My son and his brood were recently wined-and-dined by another Catholic family and surprised to discover that this faithful and otherwise intelligent couple had fallen prey to “Jewish conspiracy” propaganda. Given the seductive social media, they aren’t the only ones. Older Catholics may not have caught any whiff of it, but it’s there. We must be ready to address it. 

The broader context of this challenge is extremely hopeful. The Church in North America is enjoying unprecedented conversions of Millennial and Gen-Z young men. In an age of nihilism and public ugliness, they’re drawn by Catholicism’s doctrinal clarity and liturgical beauty. However, being young males, they’re prone to think they’re now “on the right team” or “adopted by the right tribe.” Yearning for clear “marching orders,” they tend toward doctrinal clarity and traditional liturgy—and there’s much good in that. 

Here’s the rub: young men are competitive and prone to tribalism, and the Church is neither team nor tribe. Visibly, the Church is the Kingdom of God in the world, for those freely trusting Christ’s social kingship. With His Resurrection, the Body of Christ redeemed Creation itself, the universe, for all that the “yeast” is still working its way through “the dough.” The Church is the Spirit of love, God’s Kingdom freely redeeming Vineyard Israel.

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Tribalism was a perennial temptation even in the faithful 14th century. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the prioress of a wealthy convent tells the tale of a young Christian boy who walks to school daily though the local Jewish ghetto. He always sings O Alma Redemptoris, and his praise of the Blessed Virgin so infuriates the Jewish residents that they slice his throat and throw his body into a cesspit. When his panicking family searches for him, his dead body begins to sing O Alma Redemptoris from beneath the slime. Miraculously, his body is found and given a Christian burial. No surprise, bloody retribution is then inflicted upon the entire Jewish community. 

Did Chaucer himself, so sensible and good-humored, believe a tiny Jewish community could be so stupid? Yet his fellow pilgrims take a malicious delight in the story, as if any possible Jewish felony is an opportunity for vengeance. And 600 years later, with France defeated by the Nazi Germans, its prostrate Vichy Regime, dreaming of a restored Catholic monarchy, was at least complicit in the Holocaust. Such is the almost inevitable rot of politicized or tribal Catholicism.

This is not the Church. Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide discovered that the Church, under the orders of Pope Pius XII, saved over three-quarters of a million Jews from the Nazi ovens. Rome’s Chief Rabbi Israel Zolli, saved by the Pope, converted gratefully to Catholicism.

So, what’s the rationale for the caustic tribalism? The theory is super-secessionism, the notion that the New Covenant, “the cup of My blood,” voided the Old Covenant. This is a Protestant reading of salvation history. God’s interventions in human affairs consisted of a progressive series of enduring covenants, selectively nurturing mankind in freedom and sacrificial love.

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First the covenant with Noah outlawed murder, with God’s rainbow promising never again to destroy all of mankind. Then the family covenant with Abraham, repudiating child sacrifice, promised his seed would fill the earth. The tribal covenant with Moses, with its laws of sacrifice, offered everlasting possession of the land. The royal covenant with David promised to the Chosen people a priestly rule over all nations. Finally, Christ Jesus assumed the throne of David, realizing that free dominion of love over all mankind—where we are today. 

At every step of covenant history, we see both the expanding scope of the promise, together with mankind’s ever-flowering self-sacrificial love. The gradual realization of that promise is our real human history, despite constant political distractions. Because it’s predicated entirely on human freedom and self-sacrifice, it’s inevitably marked by pervasive ignorance and malice. Both its agents and its enemies are all of us. 

Why do “the Jews” resist the Gospel? Note first, the original Christians were Jewish (“including many priests”). We can’t know (if it matters) what percentage did convert, but the faith was spread through the Empire by diaspora synagogues. Yet fundamentally, it would have violated the entire design of our free, sacrificial trust if Judea had converted under the authority of its rulers.

St. Paul insists that this temporary resistance is Providential: “Did they stumble in order that they fall? By no means! Rather, through their trespass, salvation has come to the Gentiles… A partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in. In this way, all Israel will be saved…” (Romans 11:11-26).

Nevertheless, we constantly slide into the same old rut. Second century theologian Marcion decided that New Covenant of Jesus Christ repudiated and voided the Old Covenant of Yahweh, so he wanted the Old Testament turfed altogether. He was denounced as a heretic by Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, and finally the Universal Church.

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In his Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI engages with Rabbi Jacob Neusner’s challenge in his A Rabbi Talks to Jesus. Neusner imagines, as a rabbi trusting in the perfect Torah, hearing Jesus’ original Sermon on the Mount. He balks at Jesus’s blasphemous call for the destruction of family, community, and law—Eternal Israel. And Benedict agrees. The problem, Benedict says, is not so much that the New Covenant scandalizes faithful Jews, but that Christians don’t take the Sermon’s uncompromising demands seriously enough. If we did, we’d be more admiring of the ageless loyalty of faithful Jews, and more sympathetic to all the suffering that has cost them. 

(Joseph Woodard is a research fellow at the Gregory the Great Institute.)