“Repulsive and Barbaric” — The Pattern of Anti-Catholic Violence in Netanyahu’s Israel

A sledgehammer to a crucifix in Lebanon. A French nun kicked on Mount Zion. A priest killed helping a parishioner. Pope Leo XIV carries a photograph to remind himself why a pastor cannot stay silent.

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Before you read on, join 75,000 Americans and sign our letter to President Trump demanding that he apologize for attacking Pope Leo XIV. We’ll deliver it to the president via JD Vance.

A 48-year-old French Catholic nun and archeological researcher was walking along Mount Zion in Jerusalem — near the Cenacle, where Catholics pray at what they believe to be the room of the Last Supper — when a man ran up behind her, threw her toward a stone block with full force, walked away, and then returned to kick her as she lay on the ground.

The video, released Thursday night by Israeli police, shows the entire assault. A 36-year-old man has been arrested.

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem called it “a repulsive and barbaric hate crime,” in an exclusive statement to Crux from its public affairs advisor, Farid Jubran.

The sister’s colleagues at Hebrew University, where she has worked as an archeological researcher, described her as “a cherished academic partner.” Father Olivier Poquillon, the Dominican who directs the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem, called the assault “an unprovoked attack” and “an act of sectarian violence.”

Her assault is the most recent in a long and lengthening list.

Ten days ago, two Israeli soldiers received 30-day military prison sentences for smashing a fallen statue of the crucified Christ outside a Christian family’s home in Debel, a southern Lebanese village a few kilometers from the Israeli border.

One swung a sledgehammer while a second filmed the act. Six other troops watched and did nothing. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, voiced “deep indignation” and “unreserved condemnation,” and the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land warned of “other reported incidents of desecration of Christian symbols.”

Action on Armed Violence reports that Israel has closed or left unresolved 88% of cases of alleged misconduct in Gaza and the West Bank.

On Friday morning, hours before the world saw the video of the nun’s beating, the Lebanese state media claimed that the Israeli army demolished a monastery and school belonging to the Sisters of the Holy Savior in Yaroun, in the Bint Jbeil district of southern Lebanon.

The school had educated thousands of children from across the region, and Lebanon’s National News Agency described its destruction as “a major loss at both the educational and social levels.”

An Israeli Merkava tank in Qlayaa killed Father Pierre el-Rahi in March, and Pope Leo XIV eulogized the beloved Maronite priest at the Vatican.

On Palm Sunday, Israeli police barred Cardinal Pizzaballa from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christianity’s holiest site — the first time in centuries the head of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land was physically prevented from praying at the empty tomb.

The Holy Family Parish bombing came earlier, in July of last year: an Israeli munition struck Gaza’s only Catholic church, wounding Father Gabriel Romanelli, the priest whom the late Pope Francis called every night during the final months of his life.

None of this can be dismissed as the work of a careless commander or a handful of extremists. It is happening under the most surveilled territory on earth. That impunity is underwritten, to a significant degree, by American taxpayers.

Pope Leo XIV refuses to look away.

Last week, on the flight back from Africa, he stood in the aisle of the papal plane and told reporters: “As a Church — I repeat — as a pastor, I cannot be in favor of war.” He carries with him, a small photograph of a boy killed in southern Lebanon during the Israeli campaign — a child whose face went viral when Leo visited Lebanon last fall. The pope told the press that he holds the picture close so he never forgets the child.

The Christians of the Holy Land form the oldest continuous Christian community on earth, predating the Crusades, the rise of Islam, and the founding of the modern Israeli state by, in some places, nearly two thousand years.

Their numbers have collapsed under occupation, war, and emigration. The violence of the past year has thrown the survival of Holy Family Parish, the Latin Patriarchate, and the Sisters of the Holy Savior into open question.

Italy donated a replacement crucifix in Debel — Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called it “a powerful message of peace, hope, and dialogue.”

Stone is the easiest part of any crime to repair.

Father Pierre el-Rahi cannot be brought back. The French sister attacked on Mount Zion will live with what was done to her in the shadow of the Cenacle. In Debel, a Christian family will keep watching their replacement crucifix and remembering the soldier with the sledgehammer who was given thirty days.

The pattern has become the policy. Pope Leo XIV is keeping his photograph close, and he is asking the rest of the Church — and people of goodwill of every faith — to do the same.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Cardinal Pizzaballa, with the wounded sister of Mount Zion, with Father Romanelli of Gaza, with the family of Father Pierre el-Rahi, and with the Christians of the Holy Land who continue to keep the faith of the apostles in lands no longer safe for them.

Pope Leo XIV carries a photograph in his cassock so that no pastor in the Catholic world can claim ignorance, and we stand with him in that refusal to forget.

In an era when the most powerful nations on earth fund and excuse the destruction of sacred space and the wounding of consecrated lives, we remain rooted in a faith that names the violence by its right name and refuses to make peace with it.

Letters from Leo is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because Catholics — and people of goodwill from every tradition — are hungry for moral clarity. Right now, as the violence reaches even the streets of Jerusalem and the Christian enclaves of southern Lebanon, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the violence visited upon the Church in the Holy Land — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help this Easter season:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid members receive my full biographical series on the life and formation of Pope Leo XIV, the American pope who now carries Francis’s mission into a new era. You’ll also get access to exclusive investigations, including my ongoing Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and the best of our full archive.

Whether you give $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.