Standing Against Hate: Catholics, Jews and the Story That Holds Us Together
- Guest Contributor
- Oct 8
- 5 min read
By Matt Walker
“For the first time in 50 years, antisemitism routinely appears on American streets and in America’s public places.”
Those words may sound like they belong in a history book. Instead, they opened a public discussion held last month at the University of Colorado in Boulder (CU).
The urgency was not theoretical. On June 1, a group walking Boulder’s 16th Street Mall in support of hostages taken during the Oct. 2023 attack on Israel was ambushed by a man wielding a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails. Eight were wounded, and 82-year-old Karen Diamond later died from her burns. This attack came just weeks after a firebombing of the Pennsylvania governor’s residence and the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., two tragedies which underscored the deadly persistence of antisemitic violence.
Against this backdrop, CU’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization convened concerned Coloradans, students and faculty, to hear Catholic and Jewish leaders reflect on the modern resurgence of antisemitism — and how faith, history and solidarity point to hope.
The Pope Who Defended the Jews
George Weigel, syndicated Denver Catholic columnist and biographer of Pope St. John Paul II, addressed these growing threats from the Catholic perspective. He noted that for John Paul II, defending Jews was not an abstract teaching, but an intensely personal conviction formed by childhood friendships in his hometown of Wadowice, where one in five residents was Jewish.
“Young Karol Wojtyła had many Jewish friends as a boy and a teenager. Some of them remained his friends for life. Others perished in the Shoah [Holocaust],” Weigel said. “The Second World War, this cauldron of hatred and violence, was the most formative experience of Karol Wojtyła’s life. And it was through that experience that … he came to the decision to dedicate himself to the defense of human dignity and freedom through the priesthood of the Catholic Church.”
That lifelong defense left a profound mark on both Catholics and Jews. After the saintly pope’s death, Rabbi Michael Shudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, wrote: “For the past 2,000 years, no one did so much for Jewish-Christian dialogue and reconciliation as John Paul II. He taught us in a very special way what it means to love all people, all God's creatures. The world has lost an important moral authority, his moral compass. Poland has lost its greatest teacher and hero. The Jews have lost their best friend and defender.”
Weigel urged the audience to follow that Christlike example with clarity today.
“The range of acceptable political language and ideas with respect to antisemitic language, tropes, images and concepts has been opened far too wide over the past several years, and it is our solemn duty to slam the window shut,” he said.
Proof in History — and in Providence
Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, senior rabbi of America’s oldest Jewish congregation and director of the Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, joined Weigel in offering historical and theological insights. In his remarks, Rabbi Soloveichik aimed to answer why the hatred of Jews has persisted across millennia.
He pointed to the discovery of a 3,200-year-old Egyptian stele listing one pharaoh's victory of many nations, including the total destruction of Israel. This “obituary” is the oldest known reference to the Jewish people outside of the Bible itself, yet over 3,000 years later, it is the other nations mentioned on that stone that have vanished, while Israel still remains.
“This stele instructs us not only about the history of the past but the miracles of the present,” Rabbi Soloveichik explained. “We could see this endurance as a sign of wonder, as a message from God. But there are those who ask, ‘Why are the Jews still here?’ Not with awe, but with envy and hatred. They look not to providence, but to conspiratorial calumnies. ‘It must be,’ they say, ‘because Jews control the markets or the media.’ This is the sort of thinking that fuels a fire that sees in every Jew an enemy.”
The Biblical Story as the World’s Story
For both speakers, the “red thread” was clear: history is not random. It is God’s story — and his people’s story lies at the center.
“John Paul II’s approach to Jews and Judaism was shaped by the conviction that the world’s story and the biblical story are not stories running on parallel tracks,” Weigel said. “The biblical story is the world’s story rightly understood.”
That story, he explained, is not cyclical repetition but a journey with purpose — beginning with the Exodus, fulfilled in Christ, and carried forward in the Church’s witness to dignity and freedom.
Rabbi Soloveichik echoed that hope especially in America by recalling George Washington’s correspondence after becoming president. The new country’s many faith traditions each wrote the new president a letter, including three separate Jewish communities. Washington replied to each, including one Savannah Jewish community, with words still striking today:
“May the same wonder-working deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors planted them in the promised land — whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation — still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people.”
“In other words,” Rabbi Soloveichik said, “Washington is looking to the God-ordained story of biblical Israel and saying to the Jews of America, ‘Your story inspires our story!’”
Standing Together in the Light of Eternity
The Boulder gathering, held on a day of fresh violence — from the assassination of Charlie Kirk to a Colorado school shooting tied to online Nazi propaganda — was undeniably sobering. Yet in recalling John Paul II’s friendship, the endurance of the Jewish people and America’s founding vision, speakers pointed not only to threats but to hope.
History is not merely a series of random events happening in succession. It is a story guided by God. And in that story, Jews and Catholics alike are called to be witnesses to dignity, lights to the nations and defenders of freedom.
“John Paul II's fervent wish that Jews and Christians be a ‘blessing to one another,’ as he put it, was not only focused on the pain of the past, but on the possibilities of the future,” Weigel said. “So that the world, in learning its true story, might recover its moral sanity. So that the peoples whose basic moral code comes from Sinai might be lights to the nations, witnesses to human dignity, and defenders of human freedom. So that together Jews and Christians might remind the world that history is his story, God's story, and that our human dignity is ennobled, not diminished by taking the same path through history taken by the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus.”
