What most people don’t know is that, for around 1,600 years, the papacy, while it hasn’t embraced the Jews (obviously), has been the Jews’ protector. The papacy recognized that Jews and Christians are family, bound together by the God of the Old and New Testaments. More recently, the papacy has recognized that leftism, which seeks to destroy a Biblical world, is the Jews’ and Christians’ common enemy.  Pope Francis’s increasingly openly expressed enmity toward Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, marks a profound break with this tradition and speaks to my personal belief that his values are informed more by Marx than by Jesus.

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great issued the Constitutio pro Iudaeis, holding that Jews were not to be molested, should be protected from violence, and could freely practice their religion. He didn’t envision them having equal civil rights, but again, this was in the sixth century. Subsequent popes kept this policy in effect.

In the early 12th century, Pope Calixtus II issued the Sicut Judaeis, a bull that most medieval popes reissued for three more centuries. It essentially affirmed Gregory the Great’s mandate. Wikipedia writes,

The bull forbade, besides other things, Christians from forcing Jews to convert, or to harm them, or to take their property, or to disturb the celebration of their festivals, or to interfere with their cemeteries, on pain of excommunication.

Of course, the popes were products of their time, so they put limitations on the Jews (clothing, intermarriage, having power over Christians, etc.), but within the parameters of the Middle Ages, the papacy was not the Jews’ enemy but their protector.

Even Pope Innocent III, who held that office from 1198-1216 during the First Crusades and was viewed as unusually hostile to the Jews, basically reaffirmed the same points: Leave Jews alone but don’t give them civil rights or authority. For European Jews, being left alone wasn’t a bad thing.

During WWII, Pope Pius XII did what he could to protect the Jews, given the limitations imposed upon him by geography and, of course, his lack of practical power versus his spiritual authority. Although his primary responsibility was to protect the Church in the face of Nazi hostility to Christianity (the Nazis used the church but were pagans), he sought to bring the Jews within the embrace of his spiritual authority. Thus, in his 1939 encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, he wrote, “There is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision,” and emphasized the commonality of these two Biblical faiths.

The Nazis brutally attacked Catholics who tried openly to protect Jews, as well as slaughtering the Jews who sought help from the church. Pope Pius responded by working with the underground to try to spirit Jews out of Nazi-occupied territory. He was a good man who did his best under completely untenable circumstances.

During WWII, John Paul II, when he was already studying to become a priest in Poland, aided Jews in escaping the Nazis. He was a great friend to Israel and the Jewish people during his papacy.

And while Pope Benedict was conscripted into the Hitler Youth during his lifetime (as required by law), there’s no indication that he was antisemitic. As pope, while he was not as philosemitic as John Paul II, he was not an enemy of the Jews or Israel.

And then there’s Francis. Pope Francis came out of Latin American Liberation Theology, which was a deliberate Soviet effort to eat away at the Latin American Church from within. On issue after issue, he’s made openly Marxist pronouncements on matters that have little to do with the church. Indeed, he opened his papacy by taking a Marxist line on economics. He’s also weighed in on the death penalty, indigenous people, the COVID vaccination, and climate change, always from a hard-left perspective dressed up in religious language.

When it comes to the faith, Francis has been strongly opposed to abortion and ordaining women. However, his softening on homosexuality has been entirely inconsistent with the church’s long history, and reflects societal changes the left has wrought.

And then there’s Israel. Although a Jewish nation, Israel gives its citizens full civil rights, regardless of sex, race, religion, etc. This means that there is complete freedom of worship in Israel. Meanwhile, in Gaza and the West Bank, Jews are forbidden, while Christians are either expelled or slaughtered.

Nevertheless, Francis’s heart is with the Muslims—another Marxist trait.

Wikipedia nicely summarizes Francis’s statements since October 7:

Francis condemned Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel. He also criticized Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip during the Israel–Hamas war, saying that “terror should not justify terror” and describing Israel’s airstrikes as “cruelty, this is not war.” He condemned the killing of two Palestinian Christian women by an IDF sniper in Gaza, calling it “terrorism”. Throughout the war, Francis has called for an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and the establishment of a two-state solution. He has communicated with the sole parish of Gaza daily since the start of the war. In November 2024, Pope Francis suggested that the international community should investigate whether Israel’s campaign in Gaza is a genocide of the Palestinian people. [Hyperlinks and endnotes omitted.]

Francis seems to have missed entirely (a) the fact that Hamas has fired over 10,000 rockets at Israel’s civilian centers since October 7, (b) that Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect and feed Gaza’s civilian population, a population that overwhelmingly supports Hamas's openly expressed genocidal intentions toward Israel, and (c) that the casualty figures out of Gaza are all lies.

Undeterred by facts, the Pope has now accused Israel of “machine-gunning” children in Gaza:

“Let us pray for a ceasefire on all war fronts, in Ukraine, the Holy Land, in all the Middle East and the entire world, at Christmas,” the pontiff said in his weekly Angelus address Sunday. “And with sorrow I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty; of the children machine-gunned, the bombing of schools and hospitals… So much cruelty!”

[snip]

Sunday’s commentary was the second time Pope Francis accused Israel of “cruelty” in just one weekend, having said Saturday that Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza goes beyond warfare and constitutes “cruelty.”

Speaking to members of the Roman Curia in his annual Christmas address, Francis remarked on Israeli airstrikes on Friday that killed at least 25 Palestinians in Gaza, including 7 children.

“Yesterday, children were bombed. This is cruelty. This is not warfare,” Francis said. “I want to say this because it moves the heart.”

I honestly don’t know whether the Pope’s pronouncements are because those around him feed him only pro-Hamas propaganda or if he hates Israel so much that he ignores anything that’s not pro-Hamas propaganda.

There’s also the possibility that Francis’s weird support for Muslims may be because he’s engaging in the equivalent of paying Danegeld. He thinks that if he’s mean to Israel, Muslims will stop killing the world’s Christians. He’s deluded if he believes this. The best way to protect Christians is to speak out against Muslim depredations against both Jews and Christians. His shrinking confidence in defending the faith is part of the problem, not a solution.

The only thing I know with certainty is that Pope Francis is breaking with an approximately 1,600-year-old papal tradition by becoming an enemy of the Jews.

Image: X screen grab.