Catholics: Hate for the Victim Should Have No Place in Our Politics

Prominent Republican officials and right-wing commentators are cheering on the persecution of Christians in the region where Jesus founded our Church. Some are making a public game of dehumanizing and threatening baptized Catholic immigrants from South America – our brethren. A pattern of defiance against our Holy Father Pope Leo XIV and our brave Catholic leaders in the Holy Land has also emerged on the political right.

It’s time for Catholics to tell our political allies that the alliance will not last if these offenses against our Church and teachings continue.

As I’ve written before, the rash of anti-Palestinian hate that has overtaken much of the political right since 2023 is no matter of indifference to Christians.

It’s bad enough that Holy Family Church, the only Catholic parish in Gaza, has been mercilessly targeted by the Israel Defense Forces. But worse, when my organization the Vulnerable People Project advocates for our correligionists in Gaza, we are inundated by online jeers and dehumanizing rhetoric from supposedly conservative Christians in the U.S. Even Gaza’s children ought to be shot, they say again and again.

And it’s not only a matter of what happens overseas.

Last week, a Chicago-area family mourned for a 13-year-old Palestinian boy they say the IDF shot dead while he played with friends in the West Bank.

Just a few months before, an American landlord was sentenced for stabbing a Palestinian-American mother and her toddler son numerous times, killing the boy and leaving the woman mangled.

The landlord justified butchering his tenants by using bigoted talking points that are all too familiar to me, calling his Palestinian victims “infested rats” and referencing Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. It’s especially chilling given how often I see that same kind of language in comments under posts my Catholic apostolate publishes online.

Stories like this are a drop in the ocean when seen in the context of the mass murders happening in Gaza. One IDF soldier told an Israeli publication last week that even the aid sites his government runs along the border have become “killing fields,” with soldiers given orders to fire on unarmed civilians. Dozens have died at those distribution centers alone – and even those who approach them are themselves survivors of untold massacres deeper inside Gaza.

But the American-connected stories do help us to see that the bigoted comments of right-wing leaders in the U.S. are clearly not consequence-free. How could they be? There is an unholy current – a kind of power – in spiritually participating in the ongoing violence of Israeli soldiers against Palestinians – despite its universal condemnation by the Church from the Vatican to the Holy Land.

Republican Rep. Randy Fine, R-FL, recently called for two nuclear bombs to be dropped on Gaza. He has also called Palestinians and their advocates “demons” who must be “put down by any means necessary.”

Neoconservative public intellectual Douglas Murray has similarly called Palestinians a “people of death” who represent a noxious threat to the whole world.

There is no mistaking the overlap between that kind of dehumanization and the almost identical unbridled hate we also see against South American migrants. And it should not be lost on any Catholic that the Faith of our fathers is the one common denominator between the ancient Christian communities of Palestine and the migrants of South America.

One person makes that connection clearer than perhaps anyone else: the ruthlessly cruel pundit Laura Loomer. She calls Palestinians “inherently violent people” who are “unworthy” of being spared. She directly mocks our pope – who has repeatedly spoken up on behalf of the persecuted in Gaza.

This week, she’s spreading photographs of a blue-collar worker wearing a Palestinian-style keffiyeh. She calls it a “terrorist rag,” and is campaigning to get the worker’s employer to fire him and – even more drastically – federal officials to investigate and potentially deport him.

Perhaps she’s aware that Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Roman Catholic Church’s highest authority in the Holy Land, is known for wearing a keffiyah as well – in solidarity with the persecuted in Gaza. Last year, in fact, the Cardinal traveled there to visit the grave of a woman shot dead by an IDF sniper on church grounds.

Would Loomer and others whom Catholics are supposed to think of as on our team also target Pizzaballa for investigation should he visit our country? Or would we do to him what Loomer, with clearly malevolent excitement, advocates doing to as many South American migrants as possible?

In an eerie call-back to the early Church, she has repeatedly fantasized this week about feeding these mostly Christian people to wild beasts.

https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1939831588902109629

https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1939829283683221960

It’s one thing for a political movement to become corrupted by vengefulness and petty hatreds. But when the movement is one that Catholics have cast our lot with, we owe it to Our Lord to make very clear we will not hand Him over to the crowd.

It’s “natural” for us fallen creatures to split into tribes, to compete for resources, and to have more spontaneous empathy for those who look like ourselves and share our beliefs than we do for the stranger. Natural, even if – in light of Our Lord’s incarnation, death, and resurrection for all – wrong.

But when we see supposed conservatives actively campaigning to make our movement into a regime that systematically targets the Body of Christ, we have a duty to witness to our faith’s claims against that evil.

That time is now.