Hello, and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I'll be your host for today. In early February, clips began circulating from Trump's Religious Liberty Commission hearing, where the former Miss California, Carrie Prejean Boller, made a huge splash challenging Jewish activists Yitzchok Frankel and Shabbos Kestenbaum about the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

So, I want to be clear on what the definition of antisemitism is. If I don't support the political state of Israel, am I an antisemite? Yes or no?

They already answered. Asked and answered.

According to you, on the record: Yes? If I don't support the political state of Israel.

These clips traveled widely outside the MAGA bubble, making their way into pro-Palestine circles, with Prejean Boller being celebrated for her courageous truth-telling. Notably, as this is a hearing on religious liberty, Prejean Boller frames her opposition to political Zionism in terms of her Catholicism and suggests that equations of anti-Zionism and antisemitism are counter to her faith.

I'm a Catholic, and Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know.

She also raised the charge of deicide, reading the New Testament verse about the Jews killing Jesus, and questioning a panelist about whether he would have tech platforms censor the Bible on account of antisemitism claims.

Are you saying that Elon and heads of platforms need to censor speech that they determine as antisemitic? And if so, by what definition do they censor? Would that definition censor this verse from the Bible? “The Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and drove us out, and don't please God and are contrary to all men.” 1 Thessalonians 2:14.

And she challenged evangelicals on their dispensationalist views, which understand Jews as God's chosen people that will play a role in the end times prophecy by settling in the land of Israel—views that have long undergirded the evangelical theological support for Zionism.

You support the political state of Israel because you believe that is biblical prophecy, and we as Catholics do not.

This has opened up a conversation about the way that Catholic theology relates both to Jewish people and to Zionism and the modern political state of Israel. So, even before this hearing, I've been thinking about the role that Catholicism has been playing in the foreign policy debate right now. And as I've been learning a bit more about the anti-interventionist wing of MAGA, I've noticed that a lot of America First isolationists are Catholic. You have Pat Buchanan, one of the fathers of America First paleoconservatism, very famously against the Iraq War. You have J. D. Vance, who has been a bit more muted as vice president but has been holding down an anti-interventionist foreign policy stance. You have Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation, who embraces a Christ-centered, America First worldview, and has been backing away recently from full-throated support for Israel and American support of Israeli wars. You have right-wing strategist Steve Bannon. You have columnist Sohrab Ahmari. The list goes on.

And then, at the same time, you have this other group of overtly antisemitic, groyper-style Catholics, who are taking a similar anti-Israel tack but infusing it with classically antisemitic language and ideas. And this includes people like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, the Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, and now Prejean Boller, who has aligned herself very firmly with Owens in particular. So, I wanted to ask: What is up with the American Catholics right now, and how is that playing out in American politics? To answer this question, I have two really amazing guests. Matthew Cressler is a writer and scholar and the creator of the educational webcomic series BAD CATHOLICS | GOOD TROUBLE, and he's also the author of, among other books and essays, the forthcoming Catholics and the Making of MAGA: How an Immigrant Church Became America's Law and Order Faith, which is due out in 2027. Hi, Matt.

Hi, it's great to be here.

And Julie Schumacher Cohen, who is the co-author with Jordan Denari Duffner of the forthcoming Palestine, Israel, and Catholic Social Teaching: A Guide, which will be out this fall. She previously served as the deputy director of Churches for Middle East Peace and currently serves on their Catholic Advisory Council. Julie, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

So, first, I just want to say, I know we're not talking about Catholics writ large here. A lot of people to say, especially on the left, when we're looking at religious Zionism or settler violence: That's not Judaism. I guess my caveat here is that that is Judaism, and what we are doing is Judaism, and there are many Judaisms. And I know that that is very much the same when we're talking about Catholicism. Actually, we're working on an issue right now dealing with immigration, and I've had the chance to learn about the Sisters of Mercy and the people who founded the sanctuary movement. So, just to say, today, we're going to be talking about some of the dark side of Catholicism, but I just want to acknowledge, obviously, that that's not the whole story—the whole Megillah, as they say.

So, to start, I guess I want to ask: How do each of you understand the relationship between the views I just laid out and Catholicism? I hope that we'll have time later on to get deeper into the contrast with evangelicalism, and I know that, as I mentioned, Catholicism lacks the theology that predisposes evangelicals to Zionism. You don't have the same end-times prophecies that require Jews to settle the land, and you don't have the focus on Jewish chosenness— whoever blesses the Jews will be blessed and whoever curses them will be cursed. So, clearly, that's created a bit more room, religiously and culturally, for Catholics to break ranks with the pro-Israel right, but what else is going on here? What explains America First foreign policy among Catholics, and what are they latching onto theologically in taking a more openly hostile stance toward Israel?

Yeah, I think if we're talking about this right-wing tradition within Catholicism, and particularly this America First tradition, we may look as far back as the 1920s and 1930s and think of someone like Father Charles Coughlin, and other both ordinary and elite Catholics, who were part of the America First movement—the original one of the 1930s. One of the things that unites this tradition is a sense of the sovereignty of Christ and the sovereignty of the Church, Christ is sovereign over everything. The church is the representative of Christ on Earth, and therefore, Catholics should be beholden to that. Now, you might be asking: Well, where does the “America” of America First come in there?

I am indeed asking that.

Yes, yes. So, in my reading of the past 100 years of American Catholic history, Catholics get this sense—or at least, a particular kind of Catholic gets a sense—that if Christ is king over everything, and the church is the representative of Christ, that America is the nation that is best equipped to embody the church in the world against what Catholics take to be the godless forces at work in the world. So, that America is, for Kevin Roberts today and for folks in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, the embodiment of the last best hope that the world has against—in the '30s, it was really the forces of secularism, and socialism, and communism, and weirdly, it seems like those things are also the enemies today, but it gets a little bit more complicated when we're talking about Zionism.

I think one of the characteristics that we're seeing in terms of that, specifically in relation to how Catholics on the right are engaging on Israel/Palestine, is this retrenchment to pre-Vatican II teachings, and you see that in some of the language, even of using words like “apostolic.”

Wait, can you define apostolic?

It means early church, going back even to the first century, and to, basically, teachings of contempt toward Jews that have been rejected. So, trying to say: We've had this modernism happening, especially around Vatican II, where we see all this outreach and trying to heal the relationship with the Jewish people—and also reach out to other religions, because that council is where the church is also reaching out to Islam. As we know, antisemitism and Islamophobia go together. But I think for me, in watching what's happening, that's something I've really seen as a trend—this language about wanting to go back before Vatican II. And then, they're attaching their criticism of Israel or their anti-Zionism to these really problematic ideas around: Jews don't deserve a state of Israel; or the Zionist project is illegitimate. Not because it has these problems that we can talk about in terms of the dispossession of Palestinians and the freedom and human rights of Palestinians. It's not really that. It's because the Jews rejected Christ, or the Jews denied Christ, and that's really problematic. And so for me, that's what I've been noticing in some of the rhetoric that's taking place right now.

Well, you've plunged us, Julie, right into some of the background that we need to understand this about Vatican II and Nostra Aetate. And also, you've plunged us into this whole other class of Catholics that we mentioned: Candace Owens, who is a convert, Prejean Boller, also a convert. I mean, J. D. Vance is also a convert. It seems these converts—and you guys can tell me whether I'm off base with this—are attracted to an earlier form of Catholicism. And so, I wanted to hear, first of all, about what we're talking about when we talk about Vatican II—how the relationship to Jews and Judaism changed in the Catholic Church, and what those converts, but also people who were born into Catholicism, are looking for when they're attracted to something that is a counter-reformation or pre-reformation expression.

So, again, talking in broad brushstrokes, when we're talking about being Catholic in 1920s, '30s, '40s, the Catholic Church institutionally and Catholics generally, in the way that they lived their lives, saw themselves as oriented against modernism, against secularism, against liberalism, against the things that we may take for granted in the 21st century as just the making of the world that we live in. Catholics saw part of being Catholic as being oriented against a particular secular, “small l” liberal world order. The Second Vatican Council was an event in the early 1960s, convened in 1960 and closed in 1965, that was convened by Pope John XXIII as an opportunity to do what he called a aggiornamento—was the Italian word for it—which is translated variously as an updating or an opening of the doors of the church to the modern world. Which, depending on your political and theological persuasion in the decades since the Second Vatican Council, was either meant to be this radical reformation of the church or simply a reiteration in slightly updated language of what the church had always said. And so, it intervened in Catholic relationships with things like modernity, and secularism, and liberalism, and it has, ever since then, been a point of contestation among Catholics.

Yeah, well, first of all, I have a confession to make, which is that I am a convert to Catholicism in the last 5 years. I grew up in the evangelical church, actually. I'm also—I have Jewish heritage. I have Jewish Israeli family on my mother's side. She grew up in Israel. And so, I was attracted to Catholicism specifically because of Nostra Aetate, and Vatican II, and how it understands its relationship with the Jewish people, and what it does in terms of really ushering in a new era of respect. I mean, that's how it's often talked about, in terms of its relationship with the Jewish people. But it also does that with other religions, so also opening up this dialogue with Muslims. And then, there's some things it doesn't do. It's not talking about Zionism or Israel in Nostra Aetate. So, there's a lot of misconceptions that they take a position on that. They specifically say: We don't want this document to be used for political reasons. The background on that is that there's Middle Eastern Christians who are concerned about that. This is the '60s, 1965. Is this document—which is legitimately trying to heal this relationship with the Jews post-Holocaust—is it then going to be used as a justification for support for what's happening in Israel? Support for what obviously Middle Eastern Christians see as oppressive toward Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims?

Wait, what needed healing?

The anti-Jewish teachings in the Catholic Church, which had contributed to historic antisemitism, which had been weaponized—obviously, in the culmination of the Holocaust. We saw, in German Nazism, collusion of German Catholics with Nazism but also silence by the Vatican. So, that's what needs to be healed. What Nostra Aetate actually says—and what it does also that is very healing—is that first of all, it does bring up the notion of the deicide charge. It really takes pain to clarify that it's rejecting that charge. It repudiates the idea of collective Jewish guilt. And so, you see the language that's talking about how the death of Christ cannot be attributed indiscriminately to all Jews of that time (or to Jews of today). But then, you can also see where it's talking about the relationship more broadly in terms of covenantal theology. So, what the Catholic Church really believes on this is that the covenant with the Jewish people was not revoked. With Jesus, there is a new covenant. So, that language of new covenant, or new Israel, a new people of God, is that opens up to all people. That's the Catholic viewpoint. And this is a quote: The church understands itself as the new people of God, but the Jews are not accursed or rejected. So, again, this is trying to heal this, but it's also still authentically—Christians have viewpoints that are obviously going to be indifference or in contrast to Jews.

The discussion around: What does it mean for Israel/Palestine? It's not settled because again, it's really an interreligious document. It's not a political document. And so, 20 years later, there's another document that is on the relationship with the Jews that's very important. It's really, I think, the seminal place in which the Catholic Church comes down on this. And it says: We respect the Jewish religious attachment to the land, full stop, but we don't prescribe any religious significance to this as Catholics. Which would be different than evangelicals and other Christian traditions. So, we respect the religious attachment, we don't assign any particular religious significance to it, and when we're talking about the modern state of Israel, we view that in reference to international law. That is not coming out in what Carrie Prejean Boller is promoting in a lot of her commentary. A lot of it's being distorted, again, because they're wanting to go back before Vatican II, before these documents, and unfortunately, I think, not take stock of where that healing was happening and the importance of the clarity between: This is the relationship with the Jewish people, and then, how do we view the modern state of Israel?

Yeah, Prejean Boller says basically: I'm not a Zionist because I'm a Catholic. And then, you have—actually, Julie, you sent me this article in the Washington Post from R. R. Reno, the editor of First Things, basically saying: I am a Catholic and a Zionist. And what he's saying is: The Catholic Church advances no specific teachings on Zionism. This agnosticism is not surprising. Jesus told Pontius Pilate: My kingdom is not of this world. Catholics must affirm a detailed and well-developed theology of the church's origin, order, rituals, and governance. But when it comes to the world's mechanisms for governing, we're free to support what we think best given theological principles, moral considerations, and historical realities. I know that you actually took some issue with the way that he was expressing that, so I wanted to give you a chance to say: What are both of them getting wrong in this?

Yeah, so I would say it is accurate to say that the Catholic Church does not embrace Zionism. It doesn't embrace any modern nationalism, and it doesn't ascribe any theological significance to any state. That is a true fact. So, some of what she's saying is accurate. I don't think the anti-Zionism label per se, but I would say the church does not embrace Zionism. What he's saying, the agnosticism, I would take issue with. He actually says, if you follow that through: Well, they're kind of agnostic, and so then I'm kind of free to think what I want to think. He's also saying: I'm mostly a Zionist, not just because of my Catholicism, but for these practical reasons, straightforward reasons.

Yeah, one of them is: Because I'm an American and Israel is our ally.

Exactly, which, that has nothing to do with anything. Okay. But in terms of why I would say the Catholic Church has not embraced Zionism, we can see it. There's a historical arc to that, and there's some important things that happen. So, in 1904, Pope Pius X, he meets with Theodor Herzl. Herzl is going around trying to get support for Zionism, and Pope Pius's commentary there is basically: Well, we can't recognize the Jewish people because you didn't recognize Christ, so we're not going to support your Zionist project in historic Palestine. What we are seeing with this moment with Boller is that there's actually memes of Pope Pius X and his quote, his full quote, being circulated in support of her with no sense of irony that that's one of these anti-Judaism, anti-Jewish beliefs that's not a legitimate view of rejecting Zionism. That's a rejected teaching. So, we set that aside and say that's not a valid way in which the Catholic Church expresses its reservations about Zionism.

What are the legitimate ways? So, in 1922, you see the Vatican writing to the League of Nations saying that: We don't oppose that Jews have equal civil rights in Palestine, but we can't accept their having a privileged status there. So, you can already sense that there's a way in which they see Zionism as having a negative impact on the Indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. They're also concerned about, certainly, the Christian communities in particular, but also the status of the holy places. By 1948, Pope Pius XII is lamenting the refugee flow from the Nakba. There's already Catholic humanitarian agencies on the ground who are seeing that impact as it's happening. And then, what I already shared about that other statement in 1985, that says: When we talk about the modern state of Israel, we're dealing with it on the basis of international law. Well, what does international law tell us? We have requirements of equality, justice, human rights. So, that's how I would say the Catholic Church does not embrace Zionism.

I do want to focus back on the Fuentes-Owens phenomenon, because my experience listening to particularly Candace Owens—I've never heard anything like what is coming out of her mouth on a regular basis. It's just like antisemitism from a totally different era, and it's even hard, on some level, for me to immediately recognize it. You know, I've never heard someone do the blood libel. I mean, as much as everyone doing Palestinian solidarity work is accused of doing the blood libel, I've never heard an actual blood libel until I started listening to the Candace Owens podcast. Or even just these terms, like synagogue of Satan—there seems to be something older happening here, something really old. And I'm like: Are they drawing on Catholicism? Are they drawing on something else? What is going on with that?

Yeah, the way I've been thinking about it is that we have Nostra Aetate and 60 years of Catholics working feverishly to dismantle about 1,500 years of anti-Jewish and, eventually, antisemitic teachings. The Prejean Bollers, and Owens, and Fuentes of the world are explicitly drawing on the tradition prior to that attempted reformulation. And you saw that a little bit on what played out on the commission itself, which has other Catholics on it, all of whom—again, this is President Trump's commission, so they're all appointed by Trump. They all fall on the right side of the Catholic theological and political spectrum. But some of the people that object to what Carrie Prejean Boller was saying was a Catholic professor, Ryan Anderson, who, again is conservative, is a more traditional Catholic, but is quoting Nostra Aetate to Prejean Boller

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ. Still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all the Jews without distinction—then alive, nor against the Jews of today—although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. Besides, as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent his passion and death freely because of the sins of men and out of infinite love in order that all may reach salvation.

It's wild because, as I was saying earlier when I was talking about the Second Vatican Council, the way Catholics, in the US and around the world, have fought over what it means to be a Catholic since the 1960s has led to these dividing lines, where you have folks who fall on, for lack of a better term, on the right or left side of that debate. And the Ryan Andersons, and R. R. Rinos, and Cardinal Dolans, and Bishop Barrons of the world have very much, for the past few decades, been on the right theological and political side of that equation, and have not been readily citing the teachings of the Second Vatican Council as an indication of what it means to be a good Catholic. They haven't been contradicting it, but they've been hedging bets of the Second Vatican Council, emphasizing the orthodox and traditional perspectives, as they would describe it. So, to have Ryan Anderson quoting the Second Vatican Council documents is wild. So, I think you're absolutely right that Candace Owens, and Fuentes, and Posobiac, and all these folks who are Catholic right-wingers, when they are deploying these antisemitic tropes, are indicating their place in a longer tradition. And Julie's been rightly distinguishing between long histories of anti-Jewishness and anti-Judaism, which is something slightly different than racialized, biological antisemitism.

I want to clarify for our listeners: When we talk about Catholic anti-Jewishness, it's like in Catholicism, there is a belief that Jews have rejected Christ. And so, there is a theological belief that has to do with a reality, which is that the Jews do not accept Catholic teachings. That is distinguished here from a racialized and maybe ungrounded idea of what Jews are: that they have horns, that they control the world in a secret cabal, whatever.

Yeah, that's how I understand the distinction. There's a longstanding Catholic Christian understanding of the Jews as a people who rejected Christ, on whom the deicide—crime of the killing of God—rests, and who have been superseded as the chosen people of God by Catholic Christians. And so, because of that, that is the Catholic Christian justification for the intentionally marginal and marginalized position of Jews in Catholic societies—and the justification, in a more ordinary sense, of Catholic mobs, and other Christian mobs, and pogroms, and anti-Jewish violence. Antisemitism that emerges in the modern era is not a one-to-one equivalent but is certainly building on these millennia-old traditions and racializing them in the context of colonialism and wider social and political contexts.

I actually think that that's helpful for where I was gonna go because some of the red flags that go up for me listening to Candace Owens are not actually the “synagogue of Satan” and “Baal worshippers” and things that, that feel in the antisemitic conspiratorial ether of the internet. But when she talks about Bolsheviks, and Soviets, and things that, she is very much of a key, speaking in the same chord as the antisemitic, anti-communist Catholics of the early 20th century who saw the fight against atheistic communism as, effectively, a fight against secular Jews, which was something that Catholics were obsessed with in the 1920s and '30s and '40s. It was hard to disentangle the struggle against leftist, communist, and socialist organizing from this idea of a Jewish conspiracy that was pushing secularism and pushing modernism.

I certainly wish the Jewish conspiracy was pushing communism right now, but I don't really see that. Julia, I want to go to you on some of that stuff. Some of what Candace Owens is talking about is—I know she was promoting a book that—I had never heard of this book—but from the German Catholic theologian August Rohling, which spread the blood libel that the Jews ritually murdered Christians and drank their blood. And she's promoting this book. Also calling Judaism a pedophile-centric religion. Do we see this in Catholic history, and where does it appear? What are they reaching for?

Well, I wanna pick up on what Matt's saying about that language about secular and atheist. So, a lot of the Boller language, she'll throw that in: How could we support the atheist state of Israel? How could we support the secular state of Israel? And that's what she's signaling. She's signaling that trend of going backward. I mean, in the hearing, Boller is asked specifically by Seth Dillon, head of the Babylon Bee: You need to also be accountable to the fact that your beautiful and courageous friend—is how she refers to Candace Owens—she has all this antisemitic commentary. Are you at least going to disavow her?

There's a duty, I think, that we have to address those things, even if it comes from a friend.

And Boller won't do that.

I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling Candace Owens an antisemite. She's not an antisemite. She just doesn't support Zionism, and that really has to stop.

Okay.

I don't know why you keep bringing her up and Tucker.

Well, because they're the two most famous antisemites.

There you go again. Everyone's an antisemite. Everyone's an antisemite, I guess.

And he just kind of drops it. But then, she's interviewed—Boller—a few days later by the Atlantic Monthly, and she's pushed again on this. And Boller keeps saying: Well, I listen to her every day, but I've never heard her say anything antisemitic. Which, of course, is ridiculous. But then, the Atlantic interviewer says; Well, I'm going to read it to you. And he specifically pulls out the fact that her big two conspiracies—around Jews having controlled the slave trade and they orchestrated the Civil War. And Boller still will not disavow that. She's a total defender of Owens. She has another video where she's talking about the possibility of Israeli settlers going into Gaza, and she looks straight at the camera, and says: And these people are vermin. This is old traditional antisemitism. She's got anti-Jewish and—it's the whole kitchen sink of all this problematic stuff that, again, Catholics have been trying to work hard to move away from for 60 years. Boller doesn't employ all of that necessarily. You don't hear her using all that rhetoric in the hearing itself, but she's all involved with it and entrenched with it. She retweets Fuentes, she's buddies with Owens, and she won't disavow her.

I mean, right after the hearing, she tweeted: Be a good little goyim and give me a follow.

Well, and she says Christ is King all the time. And the Christ is King—she uses that when she's sparring with Jewish interlocutors on X. She's always saying: Christ is King, Christ is King.

We're gonna have to put a pin in the Christ is King thing, because I don't think that the listenership is going to know really what the significance of that phrase is. So, it's coming.

One thing I want to say too: She has one retweet that I think is worth just stating, and it relates to the covenant theology and this Catholic approach to all this. So, the comment is: It is solely Christians who have a right to the Holy Land because of the blood Jesus Christ spilled to sanctify it. We Catholics and Christians cannot express any support for the secular state of Israel and must be ready to convert Jews. So, Christians, now, are going to be the ones who are going to rule in Israel/Palestine? First of all, Palestinian Christians—that is not something that they are promoting. That's completely problematic. But then, also, we get to this conversion of Jews, which is also, as we know, the endpoint of evangelical dispensationalism. Which Boller says that she's not for that anymore, but she's still going to invoke this “conversion of Jews” language. So, there's just so much going on here that's again, so problematic.

If I can just, just very briefly interject to say: It's important to say that there has been a longstanding tradition of antisemitic Christian Zionism, and what we see in Boller and Owens is an antisemitic Christian anti-Zionism. There have been a number of places and people who have endorsed Boller as: You're articulating this courageous anti-Zionism. And it is a very weird—if you watch the commission, it's a very weird thing to watch because when she first speaks, she's wearing a Palestinian flag pin and speaking very calmly, critiquing the idea that it is antisemitic to be anti-Zionist.

A lot of people saw the clips that were, in a sense, legitimate points that she was making. So, she's critiquing Yitzchok Frankel, the UCLA student who sues over antisemitism.

By the way, if you want to read about Yitzchok Frankel's lawsuit, we've got a great piece for you—we'll drop it in the notes—about UCLA and the lawfare there.

Yeah, she basically just asks him: I've talked to some of the students in the encampments. They're just protesting because of the killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.

And their university's financial ties to that war. So, I need to ask you: In a country built on religious liberty and the First Amendment, do you believe someone can stand firmly against antisemitism, including what you experienced, and, at the same time, condemn the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, or reject political Zionism, or not support the political state of Israel? Or do you believe that speaking out about what many Americans view as genocide in Gaza should be treated as antisemitic? Because, in my view, the United States cannot and must not make loyalty to a particular theology about Israel a litmus test for protected speech or moral legitimacy.

A lot of people saw those clips and then didn't go looking for what else is around her. A reason why people, I think, also attached to that is that there has been a vacuum in the United States of a strong US Catholic voice for justice and peace in Israel/Palestine. And so, when you get her voice saying: Yeah, I think it's a genocide in Gaza, and I shouldn't be called an antisemite if I say that, that's going to resonate because people aren't hearing that strong voice in the US among US Catholics.

Yeah. Julie, Matt sent me your article in Commonweal about, basically, the need for Catholics to reckon with this. What I didn't understand reading it is that was actually aimed at liberal Catholics who were more in a guilt framework—post-Holocaust guilt framework—and were still almost taking the Nostra Aetate mandate too far, in the sense of making it into a way in which they owe something to the Jews and therefore cannot be loud on this issue.

Yeah, I have had so many conversations with very well-meaning people who are engaged in immigration work, racial justice work, economic justice work, and they just feel this reticence to talk about Israel/Palestine as Catholics because of this guilt. And it's legitimate. It's sincere in a way, but it's misdirected. And that's what I try to say in the piece, is that you cannot stay silent on this, such that the Palestinians are the ones who are doing this reparation work. What do you owe toward Palestinians? In reality, Catholics owe something to Jews, Jewish Israelis, and to Palestinians. And when Pope Francis, in the fall of 2024, said that the genocide accusation at that time needs to be investigated, there were Catholics who observed that what he's trying to do there is not to be silent, as the Vatican was too silent during the Holocaust, so that they were going to say: Yes, we need to look at this, because this may in fact be a genocide, and we're not going to stay silent as we did in the past. So, the reparations have to be directed in the right way, and because there's so much Christian engagement that's unhealthy on Israel/Palestine, we need more Catholics to apply the holistic Catholic social teaching, the upholding of human dignity, the adherence to international law, the work of peace and justice and reconciliation so that we can be a part of this larger movement for Palestinian rights, and Palestinian freedom, and universal human rights in the Middle East.

Okay. I want to go back to the memification of Christ is King. What's the origin of this phrase? What does it mean? How's it being used? Because we do see, as you mentioned, this fight between Prejean Boller and Seth Dillon in the hearing.

Do you think saying Christ is King is antisemitic?

No, I— Christ is King.

Amen.

Christ is my King. He's the King of the universe.

So, that's what started the whole thing with her, right?

Yeah. I mean, the idea that Christ or Jesus is King is not an exclusively Catholic idea, but when Catholics are using it in that right-wing context, they are tapping into at least a century-old tradition in the Catholic Church. So, in 1925, the Feast of Christ the King was instituted as an annual celebration for Catholics by Pope Pius XI, and that feast was instituted to assert the sovereignty of Christ as King over the secular liberal nationalist orders that were emerging in the post-World War I era. And so, Christ is King—the declaration of Christ's kingship in that kind of both moral and temporal, political and spiritual sense—becomes this literal rallying cry for Catholics who are opposing what they take to be secular, leftist, socialist, and then communist movement making.

So, the Cristeros, who are fighting against the anticlerical liberal government in Mexico in the 1920s, are saying, "Viva Cristo Rey"—long live Christ the King. The Spanish monarchists in Spain who are supporting Franco are saying the same thing: “Viva Cristo Rey.” The Christian Front, which was a Catholic right-wing paramilitary movement that was inspired by Father Charles Coughlin, and deeply antisemitic, and actively allied with the Nazi Party in the 1940s, they were saying, “Long live Christ the King.” And then, to fast forward to 1970, when radical right-wing Catholics like L. Brent Bozell—who was the brother-in-law of William F. Buckley and one of the co-founders of the National Review—when he is breaking away from mainstream conservatism and engaged in violent and nonviolent disobedience against abortion clinics, he and his followers, who are calling themselves the Sons of Thunder, are shouting, "Long live Christ the King!" And they're donning clothes that evoke the Francoite supporters of the '30s. So, there's a pretty consistent 100-year history of "Christ is King," "Long live Christ the King!" as a declaration of war, in a sense, against this amorphous enemy—of the secular, the liberal, the socialist, especially in the first decades of the 20th century. And again, with folks like Fuentes, the line between those forces and Jews is very blurry, if there's a line at all. The Christian Front in Boston and New York in the 1940s is explicitly antisemitic and pro-Nazi.

I heard you on another podcast speculating how aware Fuentes and Owens might be of these histories, but I think what's interesting is that whether they're aware or not, they're so completely in the lineage, there must be something that they are channeling from within—I don't know.

Yeah. Maybe I should give them a little bit more credit. When Candace Owens looks to the camera and uses the word vermin, that's not just she chose a colorful phrase—she's clearly fluent in a particular Nazi antisemitism. Julie is absolutely spot on. Folks Owens and Fuentes are very much trying to revive and tap into Catholicism prior to the Second Vatican Council. So, I'm a little bit more convinced that they may actually just be reading about what Pope Pius XI is saying about the kingship of Christ and saying: You know what? That's the kind of Catholic that we're supposed to be.

Yeah, Prejean Boller ends almost all of her tweets with Christ is King. So, in a sense, maybe it's flippant, but I don't think so. I think she's really saying: Unless you are Catholic, you can't really have the right approach to this. So, this is a Christian authoritarianism and Christian nationalism. And then, she's going to apply it to Israel/Palestine as some kind of a solution. Of course, that's just so explosive, and again, Palestinian Christians—this would not help their situation on the ground, as they experience the same injustices as Palestinian Muslims. And of course, it just invokes the fact that she's calling on Jews to convert to Catholicism, which is—again, she's not aligned in that sense with what the Catholic Church would be saying about that.

Just very briefly, I was going to say: When Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, was refusing to distance the Heritage Foundation from Tucker Carlson after the interview with Nick Fuentes, he ended his statement not with Christ is King, but with something that I read as adjacent, where he said: Christ first, America always. Which is, I think, of a key with Christ is King and America First—this notion of a particular American nationalism and a particular Christian sovereignty or Catholic Christian authoritarianism.

Yeah. And Boller is also using that language of America First to kind of: We shouldn't be in allegiance to a foreign country. So, she's making a more classic America First argument. And then, in R. R. Reno, he's making it in an even more mainstream way: Well, there our allies. We should support them. That's just smart political strategy.

And it seems I read this in an article in The Guardian about Pope Leo— that maybe there is almost some intentional choosing of this American pope by this conclave, in this moment, to confront some of the particular, America-first Catholicism that is emerging right now. Because it's dangerous for the world because of America's power. I mean, you have J. D. Vance quoting St. Augustine when justifying the rescinding of aid from other countries.

Yeah, and then having an Augustinian pope really helps clap back against that. I don't know if he was chosen for that reason. I think that the reason people thought there'd never be an American pope was precisely because of the geopolitical power of the US. And he—I think for people who aren't US Americans, he's not viewed as an American pope. He's viewed as a Peruvian pope and a pope of the world. But I think there's a lot of hope among a certain class of American Catholics—of which I would consider myself one—that his fluency in the US American context is going to be helpful for precisely the reasons you, in that article, lay out.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, he already announced that he's not only not coming to the 250th American anniversary, but he's going to be in Lampedusa, which is this place that has all this meaning for the global refugee crisis, on that day, instead of being in the US. So, that's really important. But again, we take it back to Israel/Palestine. This decision by the Vatican not to engage with the Board of Peace, and to specifically assert that this is undermining international bodies in the UN, and, again, their adherence and belief that international law has a role to play. So, that is very important. And again, for him to be an American pope saying that and not wanting to engage with what he sees Trump doing there as really a problem, I think, is important. And the Jerusalem patriarch, who's the Catholic leader in the Holy Land, who's an Italian patriarch, Pizzaballa, he went even further and said: This is a colonialist operation because Palestinians are not involved in that Board of Peace. And so, yes, we're hopeful about Pope Leo.

Well, so we're getting toward time here, and there is something I feel we haven't discussed yet. There is also clearly a political battle going on between evangelicals and Catholics on a theological level, in regards to the question of Israel right now. I was hoping that we could bring a little bit of that out: How do we understand the fight between evangelicals and Catholics in this moment? I feel I understand, having grown up in the Bush era, what evangelical political power looks in the United States. What is Catholic political power? What is it looking like now, and what do we expect that it will look like as its influence grows? Because it seems ascendant in this moment.

Yeah, I think when you see the conflict around Zionism and how conservatives should be aligned or not around the state of Israel, you're seeing a piece of the puzzle that is starting to fracture a little bit. So, the evangelical theology that undergirds Christian Zionism was never a Catholic theology and never a central political pillar for conservative Catholic political actors. So with R. R. Reno, he, on the one hand, represents some of the post-liberal right wing of Catholic conservatives. But when he's saying the things that he's saying about his Zionism, I hear him echoing a older generation of conservative Catholics who made this deal, and to whom Nick Fuentes and younger, more radical right-wing Catholics do not feel themselves beholden.

Yeah, I think on this Catholic-evangelical split, there's still a lot of power in that Christian Zionist evangelical movement. As we know with Ambassador to Israel Huckabee. I mean, we've got a real dyed-in-the-wool Christian Zionist who's going to say: They so much have the God-given right, Israel, to be here—not only can they be in Israel/Palestine, but they should take over the Middle East. He didn't get fired. I mean, he went and had to try to walk back a lot of what he said in the interview with Tucker Carlson, but I don't know where this is going to go. There is a lot of Catholic political power in the Trump administration, and I think in a certain sense, Boller is trying to impact that, but again, doing it in ways that then end up very problematic. But I don't know what the outcome of it's going to be. I personally see it as just, again, when you, start seeing Nostra Aetate and all these Catholic teachings running around the internet, you're like: This is a teachable moment. And there is a holistic Catholic teaching that can be very helpful here. But whether everybody's going to get that is another story.

Thank you, guys. I hope that our audience learned something from this podcast. I know a lot of this stuff was new to me, so I'm really, really grateful to you, Julie and Matt, for joining us. This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brenneman. If you liked this episode, share it, rate it, leave us a review, and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. Thanks a lot, everyone. See you next time.