Zionism, Christian history, and the pope
By Kevin Madigan December 28, 2015
Pope Francis recently
declared that attacks not just on Jews but on the State of Israel are
equally anti-Semitic.(emphasis added) In a late-October address to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II decree that transformed
relations between Jews and Catholics, the pontiff concluded: “The State
of Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity.” Largely
lost in the coverage of his remarks was any historical perspective on
the degree to which Francis decisively overturned statements made by
influential Catholic theologians, and by popes, on Zionism in the 19th
and 20th centuries.
What had been the authoritative Catholic view
on Zionism reaches back to the fifth century and to the church father,
Augustine of Hippo. For Augustine, Jews had been exiled from their land
and dispersed among the gentiles for their guilt in the death of Jesus.
There they would be condemned to wander and to live, until the end of
time, in a state of anxiety, misery, and servitude to gentile emperors
and kings. This “doctrine of Jewish witness,” which underscored the sole
responsibility of Jews for the death of Jesus of Nazareth, tried to
explain why they had been exiled from their homeland (though the
historical truth, little known, is that large numbers of Jews lived in
the land in Augustine’s time).
It would be hard to exaggerate the catastrophic impact of this line
of thinking. Not only was it the ideological seed for a history of
calamities, a history in which Jewish communities, over the centuries,
were murdered in the first three crusades, killed by the thousands for
supposedly poisoning wells and causing the Black Death, forced to
convert or emigrate, ghettoized, and made to wear stigmatizing clothing
by popes. This Augustinian “theology of the Jews” was also the dogmatic
ground for Catholic opposition to Zionism. Indeed, the Vatican did not
recognize the State of Israel until December 1993. When Theodor Herzl,
perhaps the most important father of modern Zionism, asked Pope Pius X
to lend his support to the establishment of a Jewish homeland, the
pontiff infamously responded, “Non possumus” (“We cannot”)(emphasis added). This was the
beginning of what seemed, until Francis’ historic remarks, to be
indefinite papal opposition to Zionism.
No pontiff was as
actively opposed to the establishment of a Jewish homeland as the
controversial wartime pope, Pius XII. After successfully persuading many
that Jews were aggressors and belligerents — this just years after the
few survivors of Hitler were struggling to establish a homeland to
ensure them basic security — he issued no fewer than three encyclicals
opposing the State of Israel. The Church began to associate Zionism with
Communism and other impious movements and to regard Israelis as
contestants for the same territory: what the Church proprietarily
regarded as “the Holy Land.” The statements of Pius XII put a seal on
anti-Zionist attitudes that began with Herzl’s unhappy meeting with the
pope in the early 20th century.
While Pope Francis visited the
State of Israel in 2014, he made no statement like the one he recently
expressed. But in his October remarks, he stated, “To attack Jews is
anti-Semitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also
anti-Semitism.” (emphasis added) Only against the lachrymose background of centuries of
theological anti-Judaism, persecution, ghettoization, genocide — and,
above all, papal opposition to Zionism — can we appreciate the import
and novelty of the Holy Father’s declaration on anti-Semitism and the
State of Israel. In historical context, Francis’ statement must be
perceived for the welcome and fundamental reversal it is.
Why
I, among many other things, love Pope Francis. Where is the left when
the those that want Israel's throat threaten Nazi-like violence. I hear
only silence!
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