For Jews, the Name Leo Evokes a Dark Period of Antisemitism

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 Ralliement—the Church’s policy encouraging the faithful to adhere to the republic—asserts that Leo XIII was far from the modernist that many found him to be. Sedgwick reads Leo XIII’s encyclicals against the grain. By pointing out that Leo XIII’s preoccupation was restoring the prestige and glory of the Church, he sees the pontiff’s obsession with obedience and order. Sedgwick notes that the papal encyclicals Inscrutabili in 1878 and Rerum Novarum in 1891 view solutions to societal problems only through the Church. In Nobilissima Gallorum gens in 1884, Leo XIII lay the blame for France’s difficulties on excessive liberty and secret societies such as freemasons, saying that “there can be no prosperity in a state where religion has been extinguished.” In each of these papal documents, Sedgwick sees Leo XIII putting his mark on every facet of society, trying to exercise his control.

Despite wanting to retain control, he failed in a number of ways. One of these is when his encyclicals were misinterpreted by antisemitic forces within the French Church which historian Vicki Caron examines in an article she wrote about the far right-wing Catholic nationalist group, the Union Nationale. Per Caron,

It is true that the text of Rerum Novarum was in no way overtly antisemitic. But the encyclical’s condemnation of capitalist excesses as ‘omnivorous, devouring, and voracious’ usury was invariably interpreted as referring to Jews. The abbé Pascal published a French translation of the encyclical with a commentary that made this association explicit, and La Croix, too, claimed that it was merely following the Pope’s counsel when it condemned ‘modern usury or the Jewish system’ as ‘the principal cause of the economic and social ruins that accumulate daily.’ The Pope himself lent credence to these views when he told the journalist Séverine in 1892 that although the Church condemned racism and anti-Jewish violence, it nevertheless had ‘a mission to defend itself against every attempt at oppression.’ When asked specifically about the economic role of the ‘wealthy Jewish magnates,’ the Pope declared that the Church would always defend ‘the little folk, the humble, [and] the dispossessed.’

Regarding the papal encyclical Au Mileu des Sollicitudes, which codified Ralliement, local prelates again could not hide their antisemitism. Caron cites Monsignor François Xavier Gouthe-Soulard, Archbishop of Aix-en-Provence, as declaring “we are not living in a republic, but in free-masonry” in 1893. Gouthe-Soulard thought that Leo XIII had not wanted that Catholics adhere to the republic of masons and Jews, and that his papist brethren should have replaced, by legal means, everything about the republic they did not like by a Catholic republic. Despite Gouthe-Soulard being a conservative, his view was similar to more progressive, liberal clergy, such as Abbé Gayraud, who, in 1897, said, “the sympathies of Christian democracy go out to the Republic, not to the masonic and Jewish Republic, but to a Republic that we will infuse with Christian blood.”

More disturbing about Leo XIII’s legacy is how some historians have recorded—or not—the antisemitism that occurred during his papacy. Leo XIII presided over the Catholic Church during an unprecedented resurgence of antisemitism. Resistance to Ralliement and ascription to conspiracy theories about Jews culminated in the 1890s during the Dreyfus Affair. Pope Leo XIII can be seen, at best, as someone who turned a blind eye to antisemitism, thus enabling it to flourish. Several historians have tried to dismiss this antisemitism as secondary or a symptom of the time period, but Vicki Caron brought the receipts and takes them down one-by-one in her article. In one such example, she finds fault in Paul Duclos’ argument that the most antisemitic elements were the least religious. By noting the hundreds of priests who supported or were part of the Union Nationale and by citing statistics provided by historian Robert Byrnes who found that one-third of the antisemitic books published in the first quarter century of the Third Republic were written by priests, Caron shatters Duclos’ argument. She takes other historians to task and questions their motivations, writing, “Given how prominent Catholics were in the creation of the French antisemitic movement, we need to ask why so many historians have dismissed their antisemitism as a secondary phenomenon, something incidental and not really at the core of their concerns.” This has certainly changed the tone in the study of the Catholic Church in France and suggests that antisemitism is what drove both the history as it unfolded and the historians whose distortion of it is corrected by Caron.

Having said that, I have no doubt that Leo XIV is a good, earnest person and his first speech to the public in St. Peter’s Square about building bridges gives me hope. He is, after all, the leader of a church that has transformed its relationship with Jews since 1965 with Nostra Aetate and which has seen historic moments in every papacy including John Paul II’s note in the Western Wall committing to genuine brotherhood with Jews and Pope Francis’ opening of the Vatican Archives from the Holocaust-era years ahead of schedule as well as his ending the Mission to Jews. And, Leo XIV has taken some important first steps such as his letter to Rabbi Noam Marans of AJC, and subsequent meeting with Marans, David Michaels of B’Nai Brith, Rabbi Riccardo di Segni and other leaders of the Jewish community of Rome, and the Conference of European Rabbis.

As Pope Francis, Leo XIV’s immediate predecessor, noted, “the Church is not afraid of history.” It is therefore important to stay vigilant and fully examine the mistakes of the past so that they are not repeated. This is particularly crucial at a time of resurgent antisemitism similar to the period presided over by Leo XIII. That Leo lost the control he sought so hard to solidify, and the antisemitism that resulted was horrifying and impossible to stamp out until John XXIII and Paul VI initiated and implemented Nostra Aetate with the help of Jews like Jules Isaac. The new Leo needs to take firm action and quickly to strengthen the Catholic-Jewish relationship especially since his namesake stirs up a difficult history for those of us who are descended from or research the Jews who suffered the consequences of Leo XIII’s inaction on antisemitism.