By Wyatt Flicker, Juicy Ecumenism. (photo: Fabio Fistarol/Unsplash)
Amidst the rising tide of antisemitic sentiment in society and the Church, on March 10, the Philos Project and the Catholic Information Center collaborated to host a conference themed “Catholics and Antisemitism—Facing the Past, Shaping the Future.” This conference sought to identify the causes and nature of antisemitism in our time and give Catholics ways to address anti-Jewish bigotry in their communities.
The conference opened with a panel titled “Catholics and Antisemitism—Is It Still a Problem?” It featured Mary Eberstadt, a senior fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute, Trent Horn of Catholic Answers, and Jonathan Silver of the Tikvah Fund.
Eberstadt offered her initial thoughts and framed the later discussion by placing the relationship between Catholics and Jews in the broader Catholic intellectual tradition. Eberstadt focused her comments on the just war tradition as a differentiating feature from Evangelical supporters of Israel. For Catholics, Eberstadt argued, the just war tradition “smashes moral equivalence like an idol” and renders support for the Jewish state the “right thing to do intrinsically as Catholics” on this basis.
Eberstadt also noted the Jewish love for life as a unique ground for solidarity between Catholics and Jews. As Eberstadt recounted, “Hamas and other enemies of the Jewish people say scornfully, ‘the Jews love life.’” Catholics, too, share in this love for life and radical resistance to the culture of death that Jews do. Thus, Catholics and Jews have a common enemy in anti-life secularism, radical Islamism, and the throwaway culture of modernity.