Your Holiness Pope Leo XIV,
You are the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, and the spiritual father of over a billion Catholics worldwide. But you are also something new in the long history of the papacy: an American Pope. That fact carries immense symbolic weight, and with it an immense moral obligation and a spiritual calling of global significance.
America, more than any nation, bore the burden of defeating fascism in the Western European theater. American soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy, liberated the death camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, and in June 1944 liberated Rome itself, securing the Vatican from the shadow of the swastika. Without America, the Eternal City might have fallen under Nazi domination, and the independence of the Holy See itself extinguished.¹
Because you are an American, respectfully, Holy Father, history demands more of you. America gave blood to defeat Hitler. America tore down the fascist menace that once stalked your very city. And now, as antisemitism rises again — and as figures who claim Catholic identity, like Candace Owens, trivialize Hitler and vilify Jews — it is incumbent upon you to speak with moral thunder.
The Legacy of Catholic Silence
We must be honest, Your Holiness. The Catholic Church has not always met this test. During the Holocaust, while Jews were deported from Rome’s ghetto just yards from the Vatican walls, Pope Pius XII remained largely silent.² Trains departed for Auschwitz. Men, women, and children were led to slaughter. More than 1300 Roman Jews were incarcerated at a military camp for two days in October, 1943 just two blocks from the Vatican. Pope Pius summoned the German Ambassador Ernst von Weizsäcker and demanded the release, not of the 1000 Jews but only of the 250 who had been baptized into Catholicism. The rest were sent by cattle car to Auschwitz in an eight-day Germany where nearly all were immediately gassed. Some eight Jews survived.
And though he surely knew, the Pope’s voice never rang out with the clarity that history demanded.
This silence is remembered not as neutrality but as complicity. To this day, it stains Catholic-Jewish relations. For the Jewish people, the lesson is searing: if the papacy could remain silent even as Jews were murdered in its own backyard, then silence must be understood as assent.
The stain was not only in Rome. In the United States, Father Charles Coughlin, the “radio priest,” disgraced the Church by broadcasting antisemitic venom to tens of millions.³ He railed against Jewish bankers, peddled Nazi propaganda, and scapegoated Jews for America’s woes. Coughlin was eventually silenced under political pressure, but the Vatican never condemned him by name. He died a priest in good standing.
That silence was an affront to decency and the moral stature of the Church. Here are just some of the raving Priest’s fulminations against Jews to an audience of tens of millions on American radio:
On “atheistic Jews” imposing their code he said, “We are opposed, however, to having atheistic Jews impose their code of life upon our political structure, our economic structure and our national structure.” Berman Archive+3Berman Archive+3Wikipedia+3 This claims that a group of Jews (atheists among them) are seeking control/influence over society; a classic conspiracy trope.
In attributing Jewish responsibility for communism, Coughlin blamed Jews for Bolshevism and communist revolutions (e.g. Lenin, Trotsky). He lied and said that the Soviet Russia was excessively influenced by Jewish elements, even as Lenin and Stalin were not only non-Jews but Stalin was one of the worst antisemites in all human history. Wikipedia+3Wesleyan Digital Collections+3Wikiquote+3
In Defending antisemitic violence and justifying persecution against Jews, Coughlin was vitriolic. After Kristallnacht, Coughlin defended Nazi antisemitic violence, arguing it was justified as a retaliation for how he claimed Jews had treated Christians under Soviet persecution. US Holocaust Memorial Museum Newspapers+1
Thus, the Catholic Church twice failed: in Rome with silence during genocide, and in America with silence before the most notorious Catholic antisemite of his era.
Candace Owens: Today’s Father Coughlin
Today, Your Holiness, we face another moment of truth. The voice is no longer Coughlin’s. It is Candace Owens. In America we derisively call her Klandace Ovens. Klandace, because her hatred and repeated libels against the black community, amid being black herself, comes straight from the worst racism of the KKK. And Ovens because that’s where she wants to send the Jews.
Owens is one of America’s most visible and vile media personalities. She claims Catholic identity — proudly and repeatedly. She has described herself as “a proud Catholic” in interviews, insisted she is speaking from a “Catholic worldview,” and has even told critics, “You cannot cancel me — I stand with the Church.”⁴ On podcasts and public appearances, she invokes Catholicism as the foundation of her values, presenting her rhetoric as authentically Catholic.
This is what makes her venom doubly dangerous. She does not speak merely as a commentator. She speaks as a Catholic. Every time she minimizes Hitler, every time she casts doubt on the Holocaust, every time she rails against Jews or Israel, she does so under the mantle of Catholic identity. To millions of listeners, the message is clear: this is what Catholics believe.
Consider her most infamous statements. In December 2018, at a Turning Point USA event – ironic, as the late and courageous Charlie Kirk was a passionate supporter of Israel – she said: “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — O.K., fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German. Everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism.
Hitler would have been “fine,” she suggested, if only he had confined his ambitions to Germany. The mass murder of Jews was not the problem; globalism was.
When criticized, she attempted a half-hearted clarification:
“He was a homicidal, psychopathic, maniac that killed his own people … There is no excuse or defense ever for… everything that [Hitler] did.”
But by then the poison had already spread and her antisemitism had taken flight. The normalization of Hitler as a nationalist, and the echo of antisemitic conspiracy theories about “globalists,” had been unleashed under a Catholic banner.
In July 2024, she went further still, questioning the Holocaust itself. She dismissed Nazi atrocities — specifically the medical experiments of Josef Mengele — as “propaganda”: “Some of these stories just sound completely absurd. I mean, come on. Do you really believe that kind of thing happened? This has been bizarre propaganda.
This is Holocaust denial — plain and simple
She also traffics in the worst, most reptilian conspiracies about Jews as a people: “They weaponize identity. You can’t criticize them, because they’re Jewish. That’s how they protect themselves.”
This is the age-old libel: that Jews use identity to shield illegitimate power.
On Israel, she has repeatedly questioned U.S. support, delegitimized the Jewish state, and echoed propaganda of Israel’s enemies. She has claimed the Jews killed JFK, that Theodore Herzl was a child molester and that he set up the State of Israel as a haven for Jewish pedophiles.
It is no wonder, then, that the watchdog group StopAntisemitism named her “Antisemite of the Year” in December 2024.
Why the Pope Must Speak
The danger here, Your Holiness, is not abstract. Owens does not speak as a lone radical. She speaks as a Catholic. She tells her millions of followers: this is Catholic truth.
And that is why you, as Pope, must respond. If you do not repudiate her, then her claim to Catholic identity stands. If the Vatican remains silent, then millions will conclude that antisemitism and Catholicism are not in conflict.
The lesson of history is clear. Pius XII never condemned antisemitism and never condemned Hitler by name. He made the most vague statements about “people” being persecuted for their ethnicity. The result: his words rang hollow and he lives in infamy till this day. Even the Church itself cannot beatify or canonize him, knowing that the wrath of the world will descend the Church for whitewashing a leader whom the Churchill and FDR saw as a moral coward. Father Coughlin was never named by the Vatican. The result: Catholics believed his hatred could coexist with faith.
Today, unless you name Candace Owens, the result, I fear, might be the same.
The American Pope’s Duty
Your Holiness, you are the first American Pope. That gives you a special responsibility.
It was American soldiers who liberated Rome in June 1944. The U.S. Fifth Army, under General Mark Clark, marched into the Eternal City, greeted by a populace relieved to be freed from fascist occupation.¹⁰ The Vatican itself was spared because American soldiers — Jews, Catholics, Protestants alike — gave their lives on Italian soil.
America saved Rome. America saved the Vatican. America preserved the papacy.
Now, an American Pope must honor that legacy. He must make clear that the Catholic Church will never again harbor silence in the face of antisemitism. He must tell the world that Catholicism cannot be twisted into a banner for Jew-hatred.
And because Candace Owens speaks in the name of Catholicism, it is you, Pope Leo XIV, who must repudiate her. No one else holds that authority. And no one else carries so immense a moral responsibility. Only the Pope can declare that Catholic identity cannot coexist with antisemitism.
A Call to Courage
Your Holiness, the Catholic Church has traveled far since Nostra Aetate. John XXIII opened the door to reconciliation. John Paul II prayed at the Western Wall, visited the Synagogue in Rome, and called Jews the elder brothers of Christians. Benedict XVI and Francis both decried antisemitism, visited Israel, and prayed at the Great Synagogue of Rome. That’s why John Paul II is already a saint while Pius XII’s memory languishes in ignominy, even as certain Jews, who feign friendship to the Church but who mostly seek access to photo ops with you eminence, like Ben Shapiro, are destroying their own credibility by advocating for Pius.
But none have faced a challenge quite like yours: an American Catholic figure, Candace Owens, with millions of followers, who invokes Catholic identity while praising Hitler, denying the Holocaust, and vilifying Jews. Not since Father Coughlin have we seen this kind of hatred from a public American Catholic and I fear that Candace Owens psychotic obsession with Jews actually lead directly to the murder of Jews, God forbid.
You must meet this moment. Be not like Pius XII, whose silence is remembered as complicity. Be like the American soldiers who liberated Rome. Be like John Paul II, but go further: name Candace Owens, and make clear that Catholicism and antisemitism are irreconcilable.
History, Holy Father, will judge your papacy not by interfaith gestures alone, but by whether you defended the Jewish people against those who desecrate your Church by claiming its name for their hatred.
America liberated Rome. Now you, an American Pope, must liberate the Catholic Church from the poison of antisemitism.
With urgency and hope, love, infinite respect, and appreciation,
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Endnotes
- On the liberation of Rome: “Rome Liberated by Fifth Army,” New York Times, June 5, 1944.
- Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (Yale University Press, 2000).
- Donald Warren, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio (Free Press, 1996).
- Owens self-identifying as Catholic: interviews and public statements documented in Wikipedia entry.
- Owens quote on Hitler, Turning Point USA event, Dec. 2018, reported in New Yorker, Feb. 2019.
- Owens’ clarification, 2019, cited in New York Times, Feb. 2019.
- Owens’ Holocaust minimization remarks, July 2024, documented by StopAntisemitism and Wikipedia.
- Owens’ comments on “weaponizing identity,” cited in her public media appearances, 2023–2024.
- “Candace Owens Named Antisemite of the Year,” New York Post, Dec. 15, 2024.
- On the U.S. Fifth Army’s liberation of Rome, see Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (Henry Holt, 2007).
