Pope’s use of fraught verse on Gaza anniversary raises troubling questions

ROME – From the beginning of the war in Gaza, Israel and the Vatican periodically have found themselves at odds. Israel at times has objected to what it sees as the Vatican’s false moral equivalence between terrorist aggression and Israel’s right to self-defense, while the Vatican has complained of a “disproportionate” Israeli response which, it suggests, puts innocents at risk and threatens to ignite a wider regional or even global conflagration.

Such differences are perhaps inevitable, as Israel prosecutes its war while the Holy See attempts to remain above the fray, concerned for the humanitarian fallout for all parties. No one has suggested that the Vatican’s rhetoric reflects explicit anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish sentiment, but rather the consequence of contrasting perspectives and geopolitical priorities.

That is, no one has suggested anti-Semitic bias until now.

On Oct. 7, Pope Francis dispatched a letter to the Catholics of the Middle East on the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Gaza war, lamenting the “the fuse of hatred” lit a year ago and urging Christians of the region not to be “engulfed by the darkness that surrounds you.”

To some extent, the letter has elicited the same ambivalence from many Israelis and Jews that other Vatican declarations on the war have from the beginning.

Some noted, for instance, that Francis never referred to what Oct. 7 actually commemorates, which is the unprovoked Hamas assault on Israel and the taking of Israeli hostages. Others complained that Francis declared “the people of Gaza” are in his daily thoughts and prayers, but said nothing about the people of Israel.

For that matter, critics groused, this was ostensibly a letter to the Catholics of the Middle East, but there was no mention of Catholics inside the state of Israel who are also suffering – this despite the fact that the total pre-war Catholic population of Gaza was, at most, a few hundred souls, while there are at least 200,000 Catholics in Israel.

Such objections are, by now, relatively familiar, but there was a new element in this letter which has raised special alarm.

At one point, the pontiff decried “the spirit of evil that foments war,” citing John 8:44 to the effect that this spirit is “murderous from the beginning” and “a liar and the father of lies.”

The language might seem fairly innocuous, unless you know the history of this particular verse. Among experts, John 8:44 is considered among the most problematic passages for Jewish-Christian relations in all of Biblical literature.

In the New American Bible version, here’s the full verse, which features Jesus addressing the Jews: “You belong to your father the devil, and you willingly carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in character, because he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Granted, Biblical scholars insist that such passages have to be read in context. Jesus and all of his initial followers were Jews themselves, these experts point out, so Jesus clearly didn’t mean to impugn all Jews or Judaism. Instead, these antagonistic passages reflect a debate within Judaism, and were directed only at a small group hostile to Jesus and his message.

Such nuance, however, has largely been lost over the centuries on bigots and antisemites of all stripes, who have used John 8:44 to justify persecution, oppression and violence. Children’s literature in Nazi Germany, for instance, cited John 8:44 to explain and justify Hitler’s Jewish policy. More recently, Robert Bowers, the gunman responsible for the 2018 massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 people dead and six wounded, displayed “Jews are the children of Satan,” citing John 8:44, in his profile on the social media platform Gab.

Ethan Schwartz, a professor of the Hebrew Bible at Villanova, has written of John 8:44 in a piece for the Religion News Service that “it would not be unreasonable to speculate that no individual sentence has caused more Jewish death and suffering. It has fueled countless persecutions, pogroms and, in its own way, the Holocaust.” As a result, Schwartz said of citing the verse in the papal letter that “it is impossible to overstate what a disaster this is for Jewish-Catholic relations.”

Of the 7,957 verses in the New Testament, to select this particular one in the context of the Gaza war broadcasts a seemingly clear message: That the Jews are enemies of peace and truth, and thus carry the blame for the carnage.

So, how in God’s name did this verse end up in a papal letter on the one-year anniversary of the most lethal attack on Jews since the Holocaust – and without any context or gloss that might lessen the seemingly crass antisemitic implications?

Logically, there are only two possibilities, and it’s honestly hard to know which is the more troubling.

Option one is that use of the verse was intentional, a sort of scriptural shot across the bow at Israel and the Jewish world, warning them of rising frustration with Israel’s approach to the war. If so, one has to seriously question the judgment involved in using such an historically fraught passage to make the point, especially because it seems to associate the Vatican with a strain of antisemitism that’s so often ended in horror.

Option two is that the use of John 8:44 was unintentional, a case of whoever prepared a draft for the pope not knowing the history of the passage or the reaction it would likely provoke.

If that’s the reality, it raises troubling questions about the sensitivity level in the Vatican to Jewish-Christian relations – which is especially disturbing given that next year will mark the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the groundbreaking document of the Second Vatican Council that seemed to signal a Copernican shift in the Church’s relationship with Jews and Judaism.

If it’s somehow possible that a Vatican official charged with drafting a papal letter – a letter, for the record, which everyone knew would be of keen interest to Israel and Jews – could actually be ignorant of John 8:44’s checkered past, it would raise real questions about the extent to which Catholicism has taken Nostra Aetate to heart.

To date, there’s been relatively little public blowback over the papal letter, in part because many Israeli officials and Jewish leaders likely are still stunned and scrambling to understand how this could have happened. The delayed response affords the Vatican a moment of opportunity: It may still be possible to get ahead of yet another flash point in Jewish-Catholic relations by explaining how this came to pass, and by apologizing for the hurt and confusion it can’t help but cause.

Otherwise, it may be difficult for many Israelis and Jews not to draw the conclusion that the Vatican is indifferent to the historical ghosts the pope’s letter has awoken – and to call such a conclusion a potential “setback” for relations with Judaism would be to traffic in a serious understatement.