Why Jews Worry About the Next Pope

Pope Francis at Western Wall. WikiCommons 2014.

The bells of St Peter’s have tolled for Pope Francis, and a billion Catholics bow in prayer. The Jewish world, meanwhile, cranes its neck toward the Sistine Chapel with some anxiety. We have no votes in the conclave, yet the choice of the next pontiff may decide whether Western civilization rediscovers its backbone or drifts farther into moral vertigo. For two thousand years the papacy has been the West’s loudest spiritual amplifier. When that microphone crackles, the feedback reaches every synagogue from Warsaw to Los Angeles.

Paradoxical? Certainly. A people once burned by Christendom now listens for Rome to defend it. But history zigzags. Secular liberalism, stripped of metaphysics, has proved too brittle to resist the new barbarisms—radical Islamism, resurgent antisemitism, ideological iconoclasm. A confident Christianity remains the only force large enough, morally and numerically, to stiff-arm those tides. Whether the next pope provides that confidence ought to concern us all.

“Killing in the name of God is satanic.

Francis recognized jihadist carnage—after the 2015 Paris massacres he called the murders “blasphemy” and thundered the line above. He condemned ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram—name the acronym, he issued the anathema. Yet he insisted just as firmly,

“It is not right to identify Islam with violence.

Pastoral heart, diplomatic caution. Critics retorted that pastoral fog can shroud a sniper’s nest; if one refuses to describe a civilizational clash, how can one defend Western civilization?

“Migrants are not a danger — they are in danger.

That maxim framed his 2016 visit to Lesbos, where he flew a dozen Syrian Muslims back to Rome and urged Europe to treat mass migration as Christian duty. Admirers applauded the charity; skeptics warned that lax borders import Islamist zeal and antisemitic attitudes into cities already trembling. Jewish communities in Paris, Malmö, and Brussels have watched that warning grow teeth.

Islamism is no longer at the gates; it holds NGO grants and PhDs. Antisemitism goose-steps through western boulevards wearing the sash of “de-colonisation.” Israel—more than half the world’s Jews in one tiny rectangle—is smeared as a planetary villain; Jewish students are hounded for a Star of David; synagogues require armed guards. In such a storm, a pope’s clarity can steady parliaments and pulpits alike. Language precedes law, and law buttresses liberty. A pope who names evil without euphemism grants every mayor and minister moral cover to act.

That clarity wavered in Francis’s final years. After Hamas’s 7 October 2023 rampage—babies burned, families butchered—he pleaded for restraint “on both sides,” refusing, for days, even to utter the word Hamas. When he finally invited Israeli hostage families and Palestinian mourners to the Vatican, he called their pain “a mirror,” collapsing the vital distinction between calculated murder and collateral tragedy. Even the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See lamented the meeting’s “false symmetry.”

In December 2024, a Bethlehem Nativity scene swaddled the Infant Jesus in a black-and-white keffiyeh, now chic among Western activists cheering Hamas. Jews wondered how anti-Israel agitprop had slipped past the Church’s watchmen.

This is not a plea for shared creeds—merely for shared moral backbone. We seek a Church that knows the difference between justice and jihad, charity and surrender. We need a pontiff who can proclaim, without throat-clearing, that Hamas is a death-cult, that torching synagogues is an abomination, that Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable, and that Western civilization—born of Sinai’s conscience and Athens’s reason—deserves preservation, not perpetual apology.

The Jewish covenant is never revoked.” — Pope Benedict XVI

Such words cost little breath but move continents. When John Paul II knelt before Auschwitz’s Death Wall, antisemitism lost a century of oxygen in a single photograph. The next pontiff inherits a harsh landscape—drones and missiles rain on Kyiv, Christians are hunted from Nigeria to Pakistan, adhāns echo louder than church-bells in Europe’s capitals, Israel stands almost alone against jihadist death-cults, and tenured professors cheer it all from the safety of their lecterns. In such an hour, hesitation will read not as nuance, but as surrender.

Time remains, and the Church still commands vast reservoirs of moral credit and diplomatic reach. With a few plain truths—the sort the liberal elite dares not whisper—Rome can rally Catholics in Manila, Pentecostals in Lagos, evangelicals in Texas, even agnostics in Berlin. The cardinals gathering beneath Michelangelo’s fresco should grasp the stakes: elect a pastor who will defend the flock, or a concierge who will soothe the wolves.

Jews, beset by Jew-haters from Twelver Shiʿites to Sunni jihadists, from the woke Left to the isolationist Right, pray they choose the former—for their own sakes and for Christians everywhere. So much hinges on a Bishop of Rome with zeal and moral courage, a shepherd who knows that protecting the lambs requires naming the predators. The wolves are already inside the pasture—and the world is watching.