Editor’s note: The following essay contains Parts II and III in a three-part series explaining why the state of Israel, founded in 1948, has never had a divine mandate, or authentic theological claim, to the occupied Palestinian territories. The author rejects redefinitions of antisemitism which include anti-Zionism. Part I can be found HERE and the Introduction can be found HERE.
(Deification in Christ) — This “Parts II and III” now resumes from where the “Introduction” and “Part I” left-off in this three-part opinion-editorial: “Encyclical Should Reaffirm the Church Is the True Israel of God”…
Part II: The present situation and persecution of Christians in Palestine
“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.’” Haaretz, August 4, 2025
This is major news because of the immense authority all of these former heads of Israeli security once held. No one is in a better position to know the truth and speak about what is happening inside the state of Israel. Something has gone very wrong under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since his coalition government of 2022 and something worse is feared if these men of distinction decided to speak-up now.
The “Introduction” and “Part I” of this essay warned about the same extremist and messianic goals of “theological” Zionism in distinction from secular or “political” Zionism.
Close to 150 member states of the United Nations already recognize the state of Palestine. As of July 2025, this included the first pledges of recognition from G7 nations. After repeated political attempts by the international community to come to an equitable two-state solution, worldwide “theological” Zionism and the state of Israel still refuses to allow recognition of Palestine. It blames the Palestinians for the failures in many unfair negotiations by Zionist Jews for various land concessions. Due to theological Zionism [see the Introduction], many of today’s Israeli Zionists are convinced everyone should accept their alleged divine mandate over all Palestinian lands.
READ: Al Jazeera journalists killed during Israeli airstrike in Gaza
With America’s firm backing into August 2025, Israelis have crushed all significant attempts at self-governance and freedom for the indigenous Palestinians. Many Palestinians are therefore in the bizarre situation of being without an internationally recognized citizenship yet also in the awkward situation of being unable to be legally considered refugees [cf. Gary Taphorn]. This is especially due to the backing of the lone superpower of the United States which is politically dominated by Christian Zionists and lobbyists for the state of Israel [see Introduction].
The USA economically and militarily threatens allies and enemies who question its policies with Israel-according-to-the-flesh [in distinction from the Israel in covenant with God] even though America did not always behave that way.
For decades, corporate media in America has covered over the abuses and systemic injustices of the state of Israel. American blindness is due largely to the heretical Christian Zionist ethos embedded within American foreign policy [as discussed in the Introduction]. It aligns with Jewish Zionist lobbies which punish politicians and corporations who work against Zionist policies. Their bullying of Congressman Thomas Massie and others like him for their “America First” principles are cases in point.
Christian Zionism paints the false prophetic picture that God is on the state of Israel’s side and endorses confiscation of the land [theological Zionism] that once belonged to Second Temple Israel, but now lawfully belongs to the Palestinians. Some theological Zionists propose “Greater Israel” and threaten the borders of other neighboring countries with their false claims of divine mandates.
Current unjustified violence by illegal Israeli settlers in the Palestinian West Bank [not just Gaza], testified to by multiple former Israeli heads of state over a year ago, proves all of the violence of such Israeli settlers is geared towards theological Zionism and not just fighting terrorists. The quote at the start of this “Part II” by former heads of Israeli national security implied the same. Gaza is totally separate from the West Bank and so the West Bank has nothing to do with Hamas. Palestinian resistance to Israelis taking more of Palestinian lands since 1967 is usually a response to the illegal occupation of their lands, but is usually portrayed by American media as simply crazy Muslim terrorists.
The situation is more complex and theological Zionism is a major contributing factor to the circle of violence per moderate Israeli leaders. No doubt, any terrorism in the name of Islam is just as condemnable and abhorrent as terrorism by Israeli settlers. No one doubts that militant Islam is always a threat to Christians – just look at the suffering of Christians in Africa and the Middle East – and so support for the state of Israel is a mixed issue in foreign policy prudential decisions.
However, Christians are not confused over the threat of Islam and so this essay must focus upon the threat of “theological” Zionism to the international order and its attempts to stifle Christian free speech worldwide [please read this link].
Speaking to more recent events of 2024-2025, and having condemned Hamas’ hostage taking of innocent civilians and the terrorist activities of October 7, 2023, it still must be asked: what has Christian Zionism done to Christianity’s voice when innocent Christians are huddled in church buildings for safety while Israeli Zionist snipers and Israeli tanks turn their munitions on the churches, and worse, Christian Zionists applaud the IDF Jews and belittle innocent Orthodox and Catholic Christians?
What has happened when illegal Israeli settlers burn down Christian properties, destroy Palestinian Christian farms and farmlands, try overrunning Christian monasteries, and threaten the lives of Christian villagers while American Christian Zionists (not just Zionist Jews) calumniate Catholics and Orthodox Christians as collaborators with terrorist groups? There is a problem among Christians that a papal encyclical must address sooner than later.
READ: The truth is out about Israel. It can no longer be ignored
Generic public condemnations of Israeli violence and crimes against the innocent are not enough. Condemnations without legal actions are impotent when Israeli authorities do nothing to stop or punish perpetrators of crimes against Palestinians. Many secular Jews who want to stop the crimes are even being undermined by Christian Zionists (including some Catholic politicians in America).
It is criminal and disproportionate for Israeli authorities to use starvation as a tool to displace Gazan populations or to turn a blind eye to settler violence in the West Bank. Generic condemnations look impotent while even American Catholic politicians and leaders advocate to arm the Israeli military without any sanctions for the crimes against innocent Palestinians and Christians.
Worse, American politicians and the State Department are sanctioning legal authorities who speak against the crimes. American politicians and their “theological” Zionist supporters are sullying international law and justice by enabling war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Vast numbers of Americans and Jews actually oppose the lawlessness.
According to moderate Jewish Israeli leaders, the root cause of violence by Israeli expansionists – who are attacking innocent Palestinians in the West Bank and inciting reactions by militant Palestinians – is the theological Zionism behind “religious Zionists.” This theological Zionism must be condemned by religious authorities. Church leaders could tame such fanaticism by using legal instruments available to them to end false Christian Zionist support of theological Zionism. Many Protestants have already done so.
American Catholic politicians and Christian fundamentalists are some of the worst offenders and material heretics who encourage Jewish religious/theological Zionism. Their misguided support of war crimes can be halted through legal Church actions of witness to divine law and the binding of doctrine (cf. Mt 16:19, 18:18) in appropriate magisterial documents.
Part III: The Church must condemn ‘theological’ Zionism
A false ecumenism which avoids condemning modern Christian theological errors – and the accompanying violations of natural and civil law [including international law] which silence engenders – must stop. Since the New Covenant, theologies which justify taking lands without divine mandates (the error of theological Zionism), along with the accompanying ethnic cleansing and war crimes, are akin to Christian apostasy (cf. Heb 6:6).
False political theologies, false doctrines, and false prophecies work against the New Covenant and true peace. The errors must be condemned clearly in accord with Scripture in the Tradition [Scripture and Tradition are inseparable]. This can be done alongside condemnations of antisemitism and better definitions of it. Recent definitions of antisemitism which include anti-Zionism are false definitions and counterproductive.
READ: Bishops Schneider, Strickland support appeal to Pope Leo urging prayer vigil for Gaza
Ecumenism has gone off the rails and become ridiculous when Catholics call fellow Catholics “antisemites” according to false theologies which pretend there is a problem with the “supersession” teachings of the Church Fathers, like Saint Augustine’s [see Part I]. The truth is that the language of “supersedes” or “supersession” actually and correctly points to Christ’s recapitulation (cf. Eph 1:10; Benedict XVI, Communio, p. 171) of God’s covenants into a final form at “the time of reformation” (cf. Heb 9:10) by the Messiah.
The “supersedes” of the Church Fathers does not and did not mean ancient Israel was simply “replaced” or “substituted” by something “other” than God’s people since Israel always awaited Christ for its fulfillment and final definition (cf. Hebrews 11:39).
In the words of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in his 2018 Communio essay, “In fact, there is really no ‘substitution,’ but a journey that eventually becomes one reality. And yet this entails the necessary disappearance of animal sacrifices, in place of which (‘substitution’) the Eucharist occurs.” He said the same when heading the CDF decades earlier: “The Sinai covenant is indeed superseded” [Many Religions- One Covenant, p. 70]. Catholics parrot anti-Catholic theologies when they pretend the Church Fathers taught simple “replacement” instead of the dynamics of “recapitulation” or “reformation.” We must pay attention to meaning through a given context.
Thus, Pope Pius XII clearly implied “recapitulation” when in Mystici Corporis Christi #29 he wrote in 1943: “the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished.” Pius clearly had Leo the Great in mind by quoting him immediately: “‘To such an extent, then,’ says St. Leo the Great, speaking of the Cross of our Lord, ‘was there effected a transfer from the Law to the Gospel, from the Synagogue to the Church, from the many sacrifices to one Victim, that, as Our Lord expired, that mystical veil which shut off the innermost part of the temple and its sacred secret was rent violently from top to bottom.’”
Read in context, Leo the Great’s “transfer” language referred to the dynamism from foreshadowing to fulfillment in Christ as the recapitulation at the “time of reformation” (Heb 9:10). It is not simple replacement or substitution. The movement from foreshadowing to fulfillment is the “journey that eventually becomes one reality,” per Pope Benedict above. Leo the Great, Pius XII, and Benedict XVI all gave the true teaching of Scripture in the Tradition.
The Church Fathers are correct and those who reject their unanimity in matters of faith and the New Covenant are in error. There is no antisemitism in teaching Our Lord’s doctrines since Jesus is the Messiah awaited by the Jews. As Augustine taught: “The true Judea, then, is the Church of Christ” [see Part I].
Likewise, speaking against illegal Israeli occupations, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal attempts at starvation of populations are not forms of antisemitism. It is trying to save the state of Israel from false theological Zionism and its ruin as the recent statements by former heads of Israeli intelligence have tried to do.
Divine mandates of physical land only for Jews expired with the birth, death, and resurrection of the Messiah who gave something better (cf. Heb 11:39; 9:23). In giving something better, God fulfilled the meaning of the former promises. The old adage comes to mind: “Do what I meant, not what I said.”
READ: John Mearsheimer tells Tucker the US is ‘complicit’ in Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Pope Emeritus Benedict diplomatically and repeatedly tried to awaken the Church to false theological positions on divine land mandates in 2018. Jesus Christ is God’s final and authoritative revelation, and God’s name must not be allowed to be used in vain to serve false political theologies.
Attempting to explain his last essay on the question concerning the Jews and the modern state of Israel, Pope Emeritus Benedict tried reminding all Zionists: “Without repeating all that I [said] in my [2018 Communio] text, I would like to reiterate my thesis [from the 2018 Communio essay], 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” [Letter to Rabbi Folger in 2018 (emphasis added)]. Nevertheless, and striking a conciliar tone to all the Zionist Jews he upset, Benedict acknowledged God’s merciful permittance of a state in 1948.
He offered that the 1948 state could be seen as a sign of God’s ongoing faithfulness to the Old Testament patriarchs and the Jewish people in general “beloved for the sake of their forefathers” (Rom 11:28b). After the horrors of WWII many hoped that the hour of mercy to Jews would lead to Jewish and Zionist acceptance of the one true Messiah, Jesus the Christ. God’s ways are above our ways. Benedict’s friendly reflection was not a support of “theological” Zionism in any form, but on the contrary was in the context of Saint Augustine’s thought (per his Communio essay p. 169) and the previous secular or “political” Zionism of the early 20th Century.
The ending of Pope Emeritus Benedict’s last theological essay on this matter was poignant: “To all, Scripture says, ‘if we endure, we shall also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us. If we are faithless, he remains faithful – for he cannot deny himself’ (2 Tm 2:12f).” What does Christian faithfulness in witness to Christ mean today when the last Catholic Church in Gaza is shelled by Israelis, and Palestinian Christians are murdered by snipers and injured by Zionists who claim Gaza belongs to them by divine right?
What about the innocent Muslims and the most poor and vulnerable? Christ warned, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). Accidents or not, the Jewish settlers have no divine mandates, and the Geneva Conventions are not optional. Rhetorically speaking, how are sniper “kill shots” of old women and children, testified to by countless medical professionals, merely accidental?
What does faithfulness mean when Palestinian Christians or Muslims in the West Bank are forcefully removed from their homes by violent Jewish Zionists who claim the West Bank belongs to them by divine right? And, American Catholic and Baptist politicians cooperate in the removal of sanctions from the illegal settlers?
When the Church of Rome is free to speak up and take action to witness to the Gospel – and Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and prophets – what should it say? It could begin by clarifying the relation of the Church as the true Israel [cf. Lumen Gentium #9.3] to the 1948 state of Israel. It can reaffirm what Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church #9.3 actually taught: the Church is the “new Israel.” It can clarify why there is no longer a divine mandate – since Christ’s Ascension and the destruction of the Second Temple – for Jewish Zionists to take Palestine [see Part I].
The Pope has many strong instruments for action that can be employed. He has a Secretary of State to expose nations which have removed sanctions from the illegal Israeli settlers or re-empowered them. He can continually demand the state of Israel live up to its founding obligations within international law, including the Geneva Conventions. He can address nations who violate Palestinian rights, those who supply arms to Israel when those nations’ own laws forbid transfer of weapons during war crimes. The Pope can judge laws and moral obligations.
Additionally, the Pope has ambassadors or nuncios to speak up in every country and at the United Nations to defend U.N. representatives and members of the International Criminal Court. Many such members are being threatened for exposing ethnic cleansing, militarized rape of prisoners, and genocidal intent of religious/theological Zionists. The Pope’s ambassadors and nuncios can ask bishops conferences to properly relate and share the Church’s position against Zionist claims of divine mandates to take Palestinian lands. Most Jews around the world condemn current Israeli Zionist crimes and so should all Christian bishops.
The issue of this essay is not whether members of militant Islam are committing crimes, because Christians already don’t support their crimes as having divine mandates. The issue is that Christian Zionism is running cover for crimes by illegal Israeli settlers and their illegal occupations through false claims or prophecies of divine mandates. It is abetted by Christian politicians who need correction, and this is a problem among Catholics in America, too.
The false forms of Christian Zionism which embraced theological Zionism must be addressed to prevent antisemitism from rising further and to prevent Christian apostasy.
READ: ‘No strategy’ in Gaza? Former Israeli officials denounce Netanyahu’s ‘futile war’
Most importantly, as vicar of Christ, the Pope holds the mighty power of the pen and the sword of the Spirit. The Pope can write encyclicals to confirm the true faith and condemn officially the errors of any forms of “theological” Zionism that claim divine mandates. Such false mandates are misleading modern Christians and leading to the senseless death and displacement of millions. The Catholic Christian world, along with all who love Jesus Christ, would be helped by an encyclical to see through all the false media propaganda.
Ignorant Catholic politicians will be without excuse in their policies and false Christian pastors will be exposed. There is clearly a problem that must be addressed when even Catholics support alleged “divine” mandates which are contrary to Christianity.
Pope Leo can reunite Christians in the true faith of Jesus as the telos of the law (cf. Rom 10:4) and he can do this in union with all patriarchs of the ancient sees. Violations of the natural law, divine law, and international law are the rightful territory of popes and patriarchs. It is their lands, their peoples, and their properties which have been affected and to which they have an additional divine mandate to love even those who do not love them. This is accomplished by speaking the truth in love. To them belongs the power and mandate to “bind and loose” (Mt 16:19; 18:18). It is other political leaders who must stay in their own lanes before claiming divine mandates.
Lastly, the Vatican, along with all bishops, can gather the nations for a two-state solution through its neutrality, dedication to international law, and respect for Jews and Arabs.
Part I of the series, “Second Temple Israel lost its mandate. Now the Church possesses it,” can be found HERE. The Introduction can be found HERE.
Reprinted with permission from Deification in Christ.