By Catholic teaching does not explicitly oppose Zionism, the movement supporting Jewish self‑determination in a homeland in Israel.
Former Miss California Carrie Prejean Boller, a member of President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, said she doesn’t embrace Zionism because of her Catholic faith, despite Catholic teaching that does not oppose Israel as a nation or the Jewish people.
“I am a Catholic, and Catholics don’t embrace Zionism,” Boller said at the fifth hearing of the Trump-appointed Religious Liberty Commission focusing on the topic of antisemitism in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 9.
Catholic teaching does not explicitly oppose Zionism, the movement supporting Jewish self‑determination in a homeland in Israel. Israel is seen as God’s chosen people through whom God revealed himself and prepared the way for the coming of Jesus Christ. The Catholic Church universally condemns antisemitism. The Church recognizes Israel’s fundamental right to exist.
Boller issued several social media posts after the hearing. She wrote: “Forcing people to affirm Zionism on a ‘Religious Liberty’ Commission is the opposite of religious freedom. I will not resign, and I will not be bullied for following my Catholic conscience.”
The commission and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Yeshiva University President Rabbi Ari Berman said at the hearing that while one does not have to support the policies of the Israeli government, “by denying the rights of Jews to have their own state while not saying the same for any other people, that is a double standard hypocrisy and antisemitism.”
Both Berman and Yitzchok Frankel, a law student and former defendant in a case against Regents of the University of California over anti-Jewish protests that took place in wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, said “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
Boller, author of “Still Standing: The Untold Truth of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, and Political Attacks,” countered that “as a Catholic,” she disagrees with the notion that “the new modern state of Israel has any biblical prophecy meaning at all.” She repeatedly pressed the Jewish panelists on whether her views made her an antisemite before the commission’s chair, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, halted the exchange.
Boller told EWTN News that members of the commission asked her to resign a few months ago but that she refused. She also said several members asked to meet with her before the hearing to discourage her from making her planned remarks. “They were seeing what I was going to say in the hearing, trying to silence me,” she said. “I told them I won’t be silenced.”
Response from other Catholic members
Later in the hearing, panelist Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, joined the dialogue on Catholic teaching regarding the Jewish people and read passages from both Nostra Aetate and the writings of Pope Benedict XVI.
Anderson cited the following passage, which states that while “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ,” it is the case that “what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” The paragraph further states that the Jewish people should not be regarded as rejected by God “as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”
Anderson called on Father Thomas Ferguson of Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia, who sits on the panel’s advisory board of religious leaders, to provide further analysis on the Catholic Church’s position on Jewish-Catholic relations.
“About the responsibility for the death of Jesus,” Ferguson said, “he’s not dead. He’s alive, he is risen.”
The pastor emphasized the Church’s view that Jesus gave up his life freely and sacrificially. He also noted that, in alignment with the passage cited by Anderson from Nostra Aetate, Jesus “made an atonement as an offering for the forgiveness of the sins of every person, every time and place.”
“That’s how Catholics understand who is responsible for the death of Jesus on the cross: It’s all of us,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson said: “If you are seeking to know God through the Scriptures of the Old Testament and the New Testament,” it is not possible to be Christian and antisemitic, “because we have the same father and faith.” The more Catholics embrace their responsibility to know God through the Scriptures, he said, “the more we will know our common patrimony.”
Catholic reaction
“Carrie Prejean Boller does not speak for the Catholic Church,” Simone Rizkallah, director of the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism and host of the “Beyond Rome” podcast, which seeks to reconnect Catholics to their roots in the Near East, told EWTN. “Her claim that Catholics do not embrace Zionism is not merely mistaken — it is reckless, historically uninformed, and deeply misleading to both Catholics and the wider public.”
Rizkallah pointed out that the recognition of Israel’s right to exist fundamentally amounts to “precisely what Zionism means,” though Catholics themselves may not always be accustomed to using the word formally.
“Catholics who affirm Israel’s right to exist and to self-determination — whether or not they personally use the label — are, in essence, affirming that same principle,” she said. “The Church is therefore neither anti-Zionist nor, certainly, antisemitic; she explicitly condemns antisemitism and calls the faithful to reject it in all its forms.”
At the same time, Rizkallah emphasized that the Catholic Church does not define Zionism using the same “theological frameworks found in some strands of Protestant Christian Zionism.” Namely, she said, “Catholic theology does not teach that the modern state of Israel represents the direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy or a predetermined eschatological event.”
Rizkallah described the Church’s position as “both clear and nuanced,” recognizing the modern state of Israel’s political legitimacy, but not grounding it in prophetic claims.
Ultimately, she concluded, “precision matters. When public figures speak carelessly about the Church’s teaching, they do not merely express a personal opinion — they create confusion, distort Catholic doctrine, and undermine serious efforts at Catholic-Jewish understanding. Catholics deserve better than slogans masquerading as theology.”
The Religious Liberty Commission has had four previous hearings on protecting religious freedom in the U.S., religious freedom in education, and religious freedom in the military.
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EWTN really needs to stop hiring vapid twenty-somethings who seem to write about things they only poorly grasp or provide them with better supervisory review.
Reducing Zionism to “supporting Jewish self‑determination in a homeland in Israel” is a distortive abbreviation of the movement.
Theodore Herzl, the atheist lawyer-influenced by the Anglican Zionist William Henry Hechler-the father of Zionism sought and received an audience with Pius X in 1904. He journalized the encounter. He called the Swiss guards “lackeys” and seemed concerned about the Pope’s extension of his hand.
Otherwise, he described the Pope as gracious and amiable, but included some sleights against the Pope, perhaps because the Pope did not support the creation of a Jewish ethnostate. Herzl quoted him as follows:
“Yes, but we, and I as the head of the Church, cannot do this. There are two possibilities. Either the Jews will cling to their faith and continue to await the Messiah who, for us, has already appeared. In that case they will be denying the divinity of Jesus and we cannot help them. Or else they will go there without any religion, and then we can be even less favorable to them.”
Also:
“The Jewish religion was the foundation of our own; but it was superseded by the teachings of Christ, and we cannot concede it any further validity. The Jews, who ought to have been the first to acknowledge Jesus Christ, have not done so to this day.”
Now it’s no longer 1904 and the State of Israel is a fait accompli. Its creation has coincided with the slow extermination of Christianity in the Middle East and a resurgent, militant and imperious Islam. Of course what is now being debated is the nature and extent of its borders.
In an ideal world, Israel should be like any other nation, it should be able to survive on its own, but like Europe, it is largely a protectorate of the United States that runs an elaborate welfare apparatus because we subsidize its military. Unlike Europe, it is not inviting an invasion of Muslims.
But there is a second aspect of Zionism.
“Zionism is both a struggle for land and a demographic race; in essence, the aspiration for a territory with a Jewish majority.”
Ben-Ami, Shlomo (2007). Scars of War, Wounds of Peace. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-532542-3.
She claims nothing doctrinally to explicitly oppose Zionism. That’s a little like claiming Christ never explicitly opposed homosexuality. Unexamined is there is nothing to require Zionism and a person can in good faith draw from what Piux X said.
I’ll leave that to the Evangelical dispensationalists some such as Ted Cruz (who as a politician is probably coreless) or those that think they can immanentize the eschaton. John Grondelski had a great piece on the concept in the National Catholic Reporter, November 22, 2020.
and the Hannity freebasers on this board.
In the Middle East, it is the Christians who are slowing being extirpated and whose right to exist and have a homeland that is never acknowledged, as they are squeezed in a vise between to warring factions who may some day unite in opposition to the Incarnation.
Pitch Fork Rebel…
I hate to break it to you buddies but St Pius X also said the Church can’t stop them from going to the Levant but he said he would sent Priests to teach the Faith to them and Baptize them. Where are the Jew hating & Israel hating conspiracy nutters on that? There are 1000 Hebrew Catholics in Israel there are 30,000 Protestant Messianic Jews? Why? Cause they are literally taking Jesus to the Jews (as his holiness St Pius X wanted) rather then sucking up to a bunch of Jihadist yobs. We the True Church suck at it. Which is shameful.
Also Church does condemn homosexuality but she has never condemned Zionism so live with it.
The Catholic Church formally condemns
Thank God for this woman who is telling the truth about Zionism and its genocide against the Palestinian people.
I think it’s a shame she said that.
And there is no “genocide”. If Israel had wanted to create a genocide in Gaza they could have accomplished that in a few hours. That’s not how Israel or a moral nation operates.
I think there is an exaggeration going on with using legal diplomatic relations of Vatican to endorse particular aspirations of the correspondent state. A conventio is simply an establishment of arranged formal ongoing regular diplomatic meeting, between states, for meeting on/with rules of practice of diplomatic relations and ways interchange set in as (pre-)agreed terms and accepted customary (known) usages. There is a link to the particular document up there, read it with care.