There are profound spiritual and moral reasons for Catholics to stand against antisemitism. To do otherwise would be counter to Catholic teaching. As Mary Eberstadt, a senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute, explained in a recent speech at Steubenville, “to say that an antisemitic ‘Catholic’ believes in Catholic teaching is incoherent. It’s like saying ‘carnivorous vegan’ or ‘teetotaling drunk.’ It’s an oxymoron.” Catholics and Jews have a spiritual kinship that transcends their religious differences. Andrew Doran, director of Philos Catholic, pointed out to Zach that Saint Pope John Paul II called the Jewish people our “elder brothers in faith.” Both have historically stood against a paganism that terminates in a crude identitarianism, one that threatens us again now. “As many have noted, ‘the hate that begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews,’” Doran added.

Catholics also ought not to accept apathy or equivocation concerning Hamas’s attack on Israel. Both are temptations. “We might be tempted here — because of our distance from Israel, or our distance from our own Jewish origins — to feel safe from that evil, like the defenseless families sleeping on the morning of October 7,” Doran told Zach. But we have already seen evidence of that selfsame evil in our own country. And it is evil; blurring the lines will not do. The view that “moral lines can’t be drawn in the matter of October 7, or anywhere else . . . is not Catholic,” Eberstadt rightly asserts. She quotes Doran: “The monstrosities in Israel crowd out moral ambivalence.”

Eberstadt calls for “a new alliance between Jews and Catholics, the like of which has not existed before.”

[Butler is exactly right, although the Catholic Church had to come to grips with its own sins of anti-Semitism in its history, too. Those are still a little too close to living memory for us to proclaim any moral superiority on fighting this hatred, but that’s even more reason for fellow Catholics to help take the lead among the Gentiles to oppose it passionately and publicly. This is a spiritual evil, and we are called to combat spiritual evil wherever and however it manifests. — Ed]