Cardinal Dolan: The Evils of Antisemitism

It seems every generation must learn anew that hatred against Jews is not just unacceptable, but a grave evil. They don’t call it “the world’s oldest prejudice” for nothing.

A century ago, Nazi-controlled newspapers in Europe pushed vile antisemitic propaganda, a path that would, in time, lead directly to Auschwitz. Today we see similar lies about the Jewish people and Judaism spread through social media, the rantings of protesters, and on popular podcasts.

While our country guarantees freedom of speech, no matter how loathsome, we should remember that there exists no tension between First Amendment legal protections and the Biblical obligation to denounce bigotry.

In other words, countering such opinions should not fall only to our Jewish brothers and sisters. Everyone must do their part. Sometimes in the past, sadly, we have been slow to do so.

This Lenten season, we Catholics and all Christians would do well to meditate on our faith’s rejection of antisemitism, as well as the pernicious ways in which social media can warp young minds.

The Church’s stance on antisemitism is unequivocal. Our Savior was a faithful Jew killed by the Roman occupiers of Judea. He died for the sins of all mankind. According to our faith, Jesus brought about a New Covenant that exists side-by-side with the Old Covenant between God and the Jewish people. As Pope Saint John Paul II often observed, “God’s covenant with the Jews is unbreakable.”

We also believe that every human life is created in the image of God, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. As Pope Saint John Paul II said, “The Church rejects racism in any form as a denial of the image of the Creator inherent in every human being.”

John Paul II’s words do not exist in isolation. In the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, also known as Nostra aetate or In Our Time, that seminal document of the Second Vatican Council, the Church tells us to decry “hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

In 1986, John Paul II reiterated that statement while visiting the Great Synagogue of Rome. “I repeat,” he said, “ ‘By anyone’.”

Fourteen years later, when he visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem, he left behind this prayer: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.”

Pope Benedict XVI, John Paul II’s successor, likewise reaffirmed the incompatibility of antisemitism and Christianity.

“The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. . . . Deep down, those vicious criminals. . .  wanted to kill God,” Benedict XVI said while visiting Auschwitz in 2006.

“By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and replace it with a faith of their own invention,” he added.

I hope this message is clear enough: Antisemitism is a grave sin, the work of Satan himself. The devil hopes to divide God’s people, to make them fear and eventually hate each other. In rejecting Satan’s lies and empty promises, as Christians are called to do this Lent, in the weeks before Easter—and as our Jewish neighbors prepare for Passover—we renounce his plans to divide the children of Abraham from one another.

Not long after the October 7, 2023 atrocity in Israel, which irrationally unleashed a new viral strain of Jew-hatred, I received a letter from a Jewish mom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Every morning she would walk her little daughter to school and would smile at her neighbor as that mom walked her two children to the nearby Catholic school. “That Catholic mom must have noted my anxiety and fear those dreadful days after the attack,” the Jewish mom wrote, “because she came up to me and whispered, ‘Why don’t we all walk together?’ ”

For any Jewish people who might be reading this, please know: The Catholic Church stands with you in the struggle against antisemitism. And for those on social media who call themselves Christians but spread hate against Jews, we say that they have become blinded to core tenets of the faith they proclaim; that we are all equal in the eyes of God, that Christianity is a stem that grows off the good olive tree that is the Jewish faith, and that in the words of Pope Francis, “a Christian cannot be an antisemite.”

“Rather,” the Holy Father added, “we are called to commit ourselves to ensure that antisemitism is banned from the human community.”

Timothy Cardinal Dolan is the Archbishop of New York.

For more on the subject of rising antisemitism, read Christopher Rufo’s piece: “The Antisemitic Influencer Problem.”