One of the most committed Zionists I have ever met is a Catholic priest from Southeast Asia. We almost argued once, because he is considerably more pro-Netanyahu than I am.

While living in Spain, I met many conservative Catholics affiliated with Vox, Spain’s right-wing party. None were antisemitic. None had any love for the jihadist den known as “Palestine,” universally perceived in conservative Spanish circles as a left-wing cause championed by their socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. I bring up Spain because what I saw there is not an anomaly. It is the norm. Across Catholic Europe, the right is pro-Israel — often passionately so. Portugal’s Chega, Italy’s Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, the National Rally in France, Austria’s FPÖ. Hungary’s Orbán, when the ICC issued its absurd arrest warrant for Netanyahu, invited the Israeli prime minister to Budapest and pulled Hungary out of the court.

Latin America tells the same story. Paraguay’s President Peña, a devout Catholic, reopened his country’s embassy in Jerusalem and delivered a speech at the Knesset, speaking of Israelis and Paraguayans as sister peoples who both know what it means to face annihilation — a reference to the War of the Triple Alliance, when Paraguay lost most of its population. Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz recently renewed diplomatic relations with Israel after a two-year rupture. And then there is Chile, the most remarkable case of all, as it is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora outside the Arab world. José Antonio Kast, a Catholic father of nine and lifelong conservative, won the presidency in a landslide after running explicitly on reversing Boric’s anti-Israel tantrum. Kast had called the recall of Chile’s ambassador to Israel “a shame for Chile” and pointed out that Hamas itself celebrated the decision. He took office on March 11.

Look at the full picture; the pattern is overwhelming. In every majority-Catholic country on earth where a serious right-wing party exists, that party is pro-Israel. Conservative Catholics worldwide recognize “Palestine” for what it is: a leftist and Islamist cause hostile to Christianity, hostile to Western values, and strategically aligned with everything the conservative right opposes — from socialist internationalism to the global jihad. They see Israel as a natural ally. An outpost of Western civilization that shares their enemies and grasps the stakes.

So why is the American picture so different?

A small but noisy cluster of ostensibly Catholic influencers — almost all of them recent converts — are trying to mainstream a version of Catholicism that is anti-Zionist, conspiratorial, and theologically warped. Their version of the faith has no counterpart anywhere in the real Catholic world. None. It exists online, mostly in America, and its origins trace to something far more sinister than Rome.

You know the names. Candace Owens converted in 2024 and has since called Israel a “demonic state,” flirted with blood libel, cast doubt on the Holocaust, promoted a 19th-century antisemitic pamphlet, and accused Jews of orchestrating the slave trade. Nick Fuentes wraps his open Jew-hatred in the language of Catholic tradition — he has praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust, called for Jews to be executed, and says he supports “Catholic monarchy” and admires both the Inquisition and the Taliban (“in a good way,” as he put it). And Carrie Prejean Boller, the former beauty queen turned Catholic convert, showed up to a hearing of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission — a hearing convened specifically to address antisemitism — wearing a Palestinian flag pin, hijacked the proceedings to declare that “Catholics do not embrace Zionism,” revived the deicide charge the Church formally rejected sixty years ago, and defended Owens on the record. She was promptly removed from the Commission.

What ties them together, apart from the recency of their conversions, is the claim that their anti-Jewish posture is Catholic teaching. But the Church they invoke does not agree with them. The Vatican recognized Israel in 1993. John Paul II called Jews “our elder brothers in the faith of Abraham.” Nostra Aetate declared God’s gifts and calling to the Jewish people “irrevocable” and condemned antisemitism “directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” The subsequent popes reiterated all of it. Just yesterday, Bishop Robert Barron — who sits on the same Religious Liberty Commission from which Prejean Boller was ejected — responded publicly to her weeks of complaining that she’d been fired for her Catholic beliefs. He called the claim “absurd” and “simply preposterous,” and pointed out that the Catholic position includes an unequivocal acknowledgment that “the state of Israel has a right to exist.” That should have settled the matter. It won’t, of course, because facts are not what this crowd is trafficking in.

The anti-Jewish Catholicism that Owens, Fuentes, and Prejean Boller are peddling does not come from any living Catholic tradition. I have looked for it. I lived in Catholic Spain; it wasn’t there. I have friends across Catholic Latin America — in Chile, Paraguay, Argentina — and it’s not there either. Catholic Italy, France, Portugal, Hungary: nowhere. My Southeast Asian priest friend would find it bewildering. This strain of thought exists almost exclusively in the American online ecosystem, among people who discovered Catholicism roughly five minutes ago and immediately weaponized it against Jews.

So where does it actually come from?

I do not use the phrase lightly: Islamist psy-op. Watch the rhetorical trick. These converts argue against “Christian Zionism” — the Protestant dispensationalist theology that treats the modern State of Israel as the direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The Catholic Church does not share that theology, and never has. Fine. Then comes the pivot: since the Church rejects Christian Zionism, they insist, Catholics must reject Zionism as such. This is a deliberate conflation. Zionism has nothing to do with theology. It is the recognition of a Jewish right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. I myself do not ground my Zionism on any religious text. Orbán doesn’t. Kast doesn’t. Peña doesn’t. Herzl, the founder of Zionism, certainly didn’t. The millions of conservative Catholics worldwide who back Israel are making a civilizational argument, not a dispensationalist one. By collapsing the distinction between a specific Protestant doctrine and the basic political legitimacy of the Jewish state, these influencers manufacture a theological permission structure for antisemitism. Convince a newly devout Catholic that supporting Israel is sinful — that it contradicts the teachings of the Church — and you’ve achieved something that no amount of campus activism or UN resolutions ever could. You’ve turned a natural ally of the Jewish people into an adversary.

You don’t have to look hard for the fingerprints. The obsession with AIPAC, the language of “Zionist supremacy,” the casual resurrection of medieval libels, the framing of Palestinian suffering as a specifically Christian concern — it all echoes talking points refined in Tehran and Doha and distributed through Islamist influence networks targeting Western audiences for years. When Prejean Boller was removed from the Religious Liberty Commission, CAIR — the Council on American-Islamic Relations, proscribed as a terrorist organization in the UAE and in the US states of Texas and Florida — rushed to commend her for “encouraging Muslim-Christian-Jewish solidarity.” Prejean Boller publicly praised CAIR right back. The sole Muslim member of the commission resigned in solidarity with her.

The good news is that the real Catholic world isn’t buying any of it. Kast is restoring Chile’s ties with Israel. Peña speaks of Israel as a sister nation. Orbán treated the ICC warrant as an insult to be answered with defiance. And just two months ago, Netanyahu hosted lawmakers from Vox, the National Rally, and Austria’s FPÖ at his office in Jerusalem and told them plainly that Israelis and Europeans were allies in “a decisive struggle for the future of the world.” That language — civilizational alliance, shared enemies, common stakes — is how the real Catholic right talks about Israel. It has nothing to do with dispensationalism and everything to do with a clear-eyed reading of the world.

The American aberration will pass. Influencers burn bright and burn out. What will endure is the deep and growing alliance between the Catholic right worldwide and the Jewish state — held together by a shared understanding of what the West is, what threatens it, and what it takes to defend it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)