasons of millenarian theology that Catholics do not share. Catholics have a different reason for solidarity with people of the Covenant: not because we have theological or other expectations, but simply because it is the right thing to do, intrinsically, as Catholics.

Simone Rizkallah: How do you respond to those who argue that accusations of antisemitism are being overused or exaggerated in today’s discourse?

Mary Eberstadt: Some will remember from Philosophy 101 the story of 18th century philosopher George Berkeley, who came up with the idea of immaterialism – the notion that the world is not real. In response to that theory, Samuel Johnson is said to have kicked a rock, announcing, “I refute it thus!”

That’s the best way to deep-six the malignant suggestion that antisemitism is being hyped: refuse to play the game. Of course, one can also point to the empirical record. Tragically, history abounds for millennia with examples of bloody enthusiasms aimed at wiping out the Jews.

Yet as the horrors of the twentieth century recede from living memory, and as social media takes the place for many of verifiable history, we can’t expect knowledge of the past alone to get Catholics to do the right thing. We need more.

And so, a third point that I hope will be taken to heart by fellow Catholics everywhere, most especially the young.

In addition to just-war theory, Catholics – and especially young Catholics, whatever the state of their religious practice – have a particular, unique vernacular for understanding antisemitism, and the need to protect and defend those among us in need of aid. That is because of their dedication, most ardent of all among the young, to the cause of life.

Our young Catholics are empaths. All they need to know to rise to the occasion is that the refusal of the Jewish people to die has enraged their enemies throughout history. That the Jewish love of life – which is nothing less than a love of life enjoined by God Himself – binds Jews and Christians together, as no other force. As I noted at Franciscan University, “Hamas and the other enemies of the Jewish people often say, scornfully, ‘the Jews love life.’ So they do. And so do we.”

This joint love for life is a slap in the face to our common enemies: desiccated, antilife secularism; bloodthirsty Islamicism; suicidal, marriage-and-baby denialism. The same people and forces that who hate the Jews hate the Christians too – especially the Catholics. Since October 7, antisemitic offenses have risen almost three-fold in the United States. Since summer 2020, a record number of Catholic churches and properties have been attacked and defaced.

And not only in the United States. As Robert Royal shows in his new book, The Martyrs of the New Millenium, more Christians are in more danger of martyrdom today than at any other moment in history. As the months and years since October 7 have also shown, the desire to wipe Jews from Creation has been invigorated anew by Hamas, by other terrorist groups, and by their cold-blooded cheerleaders in American and Europe, including on certain feral campuses.

Today, the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism takes a new step: calling Catholics to a new abolitionism. The old abolitionism arose first in the eighteenth century, mainly in the salons of Enlightenment Europe. Left to the intellectuals, it would surely have died a slow death in drawing rooms.

Instead, something else happened. The calloused hands of farmers and others far removed from salons, toiling the land in places like New England and upstate New York, took up their Scripture, and took the fact of slavery to heart. It was prayers and preachings in tiny Protestant churches, by Quakers and Wesleyans and many anonymous souls, that found doing the right thing by slaves inescapable – just as it was Catholic clergy and other Christians on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

So let Catholics anew, beginning today, join hands in a new abolitionism: a summons to stepped-up solidarity with the Jewish people, in a moment when the malignity aimed against them continues to reveal its serpentine face.

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AUTHOR

Mary Eberstadt

Mary Eberstadt is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute and holds the Panula Chair at the Catholic Information Center. Her most recent book is Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited, with a Foreword by Cardinal George Pell.

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