Pope Francis with Italy's President Sergio Mattarella in 2022. Credit: Quirinale via Wikimedia Commons.

With just a few words, Pope Francis has plunged relations between Jews and Catholics into their worst crisis for decades and undone years of delicate rapprochement. In a new book published for the Catholic Church’s jubilee year, he wrote: “According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. We should investigate carefully to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

This is far from the first time the pope has attacked Israel over the war against Hamas and Hezbollah. In September, he berated Israel for an immoral lack of proportion. “Defense must always be proportionate to the attack,” he said. “When there is something disproportionate, one shows a tendency to dominate which goes beyond what is moral.”

These remarks are deeply troubling. They are the accusations routinely made by the enemies of Israel in the West, and they are shameful on many levels. The “genocide” claim is as ludicrous as it is monstrous. Genocide is the intentional annihilation of a people. Yet according to the CIA’s World Factbook, the population of the Gaza Strip has grown by 2.02 percent since the Oct. 7 pogrom and the war that has followed.

Far from intending to wipe out the residents of Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces have been shunting them around the Strip in order to get them out of harm’s way as the IDF pounded Hamas. The pope is also wrong about proportionality in warfare. Defensive military action must be proportionate not to any one attack but to the threat posed by the enemy. The threat against Israel is the stated intention to eradicate it from the face of the earth. What does the pope believe is the proportionate response to that?

If he really is arguing that the response should be identical in scope and nature to the attack, is he therefore proposing that Israel should set out to murder, rape and mutilate 1,200 Gazans as they did to the Israelis on Oct. 7? Or fire tens of thousands of rockets and drones at civilians in Gaza and Lebanon with the intention of murdering them, as Hamas and Hezbollah have done to Israeli civilians for years?

Israel’s military actions are undertaken solely in defense against the genocidal onslaught intended to wipe out Israel and the Jews that’s proclaimed repeatedly by Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian puppeteers. To suggest that such self-defense is genocide is cynical linguistic inversion and moral bankruptcy of the highest order.

That’s disturbing enough when it’s articulated across the West. But for the head of the Catholic Church to show himself to be so morally twisted is shocking. Pope Francis knows perfectly well that the International Court of Justice is currently considering a claim of genocide brought against Israel by South Africa. That utterly spurious claim is based upon the “experts” to whom the pope refers.

But those aren’t real experts but venomous propagandists, who peddle lies and distortions to delegitimize and destroy Israel in the court of international public opinion. So why has the pope lent his support to this vile discourse? One obvious answer is that he comes from a background of “liberation theology,” which has characterized churches in the developing world for more than half a century.

This thinking politicized religion, casting the church as fighting for the oppressed and dispossessed of the world. But it defined this according to the Marxist division between the powerful and the powerless, which cast the West as the source of oppression and racism, and the developing world as its blameless victims.

This thinking—in the view of all who subscribed to it—turned Israel into an oppressor. In addition, it fused support for the Palestinian Arabs with a return to the ancient Christian heresy of supersessionism. This was the doctrine that by denying the divinity of Jesus the Jews forfeited God’s love, so that all the promises God made to the Jews, including the land of Israel, were forfeit and transferred instead to the Christians.

Under the influence of Palestinian Christian liberation theology, the updated version held that the Palestinians were now the rightful inheritors of the land and even embodied the suffering Jesus, being crucified all over again by the Jews.

This vicious lie, given the imprimatur of religious doctrine, has made huge inroads in liberal Protestant churches, which have replaced religious belief with social activism. Despite the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants, Pope Francis adheres to that as well, deepened by the trend in Catholic thinking after World War II that embraced pacifism and rejected almost any justification for war.

This has led the pope to use language that makes Jews shudder. When he suggests that the Jews may be guilty of genocide, it’s hard not to hear echoes of his predecessors’ accusation that the Jews were guilty of deicide—the claim that lay behind centuries of Jewish slaughter. This echo is no accident.

On the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel, the pope used a vicious citation from the Gospels to denounce the evils of war. This was the accusation that the Jews “are from [their] father, the devil,” which for centuries fueled Christian attacks on Jews. In other words, his attack on Israel is far more than boilerplate liberal hostility to the existence of the Jewish state. It regurgitates the ancient Christian theological hatred of the Jews and the desire to obliterate them.

This pushes the Vatican backwards by several decades. Unlike Protestant churches, the Catholics have made significant attempts from the 1960s onwards to retract their ancient libel against the Jews and express contrition for what the church had done to the Jewish people. Particularly neuralgic had been the behavior of Pope Pius XII, who was accused of having failed to speak out publicly against the Nazis and thus made the church an accomplice to the Holocaust.

Now Pope Francis has undone all of that progress. Yet he has also said good things about Israel and the Jews. In Tablet magazine, Adam Gregerman points out that the pope has celebrated the change in Catholic thinking about Judaism that meant “enemies and strangers have become friends and brothers”; expressed sadness over Catholics’ past misdeeds against Jews; said “the State of Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity”; and insisted that “to attack Jews is antisemitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also antisemitism.”

Responding to a letter from Jewish scholars written in November 2023 expressing deep concern over “the worst wave of antisemitism since 1945,” he said the Oct. 7 atrocities reminded him that the promise “never again” remained relevant, and must be taught and affirmed anew. So what’s the explanation for the apparent contradiction?

The answer is surely that the pope is driven entirely by his identification with suffering victims—and since all wars inevitably create victims, he always opposes war. Four days after the Oct. 7 pogrom, he said: “No war is worth the tears of a mother who has seen her child mutilated or killed; no war is worth the loss of the life of even one human being.”

He is a consequentialist. Seeing only the awful consequences of war, the cause becomes irrelevant. War to stop a genocide thus becomes as bad as genocide. That amoral thinking leads him effectively to deny any justification for a just war. He thus inevitably condemns innocent victims of aggression—in this case, the Israelis—to unlimited slaughter, torture and suffering, and ultimately the State of Israel itself to existential destruction.

Believing that war is itself a crime against humanity, he excuses, sanitizes and implicitly encourages actual crimes against humanity while anathematizing the defense against them.