But whichever theory you adopt, the fact is there. The Catholic Church is the conservator of an age-long European tradition, and that tradition will never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can be other than a Jew. Wherever the Catholic Church has power, and in proportion to its power, the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full.
On the other hand, there never has been and never will be, or can be, admission by Catholic morals of warfare against the Jew. Those morals are plain. That doctrine has been defined over and over again and acted upon throughout history. If indirect hostilities are opened against the majority by a minority in its midst, they may be repressed and punished. Still more important, insincere and pretended conversion, used as a cloak, may be repressed and punished. But though a community has the right to determine its own life, and (if it think it possible) even to eliminate (with justice, not with cruelty, violence or injustice in any form) an alien, a hostile minority; yet that minority has its own right to live, if not there, then elsewhere. It has its right—once it is rooted and traditional—to its own convictions, to its own tradition. If you allow it to live among you, you must allow it to live its own life save where that life threatens yours. The Catholic Church will always maintain reality, including the reality of that sharp distinction between the Jew and his hosts.
The opponent of the Catholic Church will tend, other things being equal, to support the Jew, because, under that distinction, the Jew may find himself ill at ease. The whole Protestant tradition of the North was for more than 300 years favourable to the Jew, partly indeed on account of its reliance upon the Jewish Scriptures, its absorption in the inspired Jewish folk-lore, but more because the alliance with the Jew was an alliance against the Catholic Church. Strong traces of that spirit still remain. What has warred against it has been the sheer necessity in every country, Catholic or Protestant, Liberal or anti-Liberal, to preserve society against what each began to feel as a disruptive and an alien domination.