The Jewish people have a long and painful memory of what happens when the world’s moral voices fall silent in the face of evil. From the gas chambers of Auschwitz to the terror tunnels of Gaza, Jewish suffering has often been met not with moral clarity but with cowardly neutrality. Today, we are witnessing that silence again, not from the halls of the United Nations or the chancelleries of Europe, where we’ve long expected it, but from the Vatican itself.
Pope Leo, whose election I applauded with all my heart, has issued repeated calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, invoking lofty language about peace, mercy and human dignity. And yet, stunningly, he has failed to condemn Hamas—a genocidal terrorist organization that proudly murders Jewish civilians, rapes Jewish, Christian and Muslim women, and parades kidnapped children as trophies. In doing so, Pope Leo risks placing himself in the shameful legacy of Pope Pius XII, whose silence during the Holocaust remains one of the darkest stains on the modern moral history of the Catholic Church.
To truly love the innocent is to despise those who threaten them. Hatred of evil is not sinful. It is righteous. It is holy. It is, in fact, a biblical imperative. “You who love the Lord, hate evil!” cries King David in Psalm 97. The Torah exhorts, “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20), not peace at any price, but justice even at great cost.
There is no justice in allowing Hamas to survive. There is no morality in calling for peace while evil still rules in Gaza.
Hamas is not a freedom movement. It is not the voice of Palestinian dignity or national aspiration. It is a fanatical Islamist death cult whose charter calls for the murder of Jews worldwide. Its operatives do not fight soldiers in defense of territory; they rape women in their homes, burn babies in their cribs and gleefully livestream their slaughter for their supporters.
On Oct. 7, 2023, the mask came off. The world saw the full face of evil. Hamas terrorists stormed into Israeli communities and committed some of the most grotesque atrocities since the Holocaust. And yet Pope Leo, with all the moral authority of his office, has not uttered a single, unequivocal condemnation of this savagery. Instead, he calls for a ceasefire, which would leave this evil intact, resupplied and ready to strike again.
With all due respect to the Holy Father, this is not peace. It is appeasement. This is not compassion. It is cowardice.
Our world has become so obsessed with tolerance that it has forgotten how to discriminate—morally, not racially—between good and evil. We are told to “hate the sin, love the sinner.” But when the sinner is proud of their sin, when the sin is systemic and ideological and genocidal, we must hate the ideology, the system and those who perpetuate it.
The West’s allergic reaction to moral judgment has created a spiritual vacuum that Hamas and its ilk are only too happy to fill. And if the Vatican refuses to name evil, if it hides behind platitudes while Jews are butchered, it loses all claim to moral leadership.
Pope Leo should heed the lessons of history. During World War II, Pope Pius XII had ample opportunity to speak out against Hitler’s Final Solution. He knew what was happening. Jewish leaders, including Rabbi Isaac Herzog, then the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, pleaded with the Vatican to intervene. The Catholic Church had extensive diplomatic networks, access to intelligence and global influence. And yet, the Pope remained absolutely and completely silent.
No excommunication for Nazis. No official denunciation of the death camps. No instruction was given to Catholic institutions to offer sanctuary to the Jews, which, when it was offered, was done sporadically and only in the greatest secrecy. The Church feared provoking the Reich more than it feared the wrath of heaven.
The result was the moral collapse of an institution that could have saved millions of lives, but chose instead to protect its political neutrality.
Pope Leo is now at a similar moment of reckoning.
He has the opportunity to break with this shameful past. He can rise as a moral giant in a time of crisis. But only if he finds the courage to do what Pope Pius XII did not and condemn the murderers of Jews and all innocents, not just mourn their victims.
This is not a call for vengeance. It is a call for moral vision and moral courage.
In the book of Ecclesiastes (3:8), we are reminded, “There is a time for peace and a time for war.” When men of God fail to discern between the two, the innocent pay the price.
To equate Israel’s war of self-defense with Hamas’s war of extermination is a grave injustice. The Israel Defense Forces, for all its imperfections and flaws, common to all liberators of democracies, seeks to minimize civilian casualties, often at the cost of Israeli soldiers’ lives. Hamas maximizes civilian casualties, Israeli and Palestinian alike, as part of its strategy of blood and spectacle. It embeds rocket launchers in schools, stores weapons in mosques and hides its command centers under hospitals. Every dead Palestinian child is a photo op for Hamas, and a PR tool for their apologists.
If Pope Leo truly believes in protecting innocent life, he should be the first to demand the dismantling of Hamas’s terror infrastructure. He should demand the release of hostages. He should call for international prosecution of Hamas’s leaders for crimes against humanity.
And he should stop hiding behind the fog of “evenhandedness.” God is not evenhanded between the righteous and the wicked. Neither should His servants be.
Too many religious leaders today lack the moral vocabulary to confront evil. They prefer the safety of sloganeering to the discomfort of moral judgment. They preach love but forget that love must sometimes take the form of outrage.
We are commanded in the Torah to “blot out the memory of Amalek” (Deuteronomy 25:19)—the biblical archetype of genocidal hatred, embodied in genocidal ideologies like Hitler and the Nazis. That commandment is not about revenge. It is about ensuring that evil ideologies are not allowed to regenerate. Hamas, not the Palestinians, is a modern-day Amalek. Its mission is to destroy the Jewish people. That is not a slogan. That is not Israeli propaganda. That is Hamas’s own declared purpose.
If we cannot hate that mission, we cannot love our own children.
The Jewish people do not ask the Vatican to become Zionist. We do not ask Christians to adopt our politics. We ask only that the Church live up to its moral ideals. And that means calling evil by its name.
It means telling the world that Hamas is not a partner for peace but a cancer to be removed. That a ceasefire without justice is not a peace agreement but a death sentence delayed, not canceled.
Pope Leo, you are the spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics. You have the power to shift the moral compass of nations. Please do not squander it on sterile neutrality. Please do not allow yourself to become another Pius XII.
Use your pulpit not for platitudes, but for prophecy.
Speak not only of mercy, but of judgment.
Preach not only peace, but righteousness.
And most of all, condemn those who commit atrocities in the name of religion.
The Jewish people are watching. The world is watching. Heaven is watching.
