The Church and the Jews, 4: Estranged Brothers

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 04, 2025

This is the fourth installment of a four-part essay. (Read Part 3)

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For not all who are of Israel are Israel, nor are they all children of Abraham because they are his descendants; but “It is through Isaac that descendants shall bear your name.” This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as descendants.—Romans 9:6-8

A Jewish convert to Catholicism I know once remarked on the irony of the fact that while many Catholics since Vatican II have prided themselves on being much friendlier towards Jews than their supposedly antisemitic preconciliar forebears, our current liturgy is noticeably less rooted in Jewish worship than was the traditional form of the Roman Rite.

Likewise, one might observe that pre-Vatican-II Catholics had a worldview closer to that of the patriarchs and prophets than does the average modern Catholic, who is scandalized by the demanding justice of God related in the Jewish Scriptures.

In this essay it has become evident that despite positioning themselves as great lovers of the Jewish tradition, people like Robert George fail to take seriously what the Jewish Scriptures themselves say on questions such as the “irrevocable covenant.”

There must be something in the fact that the more ostentatious affection we show toward modern Judaism, the less our own religious mindset resembles that of our actual Jewish fathers in faith. Many churchmen today seem to think that our primary obligation towards Jews is to flatter them ceaselessly; yet no one could have been less flattering to the Hebrews of old than their own prophets.

In a sense, it is not surprising that an era of the Church marked by great worldliness should forget the difference between spirit and flesh. What I mean is that we Catholics seem to have forgotten that in the spiritual dispensation of the New Covenant, Christians are the true children of Abraham and the Church is the new Israel.

Unbelieving Jews remain the children of Abraham according to the flesh, and God has not forgotten them. But their lineage profits them nothing until they repent and turn from their unbelief: as the Baptist said to the Pharisees and Sadducees, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Matthew 3:9). Catholics of Gentile descent are those stones made children: the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.

Jacob and Esau

In his Sapir article, Robert George mentions Pope St. John Paul II’s statements that “Jews are Christians’ ‘elder brothers’ in faith.” George adds that “mindful of the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, Benedict later changed this well-intended, though potentially misleading, metaphor to ‘fathers in the faith’.”

It is true that in the 2010 interview book Light of the World, when Pope Benedict was asked why he called the Jews our “fathers in the faith,” he responded:

The phrase “elder brothers”, which had already been used by John XXIII, is not so welcome to Jews. The reason is that, in the Jewish tradition, the “elder brother”—Esau—is also the brother who gets rejected. One can still use it, because it expresses an important point. But it is true that they are also our “fathers in the faith”.

It should first be noted that Benedict affirmed that “one can still use” the language of elder brothers, but himself used different language for diplomatic reasons. (Yet the Jewish tradition uses the metaphor of Esau to refer to us Christians!)

At any rate, we are on much more solid ground with the traditional “elder brothers” language. While Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are our fathers in faith, thus making the Jews our fathers historically, I cannot conceive of a true sense in which contemporary Jews are my fathers. Rather, Israel of the Old Testament is the common root, from which current unbelieving Jews are broken-off branches—estranged brothers to those Jews who call upon the name of Christ as well as to the Gentile branches which were grafted on.

John Paul II’s phrase was no doubt meant to be complimentary, but to treat it as mere flattery is another instance of not taking the Old Testament seriously enough.

The idea of the unbelieving Jews as Esau and Christians as Jacob is not a mere “metaphor” which can be discarded, but established Biblical typology. In Romans 9, St. Paul makes this comparison, saying that not all descendants of Abraham are children of the promise: “The older shall serve the younger.” Likewise in Galatians 4, he compares the two covenants to the two sons of Abraham, the half-brothers Ishmael and Isaac: “But just as then the child of the flesh persecuted the child of the spirit, it is the same now.”

Many more examples of the typology of elder and younger brothers can be found in the Old and New Testaments. The Church Fathers see Jews and Christians as represented by Cain and Abel, or by Joseph’s brothers and Joseph. Our Lord told multiple parables on this theme, such as that of the prodigal son. In all of these cases the elder brother envies the younger, and in most of them, that envy expresses itself in murderous hatred. In spite of this hatred, younger always ends up supplanting older as the heir to God’s promise. Yet that is not the end of the story, as Gideon Lazar writes:

The theme of the elder brother in fact ought to give us hope. While the elder and younger brothers fight, and often very viciously, the theme of the elder brother in scripture almost always involves the brother’s return in the end. This is why both Jews and Christians have always looked forward to the day where there will be union between them under the rule of the messiah.

Yet the infinite rift here and now between those who believe in Christ and those who reject him cannot be glossed over. George quotes a non-magisterial Vatican document from 2015: “From an originally close relationship between Judaism and Christianity a long-term state of tension had developed, which has been gradually transformed after the Second Vatican Council into a constructive dialogue relationship.” But it is sheer fantasy to imagine that we have finally eliminated a “tension” which is inherent to the differences between these two religions and which will abide as long as those differences remain and are honestly articulated (as the angry reaction to Pope Benedict’s 2018 essay proved). Indeed, it is our very closeness that aggravates this tension.

“From prophet to priest, every one deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:13-14). To how many modern Catholic leaders will the Lord apply these words, because they preferred the false peace of not preaching the Gospel to the tension created precisely by the demands of love?

To quote Lazar again:

Romans 11 has all the keys to answering these issues, but we cannot ignore parts of Romans 11 that are politically incorrect. Paul ends his reflection there by saying “As regards the gospel they are enemies, for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers” (Rom 11:28). There is a sense in which an enmity exists between the Jewish people and the Church, and there is another sense in which the Jews still remain beloved by God. Both these halves must be embraced.

Failure to evangelize

George’s article, like so much of the present “dialogue” on this topic, leaves it entirely unclear whether Jews need to believe in Christ to be saved. He writes:

It is true that the Catholic Church emphatically rejects religious indifferentism — the idea that all religions and religious traditions are the same, contain equal elements of the truth, and are equally authentic or efficacious paths to communion with God and eternal salvation.

But the Church’s rejoinder to religious indifferentism is not that other religions are not equal paths to eternal salvation—it is that no other religion but Christianity is a path to salvation. Other religions contain partial truths, but they are not saving truths. Christ is not the privileged way—He is the only Way.

George writes repeatedly that Jews “light the path to God” but seems to have less practical confidence in his own position as a Catholic, saying that “it would be presumptuous of me to instruct the Jewish community on its engagement with Catholics and other Christians.” Actually, as Catholics we are obligated to instruct the Jews. We are the spiritual adults in the room: “The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one” (1 Cor 2:15).

The most George can suggest to his Jewish audience is that they consider the value of Christianity as a delivery system for the Hebrew Bible, an inversion of the Patristic view that the continued existence of the Jews in exile providentially spread the Old Testament around the world to prepare the Gentiles to recognize the fulfillment of the prophecies in Christianity. On which point St. Augustine wrote:

When we wish to show that Christ was prophesied about, we set those writings before the pagans. And if perhaps, hard to convince, they say that we Christians composed them, so that together with the Gospel which we preach we forged the Prophets through whom what we preach might seem to have been prophesied, we prove to them that all these writings are from the Jews, that the Jews have all of these writings. We draw codices from enemies in order to refute other enemies. In what sort of reproach, then, are the Jews? A Jew carries the codex, by which the Christian may believe. They have become our librarians, just as servants are accustomed to carry codices behind their masters; and the former faint by carrying them while the latter grow strong by reading them. (Exposition of Psalm 56)

Today’s Catholics would do well to regain this kind of confidence. We need not insult the Jews, but we should not hesitate to say that like Jacob with Esau, we now possess the inheritance originally meant for them. Perhaps it will provoke a salutary jealousy: “I magnify my ministry in order to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?” (Romans 11:13-15)

The overall impression George seems to leave to his Jewish audience is, “What you are doing is fine. You do not need to convert. Yes, Christ is the fullness of truth, but God will figure out a way to unite us someday so we don’t need to worry about it.”

Finally, it is worth remembering that George’s essay was intended to counter antisemitism. This is personal for him, as his wife is Jewish—which may go a long way toward explaining the deficiencies of his writings on this topic.

But who is an article like this actually for? It cannot have been written to convince young Catholics, since it was published in a Jewish journal. Indeed, an article like this will only further alienate traditionally-minded young Catholics, since it gives the impression that anti-antisemitism requires us to suppress Catholic teaching out of “fear of the Jews.” Indeed it sometimes seems like the only thing respectable Catholics like George have to say to Jews is to reassure them that we are not antisemitic.

To put it more bluntly, the Gen Z groypers are not impressed with the elder-statesman act. As a friend (another Jewish convert!) remarked, people like George “don’t realize how uncompelling their shtick is to anyone who isn’t a boomer.” So, a message to the respectable Catholics: if you actually want to turn young men away from antisemitism, you need to offer them something real and credible according to Catholic doctrine. If not, then you can keep up the ineffectual hand-wringing, while the kids turn to more extreme voices who at least don’t tell them “peace, peace,” when there is no peace.