Catholic Institutions that Abandon the Holy Land Will Not Survive
American Catholics, with their mountains of apologetics books, their prayer pamphlets, their homeless shelters, hospitals, and halfway houses, their staunch conservatism about the meaning of things, their journals of thought, their news outlets, their pro-life marches, and their impossible-to-ignore self-representation in our nation’s capital… It’s hard to overstate the diligence and sacrifice that went into creating such a spectacle of unified strength on the part of generations of leaders in what was once, after all, a marginalized and even a suspect minority in the United States.
But to paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s maxim about freedom, the public influence of America’s Catholic institutions is never more than one generation away from extinction. And whether the current generation of Catholic leaders will extinguish their influence depends on a moral test that is already coming to a close: the Gaza genocide and Israel’s current campaign to occupy and ethnically cleanse the West Bank.
To know whether a Catholic institution will live to fight another day in American public life, look to whether it stands for the dignity of the human person where secular forces are now most infamously trampling on it. And certainly, no Catholic organization will survive into the future that does not now stand with the Church in its original homeland as it comes under threat of extinction by those same forces.
As my organization the Vulnerable People Project (VPP) reported just this week, there are now approximately 300 Christians left in Gaza. Fr. Gabriel Romanelli, pastor of Gaza’s Holy Family Catholic parish, counted 1,017 Christians before the war. From 1,017 souls to roughly 300: an ancient Christian people approaching disappearance.
The threat to Christians in the heart of the Holy Land may be even graver: Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich just announced that the Israeli government has advanced 104 new settlement units and outposts across the occupied West Bank since taking office. He was explicit about the purpose: the expansion is meant to put the West Bank under the permanent control of Israel and preemptively make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.
As shocking as the latest developments are, for Catholics who are meant to follow the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of innocent human life and to pay at least some deferential attention to our Pope, there shouldn’t be any moral confusion.
The Church Has Already Spoken
When Israel imposed a “complete siege” after the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, Pope Francis began calling Gaza’s Holy Family Parish on a weekly, sometimes daily basis – a practice he would continue until his death 18 months later. He also pleaded regularly for civilian protection.
On December 16, 2023, the Latin Patriarchate reported that an Israeli sniper killed Nahida Anton and her daughter Samar inside the parish compound and wounded seven others. The next day, Pope Francis named the two women – members of a community he had come to know intimately – and decried their murder as an act of “terrorism.”
On July 17, 2025, an Israeli munition struck Holy Family Catholic Church itself, killing three Christians and wounding others, including Fr. Gabriel. Pope Leo named the dead, denounced their deaths as “barbarism,” and reminded the world of its obligation to protect civilians and reject collective punishment and forced displacement. Calling for solidarity on the part of Christians worldwide, he told Palestinian Christians: “You are in the heart of the Pope and of the whole Church.”
That same month, the threat reached Taybeh, the last entirely Christian town in the West Bank. Local Orthodox, Latin Catholic, and Melkite priests said Israeli settlers set a fire beside the ancient Church of St. George and a cemetery. The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem described the attack as part of an “intensifying trend of systemic and targeted attacks” against the Christian presence and appealed to Christians throughout the world for help.
These attacks on Christian sanctuaries occurred, of course, amid a much larger civilian catastrophe. Famine monitors began warning in 2024 that starvation was imminent, while Israel’s Rafah offensive displaced more than 800,000 people from the place where civilians had been told to seek safety. In 2025, Israel imposed a complete eleven-week cutoff of humanitarian aid, followed by severely restricted access. The U.N. human rights office later recorded at least 1,889 people killed while seeking food between May 27 and August 18, most apparently by the Israeli military. In August, famine was formally confirmed in Gaza Governorate. All of which is to say nothing of the direct bombardments that have talent he lives of countless thousands of unarmed innocents, including women and children.
Now a chillingly similar trajectory is accelerating in the West Bank. By July 20, 2026, OCHA had documented more than 1,330 Jewish settler attacks against indigenous Palestinians, including Christians, causing casualties or property damage that year – more than six every day. Since January 2023, settler violence and access restrictions have contributed to the displacement of more than 6,200 Palestinians and the emptying of 47 communities entirely. Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa’s verdict, published in an interview with the Vatican’s official news site, was stark: “There is no rule of law.”
It Is Now More Extreme to Be Silent Than to Speak Out
Those facts alone would make it baffling for any Catholic institution not to sound the alarm and advocate loudly for Palestinian Christians. But it gets more baffling.
Just this year, Pope Leo XIV reiterated that “the two-State solution remains the institutional perspective for meeting the legitimate aspirations for both peoples” in the region, and decried “the increase in violence in the West Bank against the Palestinian civilian population, which has the right to live in peace in its own land.”
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have themselves, often much more aggressively than Pope Leo does, decried Jewish settler violence against Christians in the West Bank – and have even explicitly and repeatedly demanded that Israel stop its planned annexations of land there.
Even former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert recently came forward with this statement, published in one of Israel’s premier news outlets: It “must be said” that “the State of Israel is conducting an organized, systematic, state-funded campaign of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” in the West Bank.
Most importantly, in the voices of Pope Leo and other Catholic authorities, the Church speaks so plainly and so continuously against the crimes confronting Palestinians that for American Catholic leaders to fail to answer her calls for solidarity is at this point more conspicuous than it would be for them to shout “genocide!” and “ethnic cleansing!” from the rooftops.
As much as Israeli-linked influence campaigns and Protestant wealth try to present the reality I’m describing as a radical or contentious position to be guarded against, the stakes I present are in fact well established and widely known.
The most recent polling shows in fact that Washington, DC, and a few American corporate newsrooms are among the last remaining places where what I readily term “the Gaza genocide” is not yet considered a fact of history by those under the age of 35. And those in that age bracket will soon decide the majority of elections and fund (or run) the majority of institutions.
To know whether a Catholic institution will live to fight another day in American public life, look to whether it stands for the dignity of the human person where secular forces are now most infamously trampling on it. And certainly, no Catholic organization will survive into the future that does not now stand with the Church in its original homeland as it comes under threat of extinction by those same forces.
