By Mary Eberstadt.
But first a note from the Editor: The following remarks were delivered in slightly different form at a conference on "Catholics and Antisemitism: Facing the Past, Shaping the Future," co-sponsored by the Catholic Information Center and the Philos Project, March 10, 2025, in Washington, D.C. A link to the video of the conference can be found by clicking here.
Now for today's column...
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 ...