Pope Francis and the Jews

In his long, consequential career, Pope Francis was an insistent voice for humility within the Roman Catholic Church. Eschewing many of the traditional luxuries afforded to pontiffs, he insisted on living in relatively modest circumstances, choosing a small apartment within the Vatican instead of the usual Pope’s living quarters, and cooking his own dinners. “My people are poor, and I am one of them,” he was known to say.

In some ways, Pope Francis was a champion for Jewish causes. He counted Jews among his friends and aided researchers exploring the Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust. Yet Pope Francis also leaves a more troubling anti-Jewish legacy. He elevated anti-Israel voices and helped stoke anti-Jewish stereotypes within the Church.

Here are 10 facts about Pope Francis’s troubled relations with Jews.

Resisting Fascism

Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936 and became a priest in 1969. His family was part of a large community of Italian immigrants living in Argentina. According to journalist John L. Allen, Jr., Pope Francis’ grandparents fled Italy in 1927 in part because they hated fascism; they harbored deep “political and ideological revulsion to Mussolini’s Blackshirts.”

Given this family opposition to right-wing dictatorships, many were disappointed by Pope Francis’ failure in the 1970s (when he was a high-profile priest in Argentina) to speak out against the murderous excesses of the Jorge Rafaela Videla government, which killed an estimated 30,000 left-wing dissidents in Argentina’s notorious “Dirty War,” many of them Jews. While some priests did publicly do all they could to help save dissidents during this time, Pope Francis did not publicly associate himself with the movement to save political prisoners.

At the time, his sister, Maria Elena Bergoglio, defended her brother, pointing out to critics her family’s anti-fascist bona fides in Italy. More recent research has shown that Pope Francis did indeed work to help some dissidents in Argentina in the 1970s, hiding dissident priests and others at a school he ran in Buenos Aires.

Friendship with a Rabbi

Pope Francis became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998. In his new role, he reached out to Buenos Aires’ sizeable Jewish community, forging friendships with prominent Jewish leaders. One of these was Rabbi Abraham Skorka, an educator and former leader of Bene Tikva Congregation in Buenos Aires. Pope Francis and Rabbi Skorka promoted interreligious dialogue. Pope Francis attended a Holocaust memorial service in Bene Tikva, and in 2010 the two men published a book together, On Heaven and Earth in which they put forward Jewish and Catholic positions on a range of issues.

“I remember the moment I suggested that we might write a book about God,” Rabbi Skorka later described. The future Pope was excited to participate. Rabbi Skorka described Pope Francis as embodying respect for Jewish views of the world.

Responding to Buenos Aires’ Jewish Center Bombing

On July 18, 1994, the deadliest terror attack in Argentina’s history took place in Buenos Aires. The Iranian-backed Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah filled a truck with high-power explosives and drove it to the Argentine Mutual Israelite Association (AMIA), a Jewish community center packed with children, families, and others. A suicide bomber detonated the truck, killing 85 people and wounding over 300 others. It emerged that the attack was planned and directed by senior Iranian politicians and was overseen by Iranian diplomats and other officials.

Pope Francis was Archbishop of Buenos Aires at the time. He took a stand over a decade later when he became the first public figure to sign a public petition calling for justice for the victims of the attack. (Nobody was ever convicted for the bombing and the bomber who detonated the truck was honored after his death in Lebanon.) When the rebuilt AMIA center reopened to the public in 2010, Pope Francis (still Archbishop of Buenos Aires at the time) toured the rebuilt center along with local Jewish leaders.

Meeting With Jews as Pope

Vatican journalist John L. Alllen Jr. notes that when Pope Frances became the Pontiff in 2013, “The forecast among those invested in Jewish-Catholic dialogue was generally rosy.” Jews “couldn’t have wished or hoped for a better pope,” ADL Director Abraham Foxman exclaimed at the time. Long accustomed to meeting with Jews, Pope Francis continued this tradition at the helm of the Catholic Church. He paid a gala visit to a synagogue in Rome, traveled to Israel, and spoke out against antisemitism.

One of his most recent condemnations of antisemitism is typical: in February 2024, amidst a terrifying spike in antisemitic attacks worldwide, Pope Francis forcefully said the Roman Catholic Church “rejects every form of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, unequivocally condemning….hatred towards Jews and Judaism as a sin against God.”

Yet, despite these examples of pro-Jewish sentiment, journalist John L. Allen noted in 2023 that “the fact of the matter is that Pope Francis has had a Jewish problem, and it’s come to the fore anew amid the current war in Gaza.” Despite some friendly overtures towards Jews, Pope Francis also elevated anti-Jewish and anti-Israel voices within the Church and around the world.

Criticizing “Pharisees”

Two thousand years ago, the Jewish community was riven with divisions; a group called the Pharisees maintained traditional Jewish law and practice in the face of Roman pressure to change, and evolved into today’s Jewish community.

Again and again, Pope Francis invoked the Pharisees in intensively negative terms, and described them as evil and deceitful. In one typical 2023 speech, Pope Francis said that Pharisees only “performed works to appear righteous” and that in reality these ancient righteous Jews were “duplicitous.” .

Pope Francis knew what he was doing. Catholic theology has often disparaged the Pharisees, and Pope Francis wanted to change that. In 2019, he asked Catholic researchers to come up with a more accurate view of the Pharisees to help in “combatting antisemitism” and “overcoming old prejudices.” Disappointingly, in his public speeches Pope Francis soon reverted back to traditional views of ancient Jews as lying, manipulative, untrustworthy, and evil.

In 2017, Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, the former Chief Rabbi of Milan, wrote an open letter accusing Pope Francis of anti-Jewish rhetoric. While the Pope took some positive steps to foster Catholic-Jewish dialogue, it was “a shame that they should be contradicted on a daily basis by the homilies of the Pontiff, who employs precisely the old, inveterate structure (of describing Judaism negatively) and its expressions.”

Turning His Back on Modern Pro-Jewish Catholic Teaching

In 1965, then-Pope Paul VI issued a landmark document, the Declaration Nostra Aetate on the Church’s Relationship with Non-Christians. This groundbreaking work overturned centuries of Catholic anti-Jewish theology and declared that Jews are not guilty of killing Jesus, as Catholics had insisted for generations (and used as justification for horrific violence against Jews in the past). The Declaration also radically declared that in the view of the Roman Catholic Church, Jews are holy, Judaism is a valid religious expression, and “God holds the Jews most dear.”

To some critics, Pope Francis strayed from this doctrine, routinely employing anti-Jewish rhetoric and tropes. In one memorable 2021 sermon, Pope Francis said that only Catholicism – and not Judaism – is a valid religion, and denigrated the religious value of the Jewish Torah.

Dr. Malka Simkovitch, an expert in Catholic-Jewish relations, noted at the time that “Pope Francis’s recent reference to (Jewish) law as not life-giving is the latest remark in a string of comments which evoke old stereotypes about Jewish law and the Pharisees. These comments invite Catholics to draw a straight line from greedy and exploitative people today and to the Pharisees of the first century, and draw another line straight back to contemporary Jews.” Dr. Simkovitch noted that in many areas, Pope Francis appeared dedicated to advancing Catholic-Jewish dialogue, yet he persistently returned to anti-Jewish attitudes that the Catholic Church has tried, in recent years, to suppress.

Opening Apostolic Archives

Historians and researchers of the Holocaust will long remember Pope Francis with gratitude for his work in granting access to the Vatican archives.

When he became Pope, Francis sped up the Church’s timeline for opening Church’s records. It was a massive task, entailing 2 million documents. In 2019, to note that the Church’s records would soon be public, Pope Francis changed the name of the Vatican’s “Secret Archives” to the “Apostolic Archives.” In 2020, after over a decade of preparation, it opened to researchers.

Most highly anticipated were the Church’s records from World War II. Pope Pius XII served as Pope from 1939 to 1958, and did not speak out against the murder of 6 million Jews during World War II. Pope Francis declared that the Church had “nothing to hide” and hoped that in looking at the Church’s role in the Holocaust, researchers would focus not on complicity with the Nazis, but on the fact that Catholic priests and nuns saved thousands of Jewish babies from the Nazis by hiding them in Catholic orphanages and other institutions.

Critics complained that the Vatican published select items highlighting Pope Pius XII’s role in saving some Jewish children first, as a way to generate pro-Church headlines. “After saying that years of study would be needed, now the answers emerge on the first day like a rabbit from a magician’s hat,” Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, bitterly complained.

Tolerating Muslim Antisemitism

Pope Francis was a champion of interreligious dialogue, both with Jews and with Muslims. He became close with Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, and even declared that he and the Imam had a “pledge of fraternity” with each other.

This was despite Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb’s obvious and frequent antisemitism. Even the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, complained that the Imam made an antisemitic remark “every two minutes.”

For years, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, one of the most prestigious Islamic scholars in the world, has been implacably opposed to the very existence of Israel, which he refuses to call by name and instead refers to as the “Zionist entity.” After Hamas’ deadly October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb praised Hamas and has been in close touch with its leadership. Instead of distancing himself from this radicalism, it seems that Pope Francis was influenced to side with radical anti-Israel figures as well.

Pushing for Palestine

When Pope Francis made his first visit as Pontiff to Israel, he of course traveled to Bethlehem. There, he made an unscheduled detour to visit Israel’s security barrier separating Bethlehem from Jewish towns nearby which have often found themselves the victim of terror. Pope Francis walked up to a section of the barrier that was defaced with anti-Israel graffiti and prayed there for five minutes, as if these anti-Israel phrases were a holy site.

Pope Francis made a point of calling Palestine a state and referred to leaders of the Palestinian Authority and the PLO as leaders of the state of Palestine. In 2015, he ordered the Vatican to officially recognize Palestine as a country. The Pope made no mention of the fact that many of the lands claimed by the PLO, such as the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site, are located inside of Israel.

Criticizing Israel

After Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Pope Francis’ hostility towards Israel became more pronounced.

Take his attachment to the tiny Catholic community in Gaza. For years, Hamas has persecuted Christians in Gaza. Numbering 5,000 when Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007, there are fewer than 1,000 today. Soon after taking control, Hamas (or Hamas affiliated figures) firebombed the only Christian bookshop in Gaza and kidnapped, tortured, and murdered its owner. The Church did not react. Pope Francis took little interest in Christian suffering when it came at the hands of Hamas. After Israel attacked Hamas fighters in the wake of October 7, however, Pope Francis began calling members of Gaza’s minute Catholic community daily. Even when he was deathly ill in recent weeks, these daily phone calls – and the publicity they generated in the world’s press – were one of his top priorities.

In October 2023, Pope Francis was asked to meet with family members of Israelis being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. He refused, saying he was too busy. Pope Francis later changed his mind and agreed – on condition that he also meet (on the same day) people from Gaza and hear their thoughts about Israel’s attempts to root out Hamas soldiers. This attempt to “balance” Israel’s self-defensive war with Hamas’ actions continued over the next year and a half.

Pope Francis routinely attacked Israel for killing civilians, without criticizing Hamas for hiding their fighters and rocket launchers in schools, hospitals, mosques, apartment buildings, and UN structures. His pre-Christmas address in 2024 was typical: “Yesterday, children were bombed,” he intoned at the beginning of his speech. He made it clear that he blamed not Hamas for hiding among civilians, but Israel, for each and every civilian casualty: “This is cruelty. This is not war.” (Israel’s Foreign Ministry later accused the Pontiff of displaying double standards when it came to Israel.)

Pope Francis did call out Hamas as “evil” and called for them to return Israeli hostages. Yet these moments of moral clarity were overshadowed by Pope Francis’ frequently harsh and unjustified attacks on Israel. As the war went on, he ramped up his language, calling Israel’s self-defensive war in Gaza “disproportionate” and “immoral.” In a book he published in November in 2024, Pope Francis referring to Israel’s war on Hamas as “a genocide” and urged the world to investigate.

A month later, Pope Francis was present at a ceremony unveiling a nativity scene in the Vatican featuring a baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh. Also present was Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has attempted to rewrite history, claiming that Jesus was not Jewish but Palestinian. At the ceremony, Pope Francis made no move to correct this egregious mistake.

Saying Goodbye

Pope Francis was a complex man. As the world mourns his passing, let’s recall the many consequential actions he took – both those that helped Jews and those that harmed us – over the course of his long, eventful life.

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