From Rome to Jerusalem: the unfinished dialogue between Jews and the Vatican

When Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, died in 1958, the debate over his silence during the Holocaust had already spanned continents and consciences.

By then, the State of Israel, the Anti-Defamation League and the World Jewish Congress, along with other Jewish institutions, had adopted more nuanced, less severe positions regarding the church’s role in the Jewish tragedy. Today, Israel honors the memory of the Holocaust in every corner of the Jewish state, home to 120,000 of the world’s 200,000 remaining survivors.

The condemnation of the pope softened, but doubt lingered, as did discussion.

Over time, a more layered understanding emerged around the man once dubbed “Hitler’s pope.” Still, the issue could not be fully untangled from the Catholic Church’s historical complicity in centuries of antisemitic persecution, culminating in the Holocaust.

From the Crusades to Catholic Spain, from the papal ghettos to the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the Christian matrix of antisemitism was evident. This is why great popes—visionaries like John XXIII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI—strived to rebuild bridges with the Jewish people, both in the Diaspora and in the sovereign State of Israel. They recognized that the moral strength of the Judeo-Christian tradition, nourished by the history of Western civilization, is a bulwark against the darkness of fascism, communism and Islamism.

Pope Francis, shaped by his Latin American origins and deep concern for migrants and the oppressed, has chosen a more modern, politically charged path. He embraced the contemporary narrative that casts Palestinians as the oppressed and Israel as the oppressor—a tragic misreading, albeit a familiar one since 1945. That same ideology, birthed from Communist influence and later inflamed by the cultural revolution of 1968, has spread into the United Nations, non-governmental organizations and today’s woke movement, creating a mythic demonology that reverses victim and aggressor.

Many today confuse human rights with Western self-flagellation. But the truth is, the poor are not always where we assume; they are often overshadowed by the violent. The church knows that the Jewish people, including Israelis, are under violent assault. The church’s historical responsibility toward this persecuted minority is not only ethical but also theological. Jews remain, as John Paul II said, our “elder brothers.” They do not harbor “dominant tendencies,” nor are they to be suspected of “genocide,” as Pope Francis once vaguely implied.

Francis likely intended to side with the oppressed. But in doing so, he misjudged the reality: Israel is the truly besieged nation—on seven fronts since 1948. Israeli President Isaac Herzog was right to send condolences. It matters not that Hamas also expressed sorrow over Francis’s death. Israel knows the church does not belong to that camp, nor will it ever. The church aligns with freedom and democracy—values it shares with Israel and the Jewish world.

Catholics are brothers to the Jews, and the Vatican is a sibling to the Jewish state through their shared Western heritage. It is equally fitting that Rome’s chief rabbi, while walking the city on Shabbat, felt it his duty to attend the pope’s funeral. It was kind, it was fair, and it was diplomatically wise. The Jewish community of Rome is deeply Roman—no Jew, anywhere, would wrap the baby Jesus in the Star of David, even if Jesus was Jewish. Such appropriation would be illegitimate. Just as offensive is the modern fabrication of a baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh—nothing could be more false, yesterday or today.

Judeo-Christian brotherhood is built on the value of freedom. And the first freedom is the right to defend life. The horrifying images of Oct. 7—zombies screaming Allahu Akbar while slaughtering Jews—make it starkly clear where good and evil lie.

A funeral is a farewell. It costs little to dedicate one to a tired, ailing pope. But we must hope that soon, a vital dialogue will resume—on good, and on evil. Because the relationship between Jews and Christians does not rest on any one pontiff. It rests on moral courage.