The National Catholic Register portal reports that a group called “Catholic Voices for Israel” (CVFI), co-founded by André Villeneuve and “Father” Antoine Lévy, OP, has issued an open letter to the antipope Leo XIV, demanding clarification on whether Catholics should interpret the creation and enduring existence of the State of Israel as a sign of God’s providence. The group’s founding statement, “For Zion’s Sake,” calls for “Catholic Zionism,” asserting that God’s promises of land to Israel were “never revoked in the New Testament” and urging Catholics to see “divine providence in Israel’s return to the land.” The letter laments the Church’s “theological silence” and claims this silence empowers those who deny any theological significance to Israel’s existence. This initiative is a direct and logical fruit of the post-conciliar revolution, which, having jettisoned the Church’s supernatural framework, now seeks to instrumentalize Sacred Scripture for a political and naturalistic project, thereby compounding its apostasy.
The Heresy of “Catholic Zionism”: A Political Idol Masquerading as Theology
The core proposition of CVFI—that the modern State of Israel might be a sign of divine providence fulfilling biblical land promises—is not a legitimate “theological exploration” but a profound error that inverts the order of the supernatural and the temporal. It represents the ultimate reduction of the City of God to the city of man.
The integral Catholic teaching, articulated with supernatural clarity by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical *Quas Primas*, establishes that Christ’s kingship is spiritual and universal, not tied to any earthly nation or political entity. The Kingdom of Christ “is not of this world” (John 18:36). The Church, as the sole ark of salvation, is the only society that endures with a divine guarantee. To suggest that a secular state, born of political machination and violence in 1948, fulfills the spiritual promises of the Old Covenant is to commit a fundamental category error. It confuses the supernatural order of grace with the profane order of geopolitics. This is the very essence of the modernist error condemned by Pope St. Pius X in *Lamentabili sane exitu*: the reduction of religious facts to the level of historical and political phenomena, subject to the same analysis and interpretation.
The Conciliar Foundation: Nostra Aetate and the Seeds of Religious Indifferentism
The CVFI initiative is unthinkable without the doctrinal revolution inaugurated by the conciliar document *Nostra Aetate*. While that document rightly condemned hatred of Jews, it opened the door to a false ecumenism and religious indifferentism by failing to affirm the unique and abiding role of the Catholic Church as the sole means of salvation. The post-conciliar “Church” has consistently refused to make definitive theological judgments on political matters, creating a vacuum that groups like CVFI now seek to fill with their own naturalistic interpretations.
The “silence” that CVFI decries is not an accident but the deliberate policy of a conciliar apparatus that has abandoned its prophetic mission to teach, govern, and sanctify. As the analysis of the “Defense of Sedevacantism” file makes clear, a manifest heretic loses his office *ipso facto*. The antipopes from John XXIII onward, by promoting the heretical notions of religious liberty (*Dignitatis Humanae*), false ecumenism, and the dignity of non-Christian religions as paths to salvation, have forfeited any claim to the Petrine authority. Their “silence” on the theological meaning of Israel is not prudence but the inevitable consequence of an antipapacy that has lost the supernatural faith. It cannot clarify what it does not believe.
The Theological Contradiction: From Supernatural Covenant to Naturalistic Nationalism
CVFI’s argument, as presented, is riddled with internal contradictions that expose its naturalistic core. It claims to be “biblically grounded” while simultaneously relying on the words of the antipope Benedict XVI, who in the same 2018 letter they quote, stated that “the state of Israel cannot be seen to theologically represent fulfillment of the Land promise, but rather as a secular state.” This is a direct refutation of CVFI’s central thesis, yet they cite it as support. This selective quotation reveals their method: using the ambiguous and often modernist statements of post-conciliar figures to advance a political agenda.
Furthermore, the group’s assertion that “these promises and prophecies are never abolished in the New Testament” is a dangerous half-truth. The Church Fathers and the perennial Magisterium teach that the promises of land and kingdom were fulfilled and transformed in the universal, spiritual Kingdom of the Catholic Church. The New Israel is the Church, composed of all nations. To re-apply these promises to a specific ethnic or political entity is to regress from the universalism of the Gospel to a tribal, pre-Christian understanding of religion. This is precisely the error of the Jansenists and other rigorists, who sought to narrow the bounds of God’s mercy and the Church’s mission.
The Symptom of Apostasy: The Conciliar “Church” as a Tool of Worldly Powers
The very existence and promotion of CVFI within the conciliar structures is a symptom of deep-seated apostasy. It demonstrates how the post-conciliar “Church” has become a chaplaincy to the world’s political movements, rather than a beacon of supernatural truth calling all nations to conversion. The group’s concern about “Catholic antisemitism” is a smokescreen. The true danger is not a political bias but the loss of the supernatural faith that alone gives meaning to history and politics.
The “Catholic Voices for Israel” campaign, by seeking a theological endorsement of a political state, participates in the modernist project of immanentizing the eschaton—of bringing the Kingdom of God down to the level of human political achievements. This is the very spirit of the Antichrist, which seeks to replace the supernatural reign of Christ the King with a man-made utopia. The true Catholic response is not to ask the antipope for clarification on a political question, but to reject the entire conciliar revolution, return to the immutable Tradition, and reaffirm that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, and no enduring city but the City of God.
Source:
Catholic Group Asks Pope Leo to Clarify Church’s Stance on Israel (ncregister.com)
Date: 23.06.2026