As the dust settles from the election of Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, the world is learning about the person he is and speculating about what kind of papacy he will have. Those of us who study Catholic-Jewish relations are especially interested in the path he will take, particularly since he has a very thin record of working with Jews based on where he was stationed.

Apart from an article in JTA that mentioned that the new pope studied with Father John T. Pawlikowski—a pioneer who founded the Catholic-Jewish studies program at the Catholic Theological Union shortly after Nostra Aetate was issued and who subsequently served on the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—as well as some speculation that he is open-minded having grown up in Chicago, there is next to nothing in Leo XIV’s record on the relationship between the Church and the Jews.

One thing that many have chosen to focus on is his choice of papal name, Leo. Many in the Catholic world, including former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, have pointed to Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which the new pope himself confirmed on the first Saturday of his papacy. The papal document, which staked an ecclesiastical position on social questions regarding labor and the industrial revolution, is celebrated by many. What has not come up in the discussion of this name, this encyclical and the many others Leo XIII issued, is the antisemitism that arose from them, often unintentional, but always either ignored or stoked.

Leo XIII was pope when France was living out its first few decades of republican governance. The Church had enjoyed a Concordat with the French government since the time of Napoleon, but France was modernizing and wresting power away from the Church. During the nineteenth century—a time of unfettered capitalism, fear of Marxism, and the age of reason and laicization—the Church fought for its relevance and feared falling into desuetude.

Historian Alexander Sedgwick in a 1965 book about the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)