(LifeSiteNews) — A roundtable of Catholic scholars explained Friday why Zionism, an ideology that maintains Jews have a “right” to the Holy Land, is incompatible with Catholicism.
Journalist Matt Gaspers, founder of Veritatis Vox, gathered Professor Matthew Tsakanikas, retired Lt. Col. Gary Taphorn, and LifeSiteNews journalist Patrick Delaney to discuss whether Zionism is supported by Scripture as well as dismantle U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s recent suggestion that to reject Zionism is to hold that God has “broken” his covenant with the Jews.
Dr. Tsakanikas stressed that Christian Zionism is a growing problem even in Catholic institutions, in large part because Israel is funding and commissioning thousands of pastors to spread Christian Zionism in the U.S. and around the world to “build up the image of Israel.”
He called this a “flood of false prophets targeting to drown out the Catholic voice,” noting that Zionist groups are now even penetrating Catholic institutions to spread their propaganda. For example, the “Christian Zionist” Philos Project is setting up conferences within Catholic institutions “in which they get everyone to stand with Israel” without mentioning the country’s leaders’ involvement in genocide.
Gaspers went on to highlight a recent statement from the Latin Patriarchs in the Holy Land in which they repudiated Zionism as well as Huckabee’s response. The patriarchs affirmed that “The Catholic Church rejects any interpretation that seeks to claim the land of Palestine for the Jewish people based on the Torah as promoted by Christian Zionism in the U.S.”
Huckabee then tweeted a defense of Christian Zionism in which he suggested that rejection of Zionism amounts to the belief that God has “broken” his covenant with the Jews.
“The thought that God is even capable of breaking a covenant is anathema to those of us who embrace Holy Scripture as the authority of the church,” Huckabee wrote on January 20. “If God can or would break His covenant with the Jews, then what hope would Christians have that He would keep His covenant with us?” he added.
Gaspers suggested Huckabee’s claim was comparable with the “earliest heresy,” refuted by St. Ignatius of Antioch, that “the old covenant is still in force,” including the idea that “you need to observe the law of Moses in order to be saved.”
“It’s not a matter of God breaking a covenant. It’s a matter of the Jews breaking a covenant, you know, to be frank,” Gaspers said.
He went on to take apart another statement by Huckabee in an interview with NewsMax in which the ambassador stated that being a Zionist “simply means that you believe that the Jewish people have a divine right and frankly a geopolitical right to a homeland that they have lived in for almost 4,000 years.”
Gaspers examined Scripture to assess whether modern Jews indeed have a “divine right” to the Holy Land. He first pointed to a passage from Genesis 17, one of the foundations of the arguments of Christian Zionists:
God told Abraham, “I will establish my covenant between me and thee and between thy seed after thee in their generations, by a perpetual covenant: to be a God to thee, and to thy seed after thee. And I will give to thee, and to thy seed, the land of thy sojournment, all the land of Canaan for a perpetual possession, and I will be their God.”
Gaspers pointed out that St. Paul “actually gives us the correct interpretation of this passage,” when he clarifies that Abraham’s “seed” refers to Christ Jesus, and all “who are baptized in Him”: “To Abraham were the promises made and to his seed. He saith not, And to his seeds, as of many: but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. (Galatians 3:16)
Dr. Tsakanikas highlighted another example in which an Old Testament promise is fulfilled through Christ, whose New Covenant supersedes the Old Covenant. The book of Numbers declares that the “priesthood through Phinehas is a perpetual or everlasting covenant.” This “perpetual” priesthood is carried on and “superseded” by the priesthood of Jesus Christ, Dr. Tsakanikas noted.
By extension, Zionists are mistaken when they claim that God’s promise to “Israel” means modern Jews have a right to the land of Israel because it is Christians now who are the “true Jews,” the professor continued.
“Jews alone do not have the right to forcefully drive other people out of the land because Jesus is the king of Israel. He is the king of Judah. He is the true Israel,” Dr. Tsakanikas said.
“We Christians continue the true Judaism because we never lost the temple. It’s Jesus Christ. We still have a high priest, Jesus Christ. We still have a perpetual sacrifice, Jesus Christ. And we have a nation of priests, all who are baptized into Christ.”
Delaney stressed that Huckabee’s statement has “dangerous” consequences for the U.S. that are already being manifested. It “indicates that we are dangerously close to having a state religion in the U.S. and it’s the heresy of Zionism,” Delaney said.
He pointed out that already speech laws against “antisemitism” are being passed in different states that are “ordered towards the persecution of Catholicism,” because Catholicism is opposed to Zionism, and anti-Zionism is now commonly being interpreted as “antisemitism.”
Lt. Col. Taphorn affirmed, in response to Huckabee’s X statement, that “God did not break the covenant. It was the Jews who broke the covenant” and therefore lost their right to their Promised Land.
He compared the situation of post-Christ Jews with that of the tenants in Christ’s parable of the vineyard in which the tenants killed the son of the vineyard’s owner.
“So when the Jews failed to keep up … the vineyard in accordance with the rules of the game with the owner, they were expelled,” said Taphorn, going on to tell how this parable angered Jews “to the point where they were ready to kill Jesus because they knew he was talking about them.” Killing God’s own son is “the ultimate sin against the covenant,” he said. “And yet the Christian Zionists, it just goes in one ear and out the other. They just glaze over.”
In support of Delaney’s observation that the U.S. now has been permeated by Zionism to the point that Catholics are endangered, Dr. Tsakanikas pointed to a resolution in which the House of Representatives declared that it “Strongly condemn(s) and denounce(s) the drastic rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and around the world.” The resolution explicitly “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
“We as Catholics are being called antisemites if we don’t support what we can’t support, and that is religious or theological Zionism. So it’s an attack on Catholicism, right? It’s attack on Catholics,” Dr. Tsakanikas said.
Referencing Christ’s parable of the vineyard and its tenants in Matthew 21:33, he said that Jesus “warned them, if you will not accept my rule, you’ll be driven out of Jerusalem and God will have other tenants.”
“So, if someone’s prophesying and telling all the Jews, go back and take the land, It’s yours by divine right. You don’t have to listen to Jesus. Are they true prophets or false prophets … ?”
“A form of Zionism that claims divine right and a return to the land while refusing to recognize Jesus are the very false prophets of Jeremiah 27,” Dr. Tsakanikas declared.
Delaney went further and characterized the “hardcore Zionist movement” as “anti-Christ.”
This movement, and the Israel lobby in the U.S. have “fostered this sort of religious deal for this cause, which is at its heart anti-Christ,” Delaney said. “It’s seeking to undermine and overturn pretty much the entire world order that came as a result of the Incarnation of the Son of God, which made the world much more humane.”
One of the major results of this movement is “a war … which is an anti-Christ war, which prevents us from having peace in the Middle East,” Delaney said. Even worse, “it is executing a genocide.”
The arguments of these Catholic scholars are clearly supported by Pope St. Pius X, who in 1904 told Theodor Herzl regarding his efforts to gain Vatican support for a Jewish state in Palestine:
“We cannot give approval to this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we could never sanction it. The earth of Jerusalem, if it was not always holy, has been made holy by the life of Jesus Christ. I, as head of the church, cannot possibly say otherwise. The Jews have not recognized our Lord; we therefore cannot recognize the Jewish people.”
