The Madonna of Gaza
The murderous lies about Israel’s behavior tap into the ancient and enduring Christian problem with the Jews.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Aug 14, 2025
The superstar Madonna has urged Pope Leo XIV to visit the Gaza Strip and “bring his light” to the children there “before it is too late.”
The singer pleaded on Instagram: “We need the humanitarian gates to be fully opened to save these innocent children. As a mother, I cannot bear to watch their suffering.”
Relations between Catholics and Jews are always fragile and often fraught.
After the history of the church’s murderous persecution of Jews in medieval Europe and the refusal by Pope Pius XII to denounce the Nazis, the church tried to repair relations through its penitential Nostra Aetate declaration in 1965.
Things went backward under Pope Francis, who died in April and was profoundly hostile to Israel. Although it was hoped that his successor, Leo XIV, would be an improvement, he has sadly adopted the Western narrative of Israel demonization.
Pope Leo has condemned the “ongoing military attacks against the civilian population and places of worship in Gaza”; expressed concern about “the many dying of hunger”; and urged the world to stop Israel’s “collective punishment, the indiscriminate use of force and the forced displacement of populations.”
But the pope is repeating lies. No one in Gaza is dying of starvation; the Israel Defense Forces go to greater lengths to protect civilians on the battlefield than any other military force in the world; and there are no deliberate attacks on places of worship.
The tragic killing in July of three people at Gaza’s only Catholic church occurred after it was accidentally hit by an errant Israeli tank shell in an attack on a neighboring terrorist target.
In the same month, church leaders claimed that “settlers” had committed an arson attack against an ancient church in the Christian village of Taybeh in Judea and Samaria, the disputed “West Bank.” Vatican News claimed that “the fire nearly completely destroyed one of Palestine’s oldest religious buildings, the ruins of the fifth-century Byzantine church of St. George al-Khader.”
A subsequent investigation, however, found that this was totally false. There had been a blaze on nearby land that hadn’t even touched the church.
The current onslaught of lies about Israel demands moral clarity in response. By repeating these blood libels against Israel, the Catholic Church has instead joined those who have torn up truth, conscience and moral decency.
The theological overtones in the Church’s position, reflecting its profound and unceasing difficulty with accepting the continuing existence of the Jewish people and their redemption in the State of Israel, are unmistakable.
In Britain, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, archbishop of Westminster and president of the Bishops’ Conference, has condemned Israel’s plan to take control of Gaza City. “Already too much innocent blood has been shed; too many lives destroyed; too much hunger and starvation,” he said. “This war must be ended not increased.”
Worse was the context in which his remarks were framed. He made them celebrate the feast day of someone he referred to as “Our Lady of Gaza, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.”
In fact, the original name of this Catholic nun was Edith Stein. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Germany in 1891, she became a Catholic 30 years later and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942.
In 1933, identifying herself as both “a child of the Jewish people” and also “ a child of the Catholic Church,” she implored Pope Pius XI to intervene with Hitler on behalf of the Jews. In 1998, Pope John Paul II named her a patron saint of Europe.
Stein’s canonization was deeply troubling. When he beatified her in 1987, John Paul said the church was honoring “a daughter of Israel who, as a Catholic during Nazi persecution, remained faithful to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ and, as a Jew, to her people in loving faithfulness.”
The fact that Stein remained attached to her Jewish roots was irrelevant. She was murdered because she was a Jew. By beatifying her, the Vatican turned her into a Christian martyr.
According to Philip Cunningham, director of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations, Stein’s canonization reflected John Paul’s sincere belief that Jews killed by the Nazis should be honored and revered in the Catholic Church.
“The highest recognition the Catholic Church can give someone with heroic virtues is to canonize them, declare them to be with God, to be saints,” Cunningham said. Finding a candidate for sainthood who was “Jewish, or was of Jewish ethnicity, built a connection to all the victims of the Nazis,” he said.
That sounds pretty, but it doesn’t work at all. Beatifying a woman who was murdered because she was a Jew is an attempt to Christianize the Shoah. It’s a grotesque affront to the Jewish victims of the Shoah and the Jewish people in general. It’s an attempt to erase the Jewish element in Jewish suffering.
And that chimes with a key reason for the West’s obscene turn against the Jewish victims of today’s attempted genocide by the forces of Islam.
This is why the West also can’t tolerate the idea of Jewish suffering. It’s determined to erase all acknowledgement of that suffering, because if it turns the Jews from victims into Nazis, it can finally slough off the collective cultural guilt it feels for the Holocaust.
What church leaders are saying about Gaza has enormous influence, even in post-religious circles. Their message that Israel is a cruel force oppressing the wretched of the earth plays directly into the West’s Christian conscience, even among people who are not believers.
This is wrapped up further with the church’s ineradicable ambivalence toward Jews, which reflects Western society’s own deep-seated antisemitism.
The Islamists, who understand the West better than it understands itself, have grasped the centrality of Christianity to the West, as well as its profound Jew-hatred, and realize that they can manipulate this to their advantage.
That’s why the now-notorious picture of the skeletal Gazan child, prominently displayed in The New York Times and countless other media outlets around the world as allegedly dying of starvation, packed the punch it did. It wasn’t merely that it was a dreadfully distressing picture of a dying child. It was that it was posed to call irresistibly to mind the original Madonna, the mother of Jesus, cradling him in her arms.
This image has been repeated countless times in paintings and sculptures. It is burned into the Western consciousness not only as an iconic image of Christianity but one that identifies that faith with love and compassion for the vulnerable and innocent, represented by the baby in his veiled mother’s arms.
The carefully staged photograph of the veiled Gaza mother holding the skeletal child was thus a diabolical masterpiece of manipulation and deceit.
Not only was the child emaciated, but suffering from cerebral palsy, not from starvation. By inciting horror and revulsion at the Israelis for apparently provoking the suffering of a Gazan Madonna and child, the picture also replaced Jews with Muslim Arabs in the iconography of Christianity.
It thus manipulated some of the deepest feelings in the emotional range of the Western world to embrace an evil lie.
The propaganda war is all about playing on emotion. That’s why these mendacious claims are impervious to facts and evidence.
Christians are among the staunchest supporters of Israel, particularly in America. But many, especially in the progressive Protestant churches, are its enemy.
Even the support of American Christians is eroding, particularly among the young, under an onslaught of secularization and the unprecedented global propaganda war that’s manipulating the Western public into believing that evil is good and goodness is evil.
Their minds have been twisted into believing the big lie that the Israelis, who are defending themselves against an Islamic holy war of extermination, are themselves guilty of the very things of which they are, in fact, the victims.
It is a godless lie. And the Vatican’s support for it is a moral stain spreading backwards into its terrible history with the Jews.
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