Things Catholics should know about our relationship to the Jews — especially now

I was recently asked to comment on a popular reel circulating in Catholic circles about Israel, the Jews, and the Church. Let me begin with a necessary clarification. The individuals involved are friends, colleagues, and serious Catholics. They are acting in good faith, animated by a genuine desire to defend truth and oppose error. Nothing that follows should be read as an indictment of their intentions.

The difficulty lies elsewhere. Much of the contemporary Catholic conversation about Israel is not so much wrong as it is thin. A subject that belongs properly to theology is too often reduced to apologetics. Apologetics has its place, but it cannot sustain the full weight of this question. When apologetics becomes the dominant — sometimes the only — mode offered to lay Catholics, it forms people who can argue but not contemplate.

Israel is not a position to be defended or refuted. It is a mystery to be received. St. Paul is explicit that a mystery is involved here (Romans 11:25). Mysteries demand formation before they invite explanation.

Beyond reactive theology

Catholic discourse on Israel frequently proceeds as a reaction — often an understandable one — to Protestant theology. Yet Catholics possess their own intellectual inheritance, with categories and resources that need not be borrowed secondhand. Serious Catholic thinkers have already done the difficult work of reflection here, though their contributions are rarely engaged beyond academic circles.

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, for example, has articulated a natural-law case for supporting Israel that does not collapse theology into politics. Dr. Gavin D’Costa has explored what he terms a “minimalist Catholic Zionism,” entering explicitly theological territory without succumbing to ideological enthusiasm. These are not hot takes or internet apologetics; they are sustained arguments grounded in Scripture, tradition, and reason.

Likewise, Dr. André Villeneuve has offered a compelling theological account of Israel and the Church that deserves far wider attention. His work reminds us that interpretations such as Joe Heschmeyer’s reading of the “Israel of God” represent one orthodox position among others. Some questions in this domain are settled by the Church’s teaching authority. Others remain open to legitimate theological disagreement. Catholics should be taught to distinguish between the two.

What is taught — and what is still debated

That distinction is not a luxury. It is essential.

The Catholic Church teaches unequivocally that antisemitism is a grave sin; that crude forms of replacement theology are incompatible with Catholic faith; that the Jewish people remain beloved of God; and that the covenant God made with Israel has not been revoked. These are not optional opinions. They belong to the Church’s authoritative teaching.

At the same time, there remain open questions: the theological meaning of the modern State of Israel; the precise contours of the Church’s relationship to the Jewish people within salvation history; and how St. Paul’s language about Israel is to be interpreted in light of both tradition and contemporary history. To blur these categories — treating open questions as settled or settled teaching as optional — leaves Catholics either overconfident or confused, sometimes both.

Theology before politics

The Church is not a political actor. She is the mystical Body of Christ, ordered toward the salvation of souls and the formation of consciences. From this intelligence of faith flows culture; politics follows downstream.

When the Church recalibrated her relationship with the Jewish people in the 20th century, she was not engaging in political maneuvering. Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on the Church’s relation to non-Christian religions, is a theological and spiritual document. That it carried political consequences — including diplomatic ones — is undeniable. But it arose from theological reckoning, not policy analysis.

In the shadow of the Holocaust, the Church recognized that something had gone catastrophically wrong at the spiritual level. Anti-Jewish dispositions had become embedded not only in Christian society but, more disturbingly, in Christian imagination. Nostra Aetate sought to address that rupture at its root.

The mystery of Israel

Pope Benedict XVI, particularly in Grace and Vocation Without Remorse, insists that the Church’s relationship with Israel remains a profound mystery. The Church must hold together two claims without dissolving either: that Jesus Christ fulfills God’s promises, and that God’s covenant with Israel endures. This tension may require careful reexamination of certain inherited theological categories.

Benedict also advances a claim many Catholics find uncomfortable: that there is something mysterious, even providential, about the modern return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. This is not a political endorsement, nor a theological endorsement of every action of the modern state. It is an acknowledgment that history, theology, and prophecy sometimes converge in ways that resist easy classification.

Prophecy here is not prediction. It is the capacity to see history under the aspect of divine providence.

A relationship, not a problem

Several theological truths ought to shape Catholic instincts in this domain. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that believing Jews implicitly believe in Christ. In the Summa Theologiae (I–II, q.106, ad 2), he explains that even before the formal establishment of the Church, there were persons who belonged to the New Covenant by grace. This does not erase real theological differences, but it reframes Jewish fidelity to God in a way that resists caricature.

The Jewish people are related to the mystical Body of Christ in a way unlike any other. This is why Jewish-Catholic relations fall under the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, and why the Church conducts no institutional mission directed toward Jews. Our relationship is singular, familial, and irrevocable.

The 2015 document The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable affirms precisely this: the Church neither conducts nor supports institutional mission to the Jewish people, while still calling Christians to bear humble witness to Christ, especially in light of the Holocaust.

Even modest attentiveness to these teachings recalibrates Catholic posture — toward humility rather than triumphalism, reverence rather than suspicion, formation rather than reaction.

Israel is not a debate topic. The Jews are not a theological problem to be solved. They are a mystery bound up with the Church’s own identity.

And mysteries demand patience, seriousness, and reverence — especially now.