As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI tried to remind us in 2018, “The state of Israel cannot be regarded as the fulfillment of God’s promise of land”
By Matthew Tsakanikas, STD*
The Church’s closeness to Palestinian Christian communities: Pope Francis celebrates Holy Mass in Bethlehem in 2014 in Manger Square. Behind him, a giant image of the Popes who preceded him on their pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, sharply criticized Israel’s “ongoing massacre” of a “largely defenseless population’ of Palestinians in Gaza in an interview published October 7.
Meanwhile a host of Christians, many of them Catholics, seem to defend Israel’s military actions on not only political, but religious grounds.
But the portrayal of an Israel fighting for its life is crumbling under public scrutiny.
And the justification for Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian lands as resting in God’s promises to the Chosen People is false.
War or genocide?
Leaked Israeli Defense Forces data in August 2025 revealed that over 83% of the deaths of Gazans were non-combatant civilians, the majority of them women and children. It’s just among the latest data that has led a majority of the scholars in international criminal law to declare that the “war” in Gaza is actually a genocide. This includes many top Jewish scholars.
One month before the October 7 terror attack by Hamas, Tamir Pardo, the retired head of the Israeli intelligence apparatus Mossad, himself called Israel an “apartheid state.”
In fact, Gaza basically had been Netanyahu’s open-air prison for over a decade.
And most Americans are unaware that leading government ministers in Netanyahu’s 2022 cabinet were already advocating the complete expulsion of innocent Palestinians from their lands in accord with their theological-Zionist views.
One year before the attacks by Hamas, continually portrayed as totally “unprovoked,” Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir reminded Palestinians at the time of his 2022 appointment confirmation: “We’re the landlords here. Remember that: I am your landlord.” Palestinians understood what such “landlords” intended. (Ben-Gvir was appointed in opposition to the legal advice of the nation’s own Attorney General.)
A “two-state solution”
Yet, before October 7, 2023 about 140 countries had already officially recognized Palestine as a state (despite American pressure not to do so); and even more significantly, after October 7 several more NATO and G7 countries followed suit — in order to stop what the International Court of Justice declared were war crimes by Israel against persecuted Palestinians.
Many heroic Israelis and Jews around the world have repeatedly exposed Netanyahu’s systematic persecution of the Palestinians. They want to see their country flourish and heal the festering sore of Palestinian “apartheid” by establishing a “two-state solution” — a solution already accepted by 147 of the 193 United Nations member states.
However, they are being undermined by Christians who support the inhumane treatment, targeting of innocents and outright mass starvation of Palestinians by an illegally occupying force, based on a kind of “theological Zionism” which says that the modern state of Israel must be the “promised land” of the Old Testament, given to the Jews by God Himself. Thus the forcible incorporation of Palestinian lands into an envisioned “Greater Israel” is justified.
The Catholics among them might need to reassess not only their understanding of Catholic doctrine, but also their knowledge of who the Palestinians are. It may come as a shock to some, but before the advent of the Zionist movement that culminated in the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, 15% of Palestinians were Christians (about 40% Catholic and 50% Orthodox).
Illegal settlements in the West Bank
Paul VI on his historic 1964 trip to the Holy Land, to the Holy Sepulchre, and Bethlehem.
To make matters worse, while the apparent war of annihilation has been ongoing in Gaza, Israelis have simultaneously been allowing illegal Jewish settler movements to continue to take over Palestinian territories in the West Bank.
The Trump administration even removed sanctions on the settler movements and their leaders which, to its credit, the Biden administration had put in place to stop these crimes.
The Palestinian lands of the West Bank are a completely different territory, physically separated from Gaza; the West Bank has absolutely nothing to do with Hamas and has been populated with ancient Christian villages — such as Bethlehem, birthplace of Our Lord — since Pentecost in 33 A.D.
Over a year ago, in the summer of 2024, former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert warned Netanyahu that Netanyahu deserved to be punished and sent to jail for what is being done to the Palestinians in the West Bank by illegal Jewish settlers:
“Here crimes are committed on a daily basis, not by soldiers and not against soldiers, but by rioters who are Israeli citizens, Arab haters, with the clear intention of expelling them from their homes and the villages where they have lived all their lives…As prime minister, you know about all these events. If you choose to ignore them too, you won’t be able to deny you heard the warning of the head of the Central Command and other senior IDF commanders.”
The crimes became more public when in July 2025 Vatican News reported on the attack on the Palestinian Christian village of Taibeh — the last all-Christian village in the West Bank — by illegal Jewish settlers; they set fires next to the venerated ruins of a Byzantine Church and chased villagers from their homes.
After the attacks on Taibeh, German Ambassador to Israel Steffen Seibert condemned all attacks on Christians and other Palestinians in the West Bank: “Whether the target is a Christian village or a Muslim community, these extremist [Jewish] settlers may claim divine mandate, but in truth they are criminals, strangers to any authentic faith.”
The Church is the New Israel
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat meets Pope John Paul II in the Vatican in 2000, reciprocating the Holy Father’s visit to the Holy Land the previous year.
Even some ideologically ”conservative” Catholics believe Vatican support for the Palestinians and a “two-state solution” is somehow a product of post-Vatican II liberalism and “woke” sympathies.
One Catholic theorist even called the Vatican’s position “naïve functional pacifism.”
Nothing is further from the truth. The Vatican’s overall positions on the state of Israel and the Palestinians stem from ancient doctrinal teachings, including the truth that the Church is the “New Israel,” as Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church reiterated in 1964, and again in the definitive Catechism of the Catholic Church published under Pope St. John Paul II in 1997.
In fact, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in 2018 shed additional light on the situation, just three years after the Vatican’s formal recognition of the state of Palestine in 2015.
In an essay for the academic theological journal Communio, the journal he established to help implement the authentic ecclesiology of Vatican II (Cardinal Karol Wojtyla initiated the Polish edition before becoming Pope John Paul II), Benedict explained how the Church handled the 1948 creation of the state of Israel:
“After the establishment of Israel as a country in 1948, a theological doctrine emerged that eventually enabled the political recognition of the State of Israel by the Vatican. At its core is the conviction that a strictly theologically-understood state — a Jewish faith-state [Glaubenstaat] that would view itself as the theological and political fulfillment of the promises — is unthinkable within history according to Christian faith and contrary to the Christian understanding of the promises [to Abraham].” [emphasis mine]
In other words, the Church could recognize the state of Israel in 1948 for the secular or political ends of a homeland for people of a specific ethnicity. This is known as “political” Zionism. Concomitantly, the Church accepted Britain’s secular authority over Palestine from 1917-1948, which promoted the emigration of European Jews into the Middle East.
However, this secular political recognition should never be perceived as the Church supporting any theological claims by the ethnic state of Israel to a divine mandate over Palestinian lands — “theological Zionism.”
Put simply: political Zionism does not run afoul of Church doctrine; but theological Zionism most certainly does.
Pope Emeritus Benedict reiterated the Church’s doctrine in a response to then-Chief Rabbi of Vienna Arie Folger’s questioning of Benedict’s 2018 Communio essay. The Pope clarified: “Without repeating all that I [said] in my [2018 Communio] text, I would like to reiterate my thesis, which is important not only for Christians, that the state of Israel as such cannot be regarded theologically as the fulfillment of God’s promise of land.” After all, it is Jesus Who is the telos — the final end — of the promises to the Israelites (cf. Rom 10:4).
In 2009, Bethlehem,the welcoming ceremony for Pope Benedict XVI by the Palestinian National Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas.
Accusations of antisemitism
It goes without saying that the events of October 7 certainly were horrific and condemnable, and no one can morally support the criminal attack of non-combatants, no matter who the perpetrators are.
Not so clear is why anyone questioning the Israeli narrative regarding its subsequent military operation in Gaza and the role of theological Zionism behind it is called an “antisemite.”
Catholics completely reject antisemitism as it is traditionally defined: hatred of people of ethnic Semitic origin. But neither can Catholics doctrinally accept the theological Zionism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, nor the prosecution of his war of annihilation and ethnic cleansing of non-combatants.
Several websites have fully documented hundreds of instances in which Prime Minister Netanyahu and members of his cabinet, the Knesset and the military services have made public comments which supported collective punishment, dehumanization and genocidal intent against Palestinians.
For example, in an October 9, 2023 speech, the Israeli Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, called the Palestinians “human animals,” saying, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed…We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
On October 10, 2023, Moshe Feiglin, member of the Knesset, said :“It is not Hamas that should be eliminated. Gaza should be razed and Israel’s rule should be restored to the place. This is our country.”
On October 10, 2023, journalist and editor David Mizrahy Verthaim declared that “One principle that needs to be abandoned today: proportionality. We need a disproportionate response. If all the captives are not returned immediately, then turn the Strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head – execute security prisoners. Violate all norms on the way to victory…”
On November 11, 2023, Avigdor Lieberman, former deputy Prime Minister, said, “There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip.”
On October 25, 2023, Netanyahu himself, evoking Biblical justification for the total destruction of the Palestinian people, said, “We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness… we shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah.”
As Jerusalem Patriarch Pizzaballa has remarked, today’s brutality is the result of “years of violent and dehumanizing language.”
Naïve pacifism?
Nevertheless, Catholic commentators like American professor Daniel J. Mahoney continue to criticize the Vatican’s principled natural-law stance as “naïve functional pacifism.” Writing for the Claremont Institute, Mahony’s August 26, 2025 article “Christianity and the West, Part II,” states:
“The Vatican’s drive toward a naïve functional pacifism bodes ill for Catholic-Jewish relations since Israel has implacable (and nihilistic) enemies such as Hamas and is morally obliged to defend itself. ‘Never again!’ Jews rightly proclaim. Negotiated settlements have crucial political preconditions that are perhaps best illustrated in the commonsensical appeal to ‘peace through strength’ that so resonates with tough-minded and morally serious citizens.”
Yet, contradicting Mahoney is the Israeli newspaper Haaretz’s report August 2025 report that the recently retired heads of every major Israeli intelligence agency said at an August 4 gathering that the Gaza war was actually hurting Israel: “In a rare joint appeal, former Mossad, Shin Bet and IDF heads call for an immediate end to the Gaza war, warning it now serves ‘messianic and extremist goals’ and is leading to ‘the loss of Israel’s security and its freedom’.”
Peace meetings in the Vatican between Israeli President Shimon Peres, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, Pope Francis and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (2014).
Authentically interpreting Scripture
Christians today should carefully consider Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church in order to read Scripture with the faith of the Church. Further, it should be noted that in no way did Nostra Aetate (the 1965 Declaration on the Church’s Relation with Non-Christian Religions) change doctrine on the Church’s relationship to the Jewish people.
The Final Report of the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops was clear that all decrees and declarations must likewise be interpreted through the Dogmatic Constitution, spe
cifically this passage: “Israel according to the flesh, which wandered as an exile in the desert, was already called the Church of God. So likewise the new Israel which, while living in this present age, goes in search of a future and abiding city is called the Church of Christ” (Lumen Gentium #9.3).
The office of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem expressed the truth of the matter when in March of 2025, the Patriarch’s representative “reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s rejection of any interpretation that seeks to claim the land of Palestine for the Jewish people based on the Torah, as promoted by Christian Zionism in the United States.”
* Matthew Tsakanikas, STD is a Professor of Theology at Christendom College in Virginia, and a member of the Academy of Catholic Theology and the Fellowship of Catholics Scholars. His articles and essays on theology and Catholic social justice have appeared in numerous Catholic journals.
