Catholic cardinal risks Israel’s wrath in moral appeal for EU sanctions

It is not every day that God calls for EU sanctions on Israel, but Roman Catholic cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández appeared to do so at the opening of an Extraordinary Consistory in the Vatican on Friday (26 June) with Pope Leo.

“The European Union, in fact, imposes economic sanctions on one country, and sends financial aid and weapons to another, fails … in the face of other, even more serious invasions, with even more brutal consequences for entire populations”, Fernández said.

In case it was not clear that he meant EU sanctions on Russia and arms sales to Israel, the cardinal also said Israel’s “destruction of entire cities cannot be considered a proportionate defensive action. The enormous disproportion of the military interventions in Gaza and southern Lebanon … is evident”.

“Since these are territories that are densely populated, the percentage of civilian deaths relative to the total population, the enormous number of children killed … and the number of homes bombed, allow us to speak of total destruction,” he said.

The EU inaction on Israel was symptomatic of a global disorder, in which there was “no longer a real and stable framework of truth and values,” he added.

And Fernández warned that Israel and Russia were framing their aggression in the “theological criteria” of ‘just wars’ in Judaism and Orthodoxy.

But if adding a senior Catholic view to the heady mix of geopolitics and religion risked aggravation, the cardinal’s widely-covered speech was another nudge for Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni to join France, Spain, Sweden, and some 10 more EU states in forming a majority to impose sanctions on Israel.

Meloni is a rightwing populist, who already showed sensitivity to Catholic voters when she defended Leo in a row with US president Donald Trump in April, before getting involved in her own Trump brawl in June.

The Vatican has dozens of churches, missions, and personnel in harm’s way in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, in what were also political tripwires for Meloni, if Israel bombed them, or Jewish settlers attacked them, again.

And so I do hope Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, and security minister Itmar Ben-Gvir also read the cardinal’s words on Gaza, because they are all loose cannons, who are likely to overreact, and blast Israeli PR in the foot, again.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are storied extremists, while Sa’ar rejoined prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party a year ago, after having betrayed him, and is now trying to prove his Likudnik credentials via populist stunts to get a good place on party lists in Likud primaries in July.

Sa’ar declared EU foreign relations chief Kaja Kallas persona non grata on X on 18 June, while accusing her of antisemitic “blood libel”.

And he picked a fight with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday by championing an Israeli cabinet decision to recognise the Armenian genocide as “genocide” in 1915 to 1917.

But Sa’ar was either tone deaf to the irony of what a UN inquiry called Israel’s ongoing “genocide” in Gaza on 23 June, or he spitefully denigrated it by his silence.

For their part, EU Commission lawyers are still pondering if Israel trade restrictions can be adopted by a qualified majority vote, or by consensus only (killing them at birth, due to stated Czech and German vetoes).

EU's Christian VIPs

And since personalities often bend laws in Brussels, I hope that German Christian-democrat VIPs in the commission HQ, such as president Ursula von der Leyen, or her antisemitism watchdog Katharina von Schnurbein, who advocates against EU sanctions on Israel, might have felt the same religious, moral, and political goose pimples as Meloni, if they too heard cardinal Fernández’s message.

But for her part, Dubravka Šuica, a Croatian conservative EU commissioner, was as deaf as Sa'ar when she met him in Tel Aviv on 22 June, posted gushing pics on X, and did not mention his Kallas “blood” slur.

“Israel declares Kaja Kallas persona non grata over [her] alleged antisemitic attitude and the very next day her colleague … exchanges smiles and no reproach whatsoever with minister Gideon Sa'ar,” said former EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell on Thursday, whom Israel has also banned from entry.

“What a fine display of 'solidarity and coordination' in the EU," said the Spanish socialist.

Meanwhile, Fernández, who is an Argentinian theologian, also said at the Extraordinary Consistory on Friday that: “Violence, cynicism, and spiteful verbal attacks by political leaders in some countries have reached levels that were unimaginable not long ago.”

When I saw this, I first thought of Trump's sociopathic rants.

But silence or negligence can also be violent, cynical, and spiteful, as has been the case with the EU failure to act against Israel, despite what the cardinal called its “destruction of entire cities … enormous number of children.”