A warning about what is being advanced in your name
Dear Friend,
On my desk, right next to my siddur, or prayer book, I keep a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions, a work I return to often with humility and awe. And whenever asked to give a list of things that the world needs to set it right, among my answers is always a strong Catholic Church, standing between us and barbarity. I’m writing to you, then, because I want you to flourish, and because, right now, I see you getting terribly, cynically, and, if things go very wrong, irreversibly played.
The reason I can see what’s happening to you is because it happened to me. For two decades, loud-mouth lightweights with thin connection to Judaism or Jewish life have rushed into the spotlight, declaring themselves representatives of the Jews.
Organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace, for example, which are neither Jewish nor interested in peace, routinely declare that only by embracing Hamas can one live a truly Jewish existence. Bend the Arc, New York Jewish Agenda—there’s no shortage of groups rising to speak “as Jews” while interested in anything but the actual welfare of actual practicing Jews or, for that matter, in preserving Judaism’s real, core tenets.
And now a similar thing is happening to you. Let me show you how.
“I’m a Catholic,” Carrie Prejean Boller, the now-former member of the White House Religious Liberty Commission thundered as she took the mic in a hearing last week, “and Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know.”
Boller then proceeded to grill each member of the committee whether they considered criticism of Israel to be antisemitic, showing little interest in their considered and nuanced responses and repeatedly accusing Israel of genocide. She also used her time in the limelight to defend her friend and fellow Catholic convert, Candace Owens, arguing that the popular podcaster was “not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism.”
That would be the same Owens who called Judaism a “pedophile-centric religion”; argued that Jews believed in incest and child rape “as the sacramental rites”; urged her listeners to read a text by the German antisemite August Rohling accusing the Jews of drinking Christian blood; called Judaism “the synagogue of Satan”; and claimed that the Jews were behind every great evil, from the slave trade to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
What happens if good men and women don’t take up the fight and vociferously reject the loonies in their midst? What starts with the fringes soon takes over the supposed mainstream.
You may dismiss voices like Boller’s or Owens’s as shrill. You may argue that they’re marginal. But to ignore them is a mistake. Owens was recently invited to keynote the annual gala of a growingly influential group calling itself Catholics for Catholics.
Never heard of that outfit before? That’s the point. It’s part of an astroturfing effort meant to create a new impression of American Catholicism, led by a few high-profile standard-bearers who look and sound nothing like average Catholics.
Which is why, above all of this, the actions and words of America’s most prominent Catholic today have become so important, and so troubling. I admire Vice President JD Vance’s journey, and I want to believe that he respects my people and faith as much as I respect his. But watching him in public these days sends shivers down my spine. With one morally clear statement, he could disempower this entire emerging false idol. Instead, he’s doing the opposite.
Take, for example, his recent interaction with a student at a Turning Point USA event.
“I’m a Christian man,” the student inquired, “and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might have owed Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally, or that we have to support this multi $100 billion foreign aid package to Israel to cover this, to quote Charlie Kirk, ‘Ethnic cleansing in Gaza.’ I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution [sic] of ours.”
It was a question with a very simple answer. Vance could have—and should have—explained President Trump’s Middle East policies and how they served America’s national security interests. He could have—and should have—also informed the young man that whatever he may think about Judaism, it most definitely does not advocate the persecution of Christians.
Instead, Vance went on to assure the young man that the Israelis are “not controlling the President of the United States,” and then went on to wax theological. “It’s one of the realities is that Jews do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah,” he explained. “Obviously, Christians do believe that. There are some significant theological disagreements between Christians and Jews. My attitude is, let’s have those conversations. Let’s have those disagreements when we have them.”
Really? Imagine a prominent American politician standing up and suggesting that as Catholics don’t believe what Protestants do, we ought to have a public, political conversation about whether a Catholic president, say, will obey the Vatican and open America’s borders to comply with the Pope’s teachings.
Such a statement would be scurrilous, and recall some of the darkest moments in America’s recent history. That the Vice President would choose to center his faith not in deep, meaningful, personal, and evocative ways but as a facile and misdirected talking point is concerning. When we say we want more faith in public life, I’m not sure even the most ardently observant among us has in mind a world in which our elected officials are guided by theological urges rather than by America’s cold, hard interests.
But honestly, even that pales next to the coldest truth about Vance, which is that the most prominent American Catholic today is also the person not just shielding but promoting America’s most prominent antisemite, Tucker Carlson. There’s no need to say more here. It’s poison, and no fancy words will make it otherwise.
As I watch Vance, I can’t help but think of how he could help men like Bill Donohue, the long-time head of the Catholic League, who is in the trenches fighting the hijacking of Catholicism by high-profile charlatans and publicity-seeking frauds. (There is no shortage of these frauds by the Jews. PM)
Donohue took to the Internet after Boller’s horror show to remind anyone who needed a reminder that for any one person—especially a recent convert to the faith who neither runs an organization nor possesses any special credentials—to claim to speak on behalf of all Catholics everywhere was, at best, “presumptuous and arrogant.” Boller, Donohue pointed out, wasn’t really interested in having a good-faith theological discussion—she was there for petty political hand-to-hand combat, which is why she arrived wearing a Palestinian flag pin.
What happens if good men and women don’t take up the fight and vociferously reject the loonies in their midst? I’ll tell you, because, again, I’ve seen it happening in my own community. What starts with the fringes soon takes over the supposed mainstream. Before you know it, you have folks like Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, making common cause with the Reverend Al Sharpton, a man who still hasn’t apologized for inciting a pogrom that claimed Jewish lives in 1991. Before you know it, you have the UJA Federation of New York, arguably the largest and most influential Jewish organization in America, writing a million dollar check to Gaza. Before you know it, you have politicians like Chuck Schumer prancing around and talking about how they’re defending the community’s interests while doing everything they can to side with its most prominent adversaries and support policies that outrightly endanger its members. Before you know it, you have people like Phylisa Wisdom being propelled from their role in some marginal, radical left-wing group to become the Jewish liaison to the mayor of New York City, home to the largest population of Jews in the U.S. In other words, before you know it, the Overton Window has shifted so far and so fast that even groups that ought to know better now feel that they have no choice but to amplify or parrot the crazies.
So, friend, beware. We American Jews have been far too slow to reject our kooks. We allowed mendacious and malicious ideologues to sow too much discord, alienate too many potential allies, and cause too much damage. We spent too much time having inane and fruitless theoretical discussions about Zionism before we wised up to the fact that the un-Jews didn’t really care about us, or Zionism, or Judaism at all—they cared only about power, their own and that of their fellow travelers. And now the un-Catholics are treating you to the same playbook.
Do not go gently into this plight. Rage against the creeps and the weirdos, against the thrill-seekers and the power-hungry, against those who hijack your voice but do not share your humility, your compassion, and your depth of faith and feeling.
I realize it’s no easy task to keep your heart and your mind both wide open and your arms outstretched to embrace your fellow believers while at the same time fiercely rejecting those who approach your community and your faith with a bad conscience. But the tension is the key challenge of our time. Rejoice and love like you have no enemies, and fight like you have no friends, and maybe you—maybe we—will find, as we always do, that our faith forever triumphs over even the gravest of challenges.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/letter-catholic-friend?
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