One hundred years ago my wife’s uncle owned a small shop in Slovakia. He and his family were among the 100 Jewish families that lived in the largely Catholic village of Zborov. Every year during Holy Week (the week preceding Easter Sunday) he had to close and board up the shop because it was a common practice for the Catholic neighbors to attack and sometimes burn down Jewish property. The perpetrators rationalized their violent antisemitic behavior as just punishment for the Jewish people who crucified Jesus 1,900 years earlier. This mythical collective guilt was normative Catholic theology for more than 1,500 years. During the long painful experience of Jews in Christian Europe, no idea was more responsible for the humiliation, persecution, and murder of Jews than this toxic charge of deicide. 

Easter 2026 is now behind us, but antisemitism remains at tsunami proportions and some of it still emanates from self-identified Catholics. Tik-Tok, X, YouTube, and Instagram provide convenient platforms for personalities like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Carrie Prejean Boller, all of whom parade their Catholic bona fides to justify their noxious rants about Jews and Israel. Worse still, their public antisemitism has boosted their popularity: They now have almost 9 million followers. Being publicly antisemitic is now chic and profitable. Is anything “new........

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