The Vatican in 1897: Anti-Zionist and antisemitic

From the New York Times, September 12, 1897:

The reason was because the Vatican worried that Jews would take over Christian sites in Jerusalem. 

The Pope at the time, Leo XIII, was not just an anti-Zionist. He (and the Church altogether) was antisemitic.

From Encyclopedia Judaica:

CIVILTÀ CATTOLICA, LA, official Catholic bi-monthly.

Founded in 1849 by Jesuit writers, and published first in Naples (1850) then in Rome, this review has been the faithful interpreter of papal thought and gained an influence far beyond Catholic circles.  ...

With the accession of Pope Leo XIII (1878), the casuistic approach was replaced by systematic defamation. Civiltà wrote of “Jewish hatred… against mankind – Jews excepted” (vol. 32 (1881), no. 5, 727); of the “anti-social spirit of Judaism”; and of the “necessity of hating it” (ibid., no. 6, 603, 608). Worst of all was the review’s attitude concerning the blood libel. More than a century earlier Cardinal Ganganelli (later Pope *Clement XIV) had declared the accusation groundless but Civiltà Cattolica nonetheless wrote of the Jews of Trent, “mingling unleavened bread with Christian blood, every year, at Passover,” and of the “present Jewish use of Christian blood in paschal bread and wine.” Civiltà dwelt further on “the reality of the use of Christian blood in many rituals of the modern synagogue” (vol. 34 (1883), no. 1, 606ff.) as “demonstrated” in the Tiszaeszlar case, which Civiltà considered to be authentic beyond doubt. Likewise Captain Dreyfus could be nothing but a traitor, while France was governed by Freemasonry, which itself was controlled by the Jews. However, the Jews should not be exiled from France for they were a people accursed by God, scattered to the four corners of the earth in order to testify by their ubiquity to the truth of Christianity (vol. 49 (1898), no. 1, 273–87). Thus, anti-Jewish prejudice had again been given a moral nihil obstat and an encouragement to proceed with the worst excesses. Nor did Civiltà relent during the following decades, although “blood” charges were dropped.

Note that the bolded part was also a reason for anti-Zionism. 

That publication got worse. Much worse. 

Three years after the advent of the Third Reich, the review actively competed with Nazi propaganda, setting out in detail all the arguments for Christian antisemitism as distinguished from the racial antisemitism of the Nazis. The Jews, stated the writer, “have become the masters of the world” (vol. 87 (1936), no. 37–8); “Their prototype is the banker, and their supreme ideal to turn the world into an incorporated joint-stock company” (ibid, 39–40). 

Even after the Holocaust, the publication blamed the Jews for their own genocide!

Later, the “unprecedented cruelty of the massacres of Jews and Poles,” and “the horror of concentration camps, gas and torture chambers,” were mentioned in an article which raised doubts about the very principle and objectivity of the Nuremberg trials and stated, among other things, that “conceding even that, on the diplomatic ground, Germany had been the one to set the gunpowder on fire, historically, they had been compelled to do so” (vol. 97 (1946), issue 2297).

Antisemites and anti-Zionists. Peas in a pod.

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