Catholic bishops should refuse to share a table with antisemitism

[vile antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theory boosted by member of Religious Liberty Commission with Catholic bishops as members]

Catholic members of President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission include

• Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York;

• Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona–Rochester;

• Ryan T. Anderson, University of Dallas John Paul II Teaching Fellow in Social Thought and protégé of Dr. Robert George; and

• Carrie Prejean Boller, former Miss California and Miss USA, former member of Donald Trump’s 2020 Campaign Advisory Board, and Catholic convert as of Easter Vigil 2025.

Other bishops and priests serve on the commission’s advisory board.

If Mrs. Boller’s only disqualification for serving on a Religious Liberty Commission were her apparent lack of qualification, her presence on the commission might be considered an embarrassment worth tolerating for the greater good. However, like many of President Trump’s appointees to various offices, Mrs. Boller is not merely unqualified, but anti-qualified, among other things, by her willingness to boost antisemitism.

During Lent of this year, mere weeks from her reception into the Catholic Church, Mrs. Baller retweeted this appalling antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theory from fellow Catholic convert and moon landing skeptic Candace Owens:

In passing, this is far from Owens’s only expression of antisemitism. Last July she stated on her YouTube channel that, under the Nazis, “ethnic cleansing almost took place” (the Holocaust: narrowly averted ethnic cleansing!), while the Allies actually “ethnically cleansed 12 million Germans.” Owens also expressed skepticism about Nazi medical experiments, saying that some of the reports struck her as “completely absurd” and sounded like “bizarre propaganda.” 

While Boller hasn’t boosted that messaging, she appears to be a fan of Owens, frequently retweeting her—and the 9/11 conspiracy theory isn’t Boller’s only brush with Owens’s penchant for antisemitism. She also boosted Owens retweeting notorious Catholic Jew-hater E. Michael Jones (“As I have said many times, the main cause of anti-Semitism is Jewish behavior”):

I am not here to adjudicate the claims in this tweet or the alleged reader context note.¹ I am here to say that

1. Carrie Prejean Boller is clearly comfortable with antisemitic conspiracy theories and disinformation.²

2. Anyone as comfortable with antisemitism as Carrie Prejean Boller has no place on a Religious Liberty Commission.

3. Any respectable Catholic, especially a shepherd of souls, should refuse to serve on a Religious Liberty Commission that makes a place for Carrie Prejean Boller.

This doesn’t seem too much to expect.³ There’s an old joke: What do you call nine people at a dinner party with a Nazi? Ten Nazis. I’m not saying Baller is a Nazi, but antisemitism is antisemitism, and it should never be normalized.

Related:

1. All I can tell you is that

• the alleged reader context note does not currently appear on Mr. Friedman’s tweet, and

• I cannot find evidence supporting the claim that Mr. Friedman “did in fact call for Candace and Tucker to be arrested.” Comments on this subject are welcome; antisemitism will be deleted and blocked with prejudice.

2. A third recent example: Boller boosted disinformation claiming that “Jews” introduced legislation to “throw Christians in prison” for “mentioning Jesus in Israel.” The reality is that over two years ago a pair of ultra-Orthodox Israeli members of parliament introduced a bill to outlaw, not “mentioning Jesus,” but proselytizing a person of another faith and soliciting them to change their religion. The ultra-Orthodox have introduced this legislation before, as far as I can tell as a symbolic act; it has never been advanced, and Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu has said that it would never be considered. Nevertheless, rightwing U.S. media made it into a controversy du jour in 2023, and apparently it continues to make the rounds in some rightwing circles today.

3. A friend counters: “Jesus ate with sinners, and he ate with Pharisees too.”

To which I reply: “Jesus gave dignity to those who had none. And while he did eat with Pharisees—a highly relevant point, because Pharisees were literally conservative populist influencers, not ruling elites—Jesus also publicly and repeatedly denounced Pharisees in the most scathing possible terms. If Cardinal Dolan and Bishop Barron were out there denouncing antisemitic conspiracy theories circulating in rightwing Catholic circles, that would cast a very different light on their belonging to a commission with Boller, wouldn’t it?”