No one would ever mistake Donald Trump for a theologian, but he does share a trait of the worst theology in making the clear incomprehensible at the best of times.

The U.S. President’s recent obscurantist antics in demanding what is tantamount to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza go beyond even his previous monumental muck ups. His dehumanizing of the enclave’s shattered people, reducing them to the indignity of tenants in some tenement condo refit, is a horror of its own kind. 

Yet his reveries about recreating a mini-Mar-A-Lago by the sea from a bombed-out landscape of destruction, death and permanent refugee camps manages to exceed such odious obtuseness. It actively obscures the face of evil. Genuine evil, that is. Evil that we as Catholics are duty-bound to confront and denounce in our words and in our hearts.

This is a moment in history, not just in the 30-minute news cycle, when all eyes should be on the indisputable, damnable evils of Hamas. Implicit in such recognition is stark clarity about the distinction between the Palestinian people, the justness of their desire for sovereignty with integrity, and the monstrous theo-political entity that has held them captive and purported to act in their interest.

The comparison with an earlier rule-by-barbarians from 1933 to 1945 is undeniable. All we need as proof are the faces and physical conditions of the Israeli hostages being handed over like so many human bargaining chips as part of the current fragile ceasefire. Anyone who fails to see them as doppelgangers of Holocaust survivors has no sense of history, no compulsion to honesty or no heart.

Stephen Pollard, writing in The Telegraph two weeks after the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, drew the parallel with revelatory eloquence.

“The footage of (released hostages) Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy could have come straight from 1945. The only difference was the presence of their Hamas captors; the Nazis had fled the camps by the time they were liberated. Hamas… stood proudly by as the emaciated, almost crippled bodies of the hostages were forced by their captors on to a stage to take part in the latest of the terrorist organization’s sick propaganda stunts,” Pollard wrote.

He added these eyeball-searing sentences: “I am not religious. But I know that evil exists, and we have once more seen it on display.”

So we have. Yet we have been spared being forced to stare into the full, deep blackness of its abyss by the American president’s stumble-bumming on the Holy Land stage, diluting attention to the historic enormity of Jews, once again, being imprisoned, tormented, starved, stripped of their humanity, murdered, just for being Jews. Pollard hones that enormity down to 33-year-old Or Levy whose “only crime was to have gone to a music festival and to have been Jewish. Hamas murdered his wife and starved him for 491 days. There is only one word for the people that did this to him: evil.”

Instead of speaking that word clearly, with the full force of unequivocal global condemnation, the media, the tall forehead commentators, the apparatchiks of Hamas-propaganda empathy, offer up anodyne murmurings about the responses of the Arab world to Donald Trump’s tomfoolery. Instead of being moved to burn holes with our eyes into the terrorist masks concealing Hamas’ post-Nazi Jew haters, we are to be mollified with reports that the Saudis (the Saudis!), the Egyptians, the King of Jordan (the King of Jordan!) don’t “support” the Trumpian call for latter-day land clearances in Gaza. As if any compos mentis leader anywhere would! Yet the sideshow goes on, distracting all from calling world historical evil by its name.

For Catholics, this must be intolerable. Pollard and other perceptive writers like him may not, as he says, be “religious.” But we are. It is from the depths of our religious faith, and cognizance of our own Church’s complicity over the centuries in propagating vile anti-Semitic mythologies, that we must speak the truth.

“The Truth will set you free,” our Saviour, in His human form a Jew, taught us. 

 “Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity,” Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in Veritate.

Our charity must embrace the Palestinian people. We cannot live distracted by a theology of denial about the evil that is Hamas.