While Israel and its friends commemorated the anniversary of the October 7 attacks, and its foes celebrated it, Pope Francis marked the date with a letter to Middle Eastern Catholics. Ethan Schwartz finds nothing objectionable about the Vatican sending a missive to this vulnerable population, but is disturbed by the pope’s decision to cite John 8:44:
[Francis] urges that Catholics “must never tire of imploring peace from God” and calls for a day of prayer and fasting to “defeat our one true enemy: the spirit of evil that foments war, because it is ‘murderous from the beginning,’ ‘a liar and the father of lies.’”
In its historical context, John 8:44 is part of a disagreement between specific Jews about an internal matter. However, as Christianity developed, the verse was understood as a fundamental, eternal indictment of the entire Jewish people, by a Jesus who stood fully apart from and against them. The Jews are the children of the devil, the embodiment of evil, the enemies of humanity.
It would not be unreasonable to speculate that no individual sentence has caused more Jewish death and suffering than John 8:44. . . . Regardless of Pope Francis’s intentions, this is the legacy that he invoked when he chose John 8:44 to characterize “our one true enemy” on the anniversary of October 7. In a war that much of the world blames on the Jewish state, citing a verse that condemns all Jews as the murderous children of the devil creates an unavoidable implication: the Jews are the reason for this horror. They are the enemies of those who seek peace—the enemies of the church and, indeed, of humanity itself.
It is impossible to overstate what a disaster this is for Jewish-Catholic relations.
Read more at Religion News Service
More about: Anti-Semitism, Gaza War 2023, Jewish-Catholic relations, Pope Francis