As Christian Persecution Surges in Netanyahu's Israel, Pope Leo XIV Confronts a Hatred Crisis That Has Reached American Streets
Sister Mary Meline tells NBC News they spit on her in Jerusalem. The San Diego mosque buried its dead. Washington marks a year since anti-Semitic murder.
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Sister Mary Meline told NBC News that ultra-Orthodox men spit at her nearly every time she walks through Jerusalem.
“The spitting on the ground for me it’s every time I go to Jerusalem nearly,” she said in a Richard Engel report that aired last week from the Old City.
Engel documented what the Christian clergy of the Holy Land have warned about for years, and what most American media has refused to cover with any seriousness: attacks by Jewish extremists against Christians — clergy, nuns, parish priests, pilgrims — are escalating sharply, and the Israeli government does little to stop it.
The Rossing Center, which tracks anti-Christian violence in Israel and East Jerusalem, recorded sixty-one physical attacks against Christians in 2025 alone.
The list includes spitting, pepper spray, beatings, and the May attack on a French nun caught on CCTV outside the Church of the Dormition on Mount Zion — an assault I wrote about earlier this month.
The perpetrators are usually ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, NBC reports. The harassment is so normalized that some clergy hide their crosses when they leave their churches.
Jerusalem’s Christian population has collapsed from roughly 25% of the city a century ago to less than 2% today.
That is what the demographic line of a persecution looks like when you graph it.
This is the world Pope Leo XIV inherited from his predecessor, and one he has refused to leave alone.
In July, after the Israeli army shelled Holy Family Parish, the only Catholic church in Gaza, killing three people and wounding the parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, Leo received a call from Benjamin Netanyahu.
The pope used the call to demand an immediate ceasefire, the protection of all holy places, and an end to what he later called the “barbarity” of the Gaza war. The prime minister hung up and continued the war.
Pope Francis was just as vocal. He wrote in a 2024 book that what was happening in Gaza had “the characteristics of a genocide” — the first sitting pope to use the word against Israeli conduct. From his hospital bed in his final months, Francis called Holy Family Parish in Gaza nearly every night, sometimes twice, until his death last spring. He told one Vatican audience: “This is cruelty. This is not war.”
Leo has not retreated an inch from that line. Here’s the background.
