On the evening of 14 December 2025, the Catholic Parish of Chatswood in NSW, along with members of other Christian Churches in the city of Willoughby, gathered on the civic concourse at Chatswood for an evening of Christmas Carols. The night resounded with the sense of gentleness and peace, both of which lie at the very heart of the Christian Christmas story. At exactly the same time, on the other side of the city, at Bondi, others, too, were gathering with festivity to mark the Festival of Lights, Hanukah, itself a narrative of memory and hope.  Their evening finished with unimaginable pain and distress. How do we reconcile these two experiences occurring in the same city at the same time? Joy and grief? Harmony and severance? Gentleness and barbarity? These questions are at the centre of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

There is no future in an endless cycle of retribution as we see played out in the politics of the Middle East. Yet, neither is there a future without responsibility. It is our social and moral responsibility not only to name the anti-semitism that has unfolded through this time but also to interpret it.

The Cistercian Norwegian Catholic bishop, Eric Varden commented only last November, that “throughout the West, antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred, is raising its ugly head, more or less sublimated in political terms, but instantly recognisable. Much is being written about this development. This is good. Wise heads must think together to counter a trend that lies within the body politic as a latent virus.” Varden goes on, though, to refer to the work of the English Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who spoke of antisemitism as “the first warning sign of a culture in a state of cognitive collapse. It gives rise to that complex of psychological regressions that lead to evil on a monumental scale:  splitting, projection, pathological dualism, dehumanisation, demonisation, a sense of victimhood, and the use of a scapegoat to evade moral responsibility. It allows a culture to blame others for its condition without ever coming to terms with it themselves.” As Varden highlights, “those words were written ten years ago. Meanwhile they have only gained in relevance.”^[1]

This is what makes antisemitism so difficult to counter and, in fact, something that cannot be addressed simply as a reality in itself. Antisemitism is always the ‘canary in the mine.’ A people, so small demographically, are scapegoated, irrationally forced to carry the failure of a society. Antisemitism will, so tragically, therefore continue until we take responsibility for the moral failure that is ours as a society bedevilled by self-interested patterns of social relationship that can only bring about alienation, isolation and fragmentation.  

A particular window into this phenomenon was afforded us a month earlier than the Bondi massacre, on 8 November 2025, when a small group of men stood outside the New South Wales Parliament dressed in black, their faces covered, their banners carrying the symbols and slogans of Nazism.  This was deeply shocking not because hatred is new as Varden indicates above, but now because of the sheer brazenness of the incident. It was shocking because it demonstrated that, for whatever reason, our society had now become a place where the simply unthinkable had now become possible. The events of 14 December 2025, and subsequent legislative reform, may have made such a public protest more difficult.  But legislation alone does not address the deeper social malaise from which such brazenness becomes apparent, the simply unthinkable become remotely possible. 

The scene of 8 November 2025 represented an extreme element but it was again an illustration that antisemitism is a barometer of social decay. The National Socialist Network may have disbanded, but its action late last year exposes a toxic current within the social landscape, and that current, unless addressed, will only find new and more complex outlets and continue to fuel antisemitism as the scapegoat it has always been, historically.

In particular, this becomes especially manifest in the crisis facing young men, to name but one indicator of the malaise. Young men are especially vulnerable to becoming radicalised into all forms of extreme ideology, including religious.  Young adults, particularly young men aged 18-24, are among the loneliest people in our society.^[2] On the surface, they may appear independent, connected, and confident. Yet beneath that surface, a large number experience deep isolation, a lack of belonging, and a sense of drifting without direction. It would seem to me there are three primary factors contributing to this: the paradoxical disconnection occasioned by pervasive social media; a certain emasculation in the face of feminism; and a lack of purpose facilitated by the disintegration of the common good and the erosion of narratives of purpose previously given in both religious and civic traditions.  They leave young men lonely, confused and lost. The first factor has been well postulated by Jonathan Haidt’s landmark 2024 study, The Anxious Generation. Yet to be presented with similar cogency is the crisis in masculinity amongst young men who can now find themselves outsmarted and out- performed by generations of confident young women who may have a clearer sense of direction and goals and who have high expectations about themselves and others.  Male stereotypes of breadwinner, protector, hunter have been entirely uprooted; young men grow up at a distance from their fathers and older male mentors.  Not confident in their sexuality, unsure in the presence of confident women, it is inevitable that young men drift towards those who offer aggressive misogynist masculinity, models of the Alpha male.  Combined with a loss of life-long purpose, this then translates into affiliation with social groups that promise exclusion, cohesion and determination. And these groups need not be extreme ideologies. We see intimations in this approach to life in figures such as Jordan Peterson and the late Charlie Kirk, so popular amongst young men. 

Mike Randall, interim Head of Downside School in the UK, writing earlier this year in The Tablet, remarked, “We live in an age of fracture – political, cultural and spiritual. Public discourse is increasingly polarised, the pace of change unrelenting and young people, in particular, are confronted with contradictions about identity, morality, purpose and truth.”^[3]  This is not helped, of course, by the debasement of public leadership, and the confusion that is spawned through the rise of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, between what is true and what is false, what is fact and what is fiction.  As Pope Leo XIV spoke to diplomats at the opening of 2026: 

We should also note the paradox that this weakening of language is often invoked in the name of freedom of expression itself. However, on closer inspection, the opposite is true, for freedom of speech and expression is guaranteed precisely by the certainty of language and the fact that every term is anchored in the truth. It is painful to see how, especially in the West, the space for genuine freedom of expression is rapidly shrinking.  At the same time, a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fuelling it.^[4]

He goes onto note in his recent Encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,”

Indifference to truth leads slowly but surely to a descent into totalitarianism. As the philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much those who are ideologically convinced, but rather ‘people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction [i.e. the reality of experience] and the distinction between true and false [i.e. the standards of thought] no longer exist.^[5]

The test of Australian society, and of its political leadership, will not be the extent to which it can legislate against forms of antisemitism, necessary as this might be. Rather, the test lies in addressing the very elements of social crisis from which antisemitism has always emerged, historically. Do we have the courage, as a society, truly to acknowledge this, to attend to this, to understand this?  This requires resistance to the disintegration of community and the bonds of belonging; resistance to toxic forms of masculinity; resistance to the normalisation of capricious and narcissistic public discourse; resistance to narratives of meaninglessness; and most importantly resistance to every apathy in response to all the above.  Desperate is the need for a social and political leadership to understand this and to enunciate, in Walter Brugemann’s words, the grief of a people denied by the dominant consciousness of our society.^[6]  Without this, our Jewish brothers and sisters continue to suffer.

In the meantime, whilst we await a critical engagement of the deeper interpretive journey of antisemitism, solidarity is one of the most important responses. To this end we must look actively for those ways that build bridges and cultivate shared community and in such a way that does not get deflected by the entanglement of current Middle Eastern politics. 

Subsequently, our own Catholic Parish of Chatswood has stood with our friends at North Shore Temple Emmanuel, Chatswood, and refused to allow an historic sociological dynamic to take away our shared dignity, heritage, and future. Together with Rabbi Nicole Roberts we have pioneered small group conversations over the last two years between members of the Catholic community and the Jewish community on podcasts of the human values that unite us. We have been present together at community events that have marked the tragedies of 7 October 2023 and 14 December 2025. And we are currently planning at joint Christian-Jewish choral event in December 2026, recognising the beauty of music to unite us.

Through such growing friendship, we have been powerfully reminded that evil can never be confronted with seeking to assert a force stronger than itself. This is simply to perpetuate the ancient treadmill of oppression and submission.  The only way that we can address the manifestation of evil is to assert an entirely different logic: not to buy into its rhythm and demand but rather to practice the exercise of an entirely different power, the power of friendship, of hospitality, of solidarity.  This is why we need to come together in the face of evil to hold one another, to reaffirm the bonds that bring us together, to cultivate community, together to light candles: small, flickering but with a strength stronger than any darkness can extinguish. Then we discover that with this power we hold a light that alone can give the answer to the experience of darkness before us. 

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^[1] Erik Varden, “Antisemitism” (9 November 2025), https://coramfratribus.com/notebook/antisemitism/

^[2] See Michael Flood, “Mapping Loneliness in Australia” The Australia Institute, Discussion Paper Number 76.

February 2005, https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DP76_8.pdf

^[3] Mike Randall, “A Still Point in a Turning World” The Tablet (24 January 2026), 16.

^[4] Pope Leo XIV, Address to members of the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, 9 January 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2026/january/documents/20260109-corpo-diplomatico.html, accessed 24 January 2026.

^[5] Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” Encyclical Letter 15 May 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html, n.134.