The “Zionist State of Israel represents the apostasy of the Chosen People from fidelity to their one True God,” wrote late Catholic priest Vincent P. Miceli in his 1981 book, The Antichrist: The Final Campaign Against the Savior. Recently republished by Sophia Institute Press, Miceli’s book indicates the long-term struggles the Catholic Church has reconciling with Zionism, as highlighted by recent controversy provoked by a Catholic cardinal in the United Kingdom.
Miceli made important points about Western domestic leftist evils such as the cult leader Jim Jones and LGBT agendas, but his views on matters abroad such as Islam and his harsh criticism of Zionism are more suspect. “Much as Zionist propaganda would like to equate Zionism with Judaism, political Zionism cannot be an intrinsic core of Judaism,” he wrote, even though Jews often emphasize that Jewish faith revolves around the Jewish homeland of Israel. Rather, “political Zionism is really Jewish secular nationalism” and “is essentially ethnic and territorial.”
With words that could evoke for some antisemitic tropes about grasping Jews, Miceli wrote that Zionism
has elevated the Jewish desire for political power above the Jewish religious vocation. Unfortunately, the Jewish secular state, guided by the principles of Zionism, has become the ultimate glory of the Jews today; Jewish secular nationalism is today supreme in Israel.
Miceli appeared oblivious to the Holocaust’s harsh lessons, namely that a Jewish state is necessary not just for Jewish cultural self-determination, but also for sheer survival. He correspondingly expressed no understanding of the need for Jewish power. As Israel, he wrote,
is founded on atheistic philosophical and political Zionism, the Israeli state has had to equip itself for survival and expansion in this world. It has become a powerful military state with a superb army, air force, and navy, all being now equipped with nuclear weapons. It has perhaps the most efficient police and secret service corps in the world.
Seemingly blaming the victim, Miceli even attributed growing hostility to Jews to Israeli self-defense over the decades against the incessant jihads of Israel’s Muslim neighbors to destroy this non-Muslim state:
Zionism has clamped down on the State of Israel a Lilliputian nationalism that has so divided the Jews from all other nations that international Semitism [sic] is again on the rise, wars are habitual between Israel and her Arab neighbors and international distrust, resentment, and fear of the Israeli state is growing.
By contrast, for many reasons Israel makes convincing the Biblical claim that Jews will be a blessing to the world’s nations. Israel’s prosperous society has developed in a territory that was previously largely a wasteland, a development that attracted many Arab immigrants in the process, and Israel’s “start-up nation” today is a global technology center. Israel is also the Middle East’s lone democracy, where Arab minorities enjoy freedoms and benefits unknown throughout the Arab and broader Muslim-majority world. The Israeli military, so decried by Miceli, has become a valued Western security partner, as evidenced by Israeli destruction of nuclear weapons programs pursued by anti-Western Arab dictators in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.
Yet Miceli in 1981 deemed Israel the “apotheosis of the naturalistic, humanitarian, humanist Jew.” In denigration of Israel, Miceli defined the “profound difference between Jew and Israeli; the former maintains his relationship to God and a sense of spiritual mission to all mankind; the latter is obsessed with his own tribe’s earthly welfare.” Once again uncomfortably suggesting antisemitic tropes of Jews as self-centered, Miceli wrote that
Zionism, however, is a myopic view of Jewish aspirations; it seeks merely narrow values: an exclusive homeland, survival, security with no transcendent vocation for itself and other nations. The magnificence of the prophets lay in their overcoming narrow ethnocentricity and projecting the Chosen People toward the splendor of their divine calling, i.e., being God’s agents of truth and holiness to all nations.
In a simplistic depiction of historically diverse Zionist movements, Miceli ignored religious Zionism and depicted Jewish national liberation as a purely secular enterprise:
Zionism is not interested in God’s covenants with the Chosen People for their own and for all men’s salvation. Zionism has chosen to create a secular state seeking wealth, power, prestige, and more land. The founding Fathers of Zionism did not share the traditional religious beliefs of devout Jews. Hence they did not return to Zion physically in order to return to God spiritually. They returned to create a secular utopia.
Miceli nonetheless hinted at an abiding relationship between God and the Jews across time:
The Jews, though dispersed for two thousand years throughout all regions and nations, have, nevertheless, maintained their identity. No other people has been able to do this. The Chosen People, no matter how distantly they fled from God or separated from their homeland, could never erase from their consciousness the fact that God, Who chose them and made a solemn covenant with them, was still their true king and ruler, the fact that God still expected them to fulfill the special vocation He entrusted to them. Hence even today in the Zionist State of Israel there is an agonizing hunger among many Jews to get back to the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Joseph. There is a growing, vociferous dissatisfaction with the atheistic Zionist state.
Most Jews, however, would demur from the Catholic Miceli, who naturally interpreted a complete return to Biblical faith as involving the recognition of the Jew Jesus as messiah:
Many young Jews in Palestine are discovering the life of Christ for the first time and are coming to Christianity. They are coming to realize that Judaism was meant to be a light to the nations and a covenant of the peoples. They are seeking a spiritual Zion, not a materialistic Zionism.
Miceli’s view of Zionism as “materialistic” naturally led to his negative judgment of Israeli control over Israel’s ancient capital of Jerusalem. Since Israeli forces evicted Jordanian occupiers from Jerusalem’s eastern portion during the 1967 Six Day War, this city unified under Israeli rule has unprecedented freedom of faith among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Yet he condemned Israel’s 1980 law proclaiming Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital.
As Miceli wrote in 1981, “in order to advance this humanistic utopia dramatically,” Israel
recently legally established the Holy City of Jerusalem— both the Jewish and the occupied Arab sections — as the capital of the State of Israel. In moving its capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israel further antagonized the major religions, the United Nations, and, indeed, the whole world. Moslems, Protestants, Roman and Greek Catholics see in this move another arrogant step toward the secularization of the Holy City and the desacralization of the holy places.
Miceli’s words hint at the recent October 6 statement of Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. Both on his website and on Twitter, Nichols expressed “profound concern” about British Prime Minister Elizabeth Truss’ suggestion of moving the United Kingdom’s embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Such a move “would be seriously damaging to any possibility of lasting peace in the region and to the international reputation of the United Kingdom,” he wrote.
Advocating a “two-state solution, in which Jerusalem would have a guaranteed special status,” Nichols specifically noted:
Pope Francis and the leaders of churches in the Holy Land have long called for the international Status Quo on Jerusalem to be upheld, in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the United Nations. The city must be shared as a common patrimony, never becoming an exclusive monopoly of any party.
Jewish and pro-Israel organizations responded to Nichols’ views with various degrees of opposition. The Israel-Britain Alliance on Twitter found in Nichols a “fundamental political naivety. Sovereign states naming their own capital is normal. When did normal become a bad idea?” The American organization Stop Antisemitism was even more irate and recalled Catholic-Jewish grievances stemming from controversies over the Catholic Church’s relationship to persecuted Jews during World War II:
The Catholic Church did enough during WW2. Your input and opinions are not needed—today or EVER. Perhaps you can instead spend your time giving back the countless Jewish artifacts stolen from Jewish families during the Holocaust that you refuse to give back.
Jews would consider Nichols particularly misinformed, given that, as Israeli diplomat Dore Gold has written, only a sovereign Jewish state has created a secure Jerusalem where all religious people may visit their holy sites in peace. Contrastingly, Muslim domination of Jerusalem has historically witnessed depredations of non-Muslim sites, comparable to other ravages such as those of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In this context, Nichols’ vague ideas about internationalizing Jerusalem are in all likelihood unworkable.
Contrary to Miceli, the facts prove that the Jewish state of Israel benefits not just Jews, but others, including Christians as well. Yet his writings indicate the difficult, contested history of Zionism’s struggle to find modern acceptance within the Catholic Church, as a forthcoming article will examine.
milo minderbinder says
This article interests me as I just stumbled across Rachel Maddow’s podcast, Ultra
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra
Part Two involves a Catholic priest, back in the 1940’s, who had a radio broadcast with tens of millions of followers. This priest was, my words, ultra-antisemitic.
Andrew Harrod says
You mean Father Charles Coughlin.
Daniel Bielak says
So, according to Vincent P. Miceli and others who hold the views he held:
• Jewish people don’t have the right to have a national homeland like other peoples do have.
• Jewish people aren’t human beings, but, rather, are a religious totem* to be judged by Christians or by the Christian god.
Got it.
*totem: “a person or thing regarded as being symbolic or representative of a particular quality or concept.”
Daniel Bielak says
That’s okay by me; I don’t accept those views. Also, I take comfort in the people here who defend Israel and the Jewish people. Also, I fervently defend Israel and the Jewish people only because Israel and the Jewish people are so wrongfully attacked and maligned. And I know that the attacks and libels against Israel and the Jewish people are so wrong because I know Israel and the Jewish people well, because they are part of my cultural heritage, and I don’t have Stockholm syndrome which many Jewish people do have.
gravenimage says
Good post, Daniel.
somehistory says
The Bible, which was recorded by Jews, of their history, God’s Words, directions, instructions, Laws and Orders and Commands; His Personality of Love and Mercy, and upon which Christians depend, says that
‘God gave the Land of Israel to His chosen people…to reside, to populate, to follow His Laws and demonstrate His Personality and Eternal Godship to the entire world of mankind.’
He had promised this land to Abraham and to his descendants…who would become like the stars of heaven and receive blessings in reward for their faith in Him.
The promised Messiah would come from the nation of the Jews…through David…and would be a King Priest like Melchizedek. Jesus was proven to be that Promised One and He loved the land and its people
God fought for the Israelites and brought them into their Land. They have a right to love the land and want to keep it, even today.
gravenimage says
Miceli was a nasty piece of work. There are many Christian and Muslim majority nations, but his vicious rejection of a Jewish state is telling. And his idea that one cannot live in democratic Israel and be an observant Jew is just ludicrous.
Wellington says
Ever since I seriously began studying history and especially once I started studying Middle Eastern history I came to the conclusion that Zionism was a breath of fresh air, not just for Jews but for all of mankind. Partial, but only partial, proof of this is that if every nation on Earth were no worse than Israel we would live in a far, far better world. Israel is the only truly free polity in the Middle East and a nation where Christians and those of other faiths, including Islam, enjoy many more rights than they do in any other nation in the Middle East, including the right to publicly worship as one pleases as well as that hallmark of the most decent nations, i.e., true freedom of speech.
James Lincoln says
Wellington says
“… if every nation on Earth were no worse than Israel we would live in a far, far better world.”
100% true.
The so-called “leaders” of “islamic republics” are hurting / “enslaving” their own people – while they enrich themselves.
gravenimage says
Good exchange.