Most Holy Father,
It is as sons of the Church, with filial respect for the See of Peter, that we write to ask Your Holiness to resolve our doubts and concerns by the clarity of Your wisdom.
More than ever before, the world follows the events unfolding in the Middle East with mounting dismay. The State of Israel stands at the heart of the conflict, whether one regards it as its fundamental stake or holds it responsible for its persistence. There are good reasons why the fate of this State is of critical interest for the Church. It is the place of the events recounted in Holy Scripture — above all, the place in which God chose to become incarnate — a Land the Church considers holy because God made it the theater of His design of salvation, from Abraham to the founding of the Church of Christ. It is, moreover, home to a significant Christian population, mostly Arab Palestinian, among whom the Catholic Church plays an important role. And it aims to be a home for all Jews — the people from whom the Christian faith emerged, and with whom the Church strives to build a dialogue after nearly two millennia of painful and often tragic tensions.
The question of whether the State of Israel carries any theological status in the eyes of the Catholic Church is a particularly delicate one. The 1985 Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church, issued by the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, acknowledges the depth of the bond between the Jewish people and the Land when it observes that “Christians are invited to understand [the] religious attachment [of Jews to the Land] which finds its roots in Biblical tradition” (§6). In the same breath, however, it cautions Christians against “making their own any particular religious interpretation of this relationship” — a balance the Conference of United States Bishops had already struck in 1975.[1]
This approach finds institutional expression in the distinction between theological dialogue with Judaism, entrusted to the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, and political relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel, which fall to the Secretariat of State. While the Holy See has recognized Israel’s legitimacy as a political state — most formally in the “Fundamental Agreement” of 1993 — it has never issued a magisterial statement that could be read as even a minimal theological acknowledgment of that legitimacy, along the lines of the 1980 resolution of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, which speaks of the existence of the State of Israel as a “sign of the faithfulness of God.”[2]
The Church’s reticence to pronounce on the theological meaning of the State of Israel has served a real purpose: any such pronouncement risks being heard as a political one, in a conflict where the Holy See rightly wishes to be seen as taking no side. Indeed, it is not the role of the magisterium to issue theological pronouncements on particular political states. The difficulty arises from the fact that, of late, a number of Catholic commentators — often self-proclaimed theologians — have interpreted this silence as a formal dismissal of the very possibility of ascribing any theological resonance to the founding of the State of Israel and to its enduring existence. Thus Matt Fradd’s widely circulated “Small Catechism on Christian Zionism” grants Israel “a legitimate political reality, but not the fulfillment of Scripture”; Candace Owens has called the State “demonic”; and Carrie Prejean Boller has told a White House commission that “Catholics do not embrace Zionism” — claims to which Catholic voices such as R. R. Reno have felt compelled to reply in the public square.[3]
We live in a moment marked by the resurgence of an antisemitism that seemed driven from public life since 1945. Against this backdrop, the theological silence of the magisterium is easily weaponized by those who, relying on a systematic vilification of the State of Israel unbounded by fact, strive to sever the close ties with the Jewish people and their faith tradition that the Church has labored to restore since the Second Vatican Council. Such figures extol the one, eternal, and true Israel of God, the Church of Christ, at the expense of the contemporary State that bears the same name, which they cast as rooted in the now obsolete faith of those who rejected Christ. In this way the Church’s “theological silence” has become fertile ground for the revival of what is known as “replacement theology” or “supersessionism.” It is not that the Church will not endorse the State of Israel because the latter is merely a political reality; rather, the claim is that theologically there can be only one true Israel after Christ — the Church, not the Jewish nation, which on this view deceitfully applies the term to itself. Daniel Suazo states it plainly: “We [Catholics] are the true Israel.” Matthew Tsakanikas softens the language, speaking not of “replacement” but of a “reconstituted Israel,” the Mystical Body gathered from all nations, in which Jesus has “become the true Promised Land.”[4] Yet if Jews are to blend into a Body where distinctions of blood and ethnicity count for nothing, how could they continue to exist as a distinct people; and if God’s favor now rests entirely upon that Body, has it not simply superseded them — in the literal sense of supersedere — as the former object of election? How could such views not overturn the whole process of theological reflection on Jews and Judaism engaged since the Second Vatican Council, a process born of the friendship between Pope John XXIII and Jules Isaac (L’Enseignement du mépris, 1962)?
These concerns are not ours alone. This past May, under the auspices of Catholic Voices for Israel, we published an appeal — ‘For Zion's Sake: A Catholic Appeal in Support of Israel’ — that has since gathered the signatures of nearly two hundred Catholics and non-Catholic friends, among them clergy and academics, who share this same unease about the resurgence of supersessionism just described.
If the argument of the new Catholic supersessionists has any merit, it is because we discern in it, as in a photographic negative, the fundamental connection between theology and politics that places the State of Israel in a category of its own, irreducible to any other political entity. Scripture itself bears witness to it: God, among all the nations of the earth, chose the people of Israel, entrusted them with His Law, and led them from the captivity of Egypt to the Land. We know of no other nation whose people, after their dispersion, prayed year after year, “Next year in Jerusalem!”; none that, after an exile of nearly two millennia, gathered itself from the four corners of the earth and regained its independence on the very land from which it had been driven—as repeatedly anticipated by the prophets of Israel. We would ask whether any nation compares to modern Israel — in the effort required to build a thriving democracy in so short a time, the human price paid to prevent its destruction, or the seemingly miraculous victories that have accompanied these terrible losses.
This does not mean that the State of Israel is flawless. We are only too aware of the destruction and suffering the population of Gaza has experienced since the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th, and we leave to others the task of assessing whether Israel’s government has unduly exceeded its right to defend its population to defeat a ruthless enemy. What we can say with confidence is that since that day the world has known an unparalleled campaign of calumny against the State of Israel — its country, government, and citizens alike. What is questioned is not this or that policy of a particular government, but the very legitimacy of the State to exist and to persevere in its existence. Since this touches the moral foundations of a political state, it cannot be answered by criticism aimed at improving a government’s decisions. The Church’s silence regarding Israel’s right to exist — the reluctance to go beyond mere political recognition, on a par with that extended to the still inchoate State of Palestine (2013) — gives ground to all those Catholic voices that wish to lend this campaign of denigration the authority of the Church’s own name. For these reasons we turn to Your Holiness in the hope that You will clarify the reasons behind the Church’s “theological silence.”
We therefore dare to submit the following question to Your Holiness: should Catholics interpret the creation and enduring existence of the State of Israel as a sign of God’s providence — or should they not?
In the Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism (1985), from which we quoted earlier, we read that “the permanence of Israel (while so many ancient peoples have disappeared without trace) is a historic fact and a sign to be interpreted within God’s design.” Clearly, what is designated “Israel” here is not the Church but the Jewish nation. If, as the recent magisterium has repeatedly affirmed, God’s Covenant with the Jews was never revoked (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §121[5]), should the creation of the eponymous State not be acknowledged as the most manifest sign that “the permanence of Israel” lies “within God’s design”?
We come here to the thorny issue of the promise of the Land to the descendants of Abraham according to the flesh: “And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Gen 12:6, KJV).[6] If God’s promise is “everlasting” (Ezek 37:25), should the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel not be considered its most recent fulfillment? We measure the riches of an exegesis that contextualizes the message of Scripture; yet if we hold Scripture inspired, how are we to contextualize a promise said to be eternal? Does the very idea that the First Alliance was never revoked not stem from Paul’s affirmation that God’s “promises” to the “Israelites,” together with “the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, [and] the worship,” are irreversible (Rom 9:4)?
At this point we should be precise about what we mean by the “fulfillment” of God’s promise of the Land. The fulfillment of a promise means no more than the fulfillment of its specific object — here, the gift of the Land. This must be distinguished from the final fulfillment of Israel’s calling, which we can hardly conceive except in terms of redemption. Against this, some object that the promises to Abraham have already been fulfilled in Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven, so that no modern political state can be confused with their accomplishment; to say otherwise, Tsakanikas warns, would be “akin to heresy.”[7] We do not deny that Christ is the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham. But if that fulfillment cancelled the promises made to the Jewish people — including Jews who do not believe in His messiahship — how could Paul still ascribe to them “the covenants” and “the promises” (Rom 9:4)? Does he not have in mind a fulfillment that is partial rather than complete? If so, we can no longer hold that the only “true Israel” is the “reconstituted” Body of Christ.
Naturally, the gift of the Land implies concrete borders, and these imply a political State that fixes them, whether or not in agreement with the international community. Yet recognizing the theological legitimacy of a State to exist — like recognizing its existence politically — does not entail endorsing any particular drawing of those borders. One may hold that a State has the right to exist, and that this existence stems from God’s design, without agreeing with its current borders; this is especially relevant to the question of Jewish settlements in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria in the settlers’ terminology). By the same token, one may affirm the theological foundations of the State of Israel while working actively toward an independent Palestinian State, a functioning democracy governed by the rule of law.
Affirming the theological legitimacy of a State’s existence, and its grounding in God’s providence, does not imply that this State should be a theocracy. Taken literally, theocracy means that a country's administration springs from the immediate will of God. Israel has known only one period that somewhat conforms to this: the one evoked in the Book of Judges, when Gideon answers the men of Israel, “I will not rule over you … the Lord will rule over you” (Judg 8:22–23, RSV). In this sense, the institution of kingship represents a fall from theocracy (1 Sam 8:7), with supreme power entrusted to a human being, with all the flaws this entails. Yet Israel’s becoming a kingdom like others never meant it had ceased to fulfill God’s promise of the Land: standing before the altar in the Temple, Solomon could pray, “Blessed be the Lord who has given rest to his people Israel, according to all that he promised; not one word has failed of all his good promise, which he uttered by Moses his servant” (1 Kgs 8:56, RSV).
The transient theocracy of early Israel may foreshadow God’s authentic theocracy at the end of history, that eternal reign in which God will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28; cf. Zech 14:9; Rev 21:3). But there is also room for a fulfillment of God’s promise within the historical continuum, and this fulfillment implies a state that is far from perfect, whether in its institutions or in those who serve in them.
The evil sometimes perpetrated by those who govern the State should not prevent us from acknowledging that it derives its legitimacy from God’s promise to Abraham. Yet the converse holds too: recognizing the State of Israel as a fulfillment of that promise should not prevent anyone from condemning the evil sometimes perpetrated in its name. God Himself warns that “the land will vomit you out for defiling it” (Lev 18:28). The theological acknowledgment of the State of Israel is no blank check for its policies; it is precisely because the State is bound to the highest ethical standards of the Torah that one is entitled to denounce the policies, decisions, and actions that betray them.
To claim that the modern State of Israel fulfills God’s promise to Abraham is to claim that God has unilaterally decided to make of it the realization of His ongoing design toward His people, for it is God alone who “gathers the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth” (Isa 11:12; cf. Deut 30:3–5; Ezek 36:24). That this State is a democracy — a form of governance the Church came to embrace (Centesimus Annus, 1991, §46) — cannot by itself prove that it fulfills God’s special providence; yet neither does it exclude this, as the establishment of a dictatorship would. Moreover, Israel is not only a democracy. It is one infused with the values of the Torah, its laws and institutions imbued with the faith tradition of Judaism. It would be strange for the Church to make these grounds for denying the State theological legitimacy, since that faith tradition derives from Scriptures the Church recognizes as her own, in addition to the New Testament. How could the claim that God cannot grant to Jews the right to establish a State both respectful of civil liberties and infused with the Torah He commanded them to keep not constitute ipso facto a denial of what the Church has repeatedly proclaimed concerning the irrevocable bond between God and the people He first elected?
In his De civitate Dei (XVIII.46), Augustine writes of the Jews: “Slay them not, lest at some time they forget Thy law … they are thus by their own Scriptures a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.”[8] Is the Church’s refusal to acknowledge the providential character of the State of Israel still dictated by the need to make of the wretched dispersal of the Jews a foil to the splendor of Christ’s truth? The reply Pope Pius X gave to Theodor Herzl in 1904 still resonates: “The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.”[9]
That the modern State of Israel is, in this sense, a Glaubenstaat — a state inseparable from a particular faith tradition — admits of no doubt. The term itself, a generalization of Julius Stahl’s christlicher Staat (1847), was coined by Johannes Neumann and set against the Rechtsstaat during the controversy over the removal of crucifixes from Bavarian classrooms. Tellingly, the then-Cardinal Ratzinger defended the primacy of the Glaubenstaat there, holding that a modern democratic state must not lose its “spiritual soul” by severing its ties to the religious value system that gave rise to its constitutional order. Yet in his 2018 essay “Grace and Vocation Without Remorse,” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI appears to reject precisely such a “Jewish faith-state … that would view itself as the theological and political fulfillment of the promises” as “unthinkable within history” for Christian faith.[10] He thus seems to fault Israel for achieving what Europe, on his own analysis, is gradually losing — the constitutional memory of its religious patrimony. The paradox dissolves, we believe, only if Benedict’s rejection is read not as a denial of Israel’s Glaubenstaat as such, but as a refusal to recognize Israel’s Glaube — the Jewish faith tradition — as equally valid as the Catholic Glaube.
Arguing on these grounds that the State’s existence cannot be theologically endorsed holds good only on one condition: that of equating such endorsement with the Church’s recognition of this faith tradition’s absolute truth — an affirmation the Church cannot make so long as faith in Jesus Christ as Messiah of Israel and God’s incarnate Word remains a stumbling block between the two worlds. But there is no reason to accept that condition. Acknowledging God’s faithfulness to His first-chosen people does not imply ascribing absolute truth to that people’s present faith. Indeed, the return to the Land and the creation of the State might be, as many Christians believe, a step toward Israel’s recognition of her true Messiah — a possibility the Church cannot exclude, even though she has never endorsed any premillennialist or dispensationalist eschatology, as her long wariness toward Joachim of Fiore’s speculative scheme attests. While the Church has no certainty here, and has renounced any organized promotion of the “conversion” of Jews, acknowledging the providential design behind the creation and continued existence of the State of Israel compromises in no way the truth upon which the Church of Christ is founded.
We do not claim to have settled this question; that judgment belongs to the Holy See alone. What we ask is that it be made. At a moment when the world attends to the voice of the Pope with particular hope, clinging to the “theological silence” that has prevailed until now would risk doing more harm to the Church’s witness than the prudence it was meant to preserve. We are bound to recall another pontifical silence that, whatever its motives, remains controversial to this day: for European Jews and their friends, the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Shoah — when they most needed a word of solicitude from the successor of Peter — remains a harrowing memory. Still, the Second Vatican Council has taught us that the Church can learn from her history, and we are confident that Your Holiness will act courageously in the same life-giving and prophetic spirit.
Fr. Antoine Lévy, OP, and Prof. André Villeneuve, founders of “Catholic Voices for Israel”
- Statement of the Conference of the United States Bishops on Catholic–Jewish Relations (1975). ↩
- Evangelical Church in Germany, ed., Promised Land? A New Publication on the Topic of Israel (October 2012). ↩
- Matt Fradd, “A Small Catechism on Christian Zionism,” The Daily Wire; on Candace Owens and Carrie Prejean Boller, see “3 Highlights from Catholic Gala Featuring Candace Owens, Carrie Prejean Boller, Joe Kent,” Christian Post, March 23, 2026; R. R. Reno, “I Am a Catholic. And a Zionist,” The Washington Post, February 20, 2026. ↩
- Daniel Suazo on "Pints with Aquinas", “Why Christian Zionism is False”; Matthew A. Tsakanikas, “Against Catholic Zionism,” Crisis Magazine, August 4, 2024. ↩
- The Catechism here echoes John Paul II, Address to the Jewish Community of Mainz (1980); cf. Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013), §247. ↩
- The promise recurs throughout the Old Testament, most markedly Gen 13:14–15; 15:18; 17:8; 26:3; 28:13; 35:12; 48:4; Exod 6:8; 33:1; Num 33:53; Deut 1:8; 34; Josh 21:43; Ps 105:8–11 (// 1 Chron 16:15–18); Ezek 36:28; 37:25; Amos 9:15; and in the New Testament at Acts 7:5 and Heb 11:9. ↩
- Fradd, “A Small Catechism on Christian Zionism,” op. cit.; Tsakanikas, “Against Catholic Zionism,” op. cit. ↩
- A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series, vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff (1887; repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 386. ↩
- The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn, 5 vols. (New York/London: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), vol. 4, 1601–1605; diary entry for 26 January 1904. ↩
- Benedict XVI, “Grace and Vocation Without Remorse: Comments on the Treatise De Iudaeis,” Communio: International Catholic Review 45, no. 1 (2018): 161–175; Johannes Neumann, “Rechts- oder Glaubensstaat?” Zeitschrift für Rechtspolitik 28 (1995): 381–386; Joseph Ratzinger, “Europa: Ihr geistiges Fundament gestern, heute und morgen,” Entschluss 50 (1995): 16–20. ↩
