ROME – Recently I declared a mounting crisis in Jewish/Catholic relations the most under-covered Vatican story of 2024. Early indications are that a similar claim won’t be possible in 2025, since manifestations of the crisis simply will be too ubiquitous.
Over the last ten days, we’ve had a robust total of six separate illustrations of the point.
On Christmas eve – I repeat, on Christmas eve, when Catholic clergy generally already have their hands full – Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar summoned the ambassador of the Holy See, Filipino Archbishop Adolfo Tito Yllana, to discuss recent comments by Pope Francis on Gaza.
On Dec. 21, during his annual Christmas address to the Roman Curia, Francis added an impromptu line referring to the deaths of children in air raids as “cruelty … not war.” It was taken by many Israelis and Jewish leaders to imply that the IDF is deliberately targeting children.
According to media reports, Sa’ar did not “reprimand” the pope to Yllana, but he expressed “strong displeasure.”
The summons came after the foreign ministry had already issued a statement, which reached its crescendo by saying, “Enough with the double standards and the singling out of the Jewish state and its people.”
On the same day, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Anti-Semitism, Amichai Chikli, used an address to the Knesset marking Jewish Diaspora Week to accuse the Vatican of spreading “modern blood libels” against Israel.
His reference was to the Medieval “blood libel,” in which Christians falsely accused Jews of murdering Christian infants and using their blood in religious rituals.
“It is deeply disheartening to see the Pope – leader of an institution that was silent during the Holocaust – now promoting modern blood libels against the Jewish state,” Chikli said.
Any suggestion that Israeli soldiers target Palestinian children, Chikli said, are “lies with no foundation in reality.”
A week later, on New Year’s Eve, a group of leaders of American Jewish organizations addressed a letter to Francis calling his rhetoric on Gaza “incendiary.”
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations defended Israel’s war in the letter as a “legitimate military campaign.” The conference represents the heads of 53 American Jewish organizations.
“With global antisemitism at record highs, the American Jewish community calls on you to refrain from making incendiary comments and to build bridges between our two peoples,” said the letter, which was signed by William C. Daroff, the group’s CEO, as well as Harriet P. Schleifer, its chair.
The following day, New Year’s Day, the Jewish News Syndicate carried a piece titled, “Pope Francis, Israel and the Vatican’s historical hypocrisy.” Also addressing the pope’s language on Gaza, it accused the pope of a “double standard, especially when contrasted with [the Vatican’s] relative silence on other human rights abuses.”
Among other things, the piece wondered aloud why the Vatican seems so ready to pounce upon any perceived Israeli injustice, but remains largely silent, for example, about China’s human rights abuses against its own Muslim population of Uyghurs.
“The church must strive for consistency in addressing global injustices,” the piece asserted. “Condemning the actions of powerful states, whether in Gaza, Yemen or the Xinjiang region in China, should be guided by a consistent ethical framework rather than selective outrage.”
On Friday, Jan. 3, an Italian cultural association named Setteottobre, or “OctoberSeventh,” released a report concluding that there had been an astonishing total of 268,320 anti-Semitic posts on Italian social media sites in 2024. The survey also found that 94 percent of Italy’s small Jewish population, estimated at roughly 60,000, said they suffered some anti-Semitic acts during the past year.
Data from other organizations suggests that Italy has one of the highest rates of anti-Semitism in the European Union.
Though the Setteottobre report did not assign blame for its findings to the Vatican or the Catholic Church, some Italian Jewish leaders suggested that papal rhetoric on Gaza, such as repeated references to the possibility that Israel’s conduct is tantamount to “genocide,” have lessened the church’s ability to act as a firebreak against new outbreaks of anti-Semitism.
That same day, Pope Francis received the founder of Iran’s University of Religions and Denominations, Navab Seyed Abolhassan. A report about the meeting published by the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran’s official state-sponsored media platform, quoted Pope Francis as having delivered a fairly negative verdict on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We have no problem with the Jews, our only problem is with Benjamin Netanyahu, who, regardless of International laws and human rights, has created crises in the region and the world,” the report quoted the pope as having said, presumably based on what Navab recounted afterwards.
The Vatican so far has not commented on the report, and neither has the government of Israel. If there were any sense that the pope was irritated with the Iranians for misrepresenting his thinking, however, it didn’t prevent him from receiving Iran’s Ambassador to the Holy See, Hossein Mokhtari, the very next day for the presentation of a plaque containing remarks by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, on Jesus Christ.
In sum, that’s six flashpoints in Jewish/Catholic relations in ten days, for an average of one every 1.7 days. If that ratio were to extend throughout 2025, we’d end with 215 such incidents – raising the very real question of whether there would be any “relationship” left at that point to ponder.
An especially telling aspect of this latest round of umbrage is that much of it originated with something, in itself, relatively mild. Here’s Pope Francis’s entire ad lib remark regarding Gaza on Dec. 21:
“Cardinal Re spoke about the war,” Francis said, referring to an introduction delivered by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, Dean of the College of Cardinals. “Yesterday the [Latin] Patriarch [of Jerusalem] was not allowed into Gaza, as had been promised; and yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty. This is not war. I wanted to tell you this because it touches my heart. Thank you for having referred to this, Your Eminence, thank you!”
That’s just 55 words. Granted, the pope managed to pack one factual mistake (about the patriarch) and one provocative pejorative (“cruelty”) into the formula, but still, in itself it’s unlikely those remarks would have set off such a tempest.
The problem is that now, whenever Francis says or does anything regarding Gaza or Israel, it carries compound interest: Jews and Israelis don’t just hear the new remark, they add it to everything else he’s said and done up to this point, making the latest perceived slight infinitely more acute.
In a nutshell, that’s the Vatican’s challenge in this new year: To find a way to recalibrate its relationship with Jews and Israel, so that when the pope speaks it’s what he actually says that’s heard, not the echoes of a burdened past which, intentionally or not, he’s helped to create.
