(The Jason Jones Show) — Carrie Prejean Boller, a Catholic member of the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission, was not alone when she spoke up for Palestinian victims of radical Zionist violence in Gaza and the West Bank last month.
Rather, in decrying those abuses, she joined Pope Leo XIV and his highest authority in the Holy Land, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa – as well as many other Catholics who are themselves direct victims of Israel’s war against Christians in the region.
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After all, Christian-run hospitals in Gaza have been repeatedly targeted by Israel Defense Forces, bombed again and again. Churches and monasteries have also been targets. An Israeli shell struck the only Catholic parish in Gaza last year, killing three and wounding the pastor. In December 2023, an IDF sniper killed two women on the Church compound. And in the West Bank, Catholics are routinely terrorized by radical Jewish settlers – with the backing of Israel, whose officials openly aim to ethnically cleanse the region of its ancient Catholic communities.
None of this is a secret. The Pope and the Catholics on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank have been crying out for our solidarity. But it is nonetheless possible that, as an American Catholic, you have never heard a word about this.
Why? Because influential Catholic voices in the U.S. have covered it up.
That’s no exaggeration: the Holy Father and the Church in the Holy Land speak out about Israel’s abuses of Palestinian Christians all the time – pointing to them as a major focus of the universal Church’s concern for its flocks. And yet, for all the American Catholic content you consume – podcasts, columns, blogs – you hear not one word of their outcries.
But here’s what you likely did hear about: Prejean Boller’s comments – again, perfectly in keeping with the sentiments of the Vatican and the Church in the Holy Land – at the Religious Liberty Commission last month. And what you heard was that she is an embarrassment. She doesn’t speak for Catholics. She’s an idiot. An attention-seeker. A bitch.
Prejean Boller challenged a radical Zionism in whose name many crimes are being committed against our Palestinian coreligionists. In response, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League issued a statement accusing her of being a liar, attempting to humiliate her, and calling on President Donald Trump to “kick Carrie Prejean Boller off [the commission] immediately.”
“She does not run a Catholic organization, has no Catholic credentials as an author or instructor, and indeed represents no one but herself,” Donohue said. She is “presumptuous and arrogant,” he wrote, adding flippantly that it was “so telling” that she wore a Palestinian flag pin at the commission panel. As if the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem had not himself worn a Palestinian keffiyeh to mark his solidarity with Palestinian victims of radical Zionist violence. And as if the Holy Father himself had not decorated a Nativity Scene at the Vatican with the same symbol.
Maybe Prejean Boller is an easy target – in part precisely because of the insidious and concerted cover-up of the abuse of Palestinians by so many Catholic commentators here in the U.S. But the truth is this: The real targets are the victims of Israel’s abuse.
That’s right – influential Catholics are once again betraying victims. And what we are seeing is a new Catholic abuse scandal. Call it the American Catholic Church’s Palestinian abuse scandal.
It has become so normalized that even American priests feel free to lob their share of scorn at the victims.
Take Father Rick Wendell, a Catholic priest in Wisconsin who recently told me flatly that there’s “no such thing as a Palestinian Christian.”
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Or consider this: Donohue was quick to issue a statement condemning Prejean Boller when she stood up for the Church in Palestine. But now, two weeks after U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee slandered Catholics in the Holy Land, there still has been no Catholic League defense of the victims.
And consider how egregious Huckabee’s slander was: As I reported, he refused to criticize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterizing Palestinians as “Amalek” – an ancient people whose women and infants God ordered His people to kill. What’s more, Huckabee even said the Christians of the Holy Land are potential terrorists – claiming they are all trained “from age five” to “kill Jews,” and answering, “I don’t know” when asked if these Christians could be suicide bombers.
Betrayal of the vulnerable is betrayal of Christ and His Church
As we face more wars and other offenses against human dignity, I find myself returning to the witness of those who saw past evils for what they were – not noble, not glorious, but degraded and inhuman. One of the most powerful anti-war ballads you can find is, “Willy McBride.” In it, the singer addresses the 19-year-old McBride – a casualty of the First World War – at his grave:
But here in this graveyard it’s still no-man’s-land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man
And a whole generation that was butchered and damned
Faced with the defining evils of our time, we Catholics have a duty to renew our perspective as followers of Christ so that we can live out the responsibility of witnessing to the love of God at a time when the world desperately needs assurance of it. A radical love that abhors the degradation of our young and the thoughtlessness of the powerful to those who bear the brunt of their catastrophic decisions.
Simply being a Christian is a vital mission, and we can see that fact by looking into the darkness that comes about when Christians fail.
We all know the devastating and long-lasting effects of the Catholic sex abuse scandal. As if the unspeakable crimes weren’t bad enough themselves, it was the cover-ups and the slander of victims and whistleblowers that ensured a whole generation would see its faith butchered and damned.
The Church went from a bulwark of decency and wholesomeness and social justice in American public life to a reviled sect. Parents left the Church, young people looked elsewhere for inspiration, and untold numbers came to view influential Catholics as cynics who could never be trusted to stand with the vulnerable – and not the powerful – in a crisis.
The impulse to dismiss the Image of Christ in our suffering brother or sister is demonic. It is an instinct that comes not just from our base nature, but from a corrupted form of our highest and most public-spirited faculties.
Bill Donohue’s Catholic League was in fact one of the most infamous examples of this approach. He seemed to think during the sex abuse scandal of the early 2000s that denials of the crisis and defenses of those who betrayed Christ and His Church from within was the best way to defend the Church’s image – to keep it standing tall and proud. As if sacrificing the dignity of victims were a loophole by which we could save the dignity of our institutions.
Donohue’s belief is a mirror-reversal of the truth: it is by standing with the scandalized, the vulnerable, the “least of these brethren,” the crucified, that we witness to the truth of our faith and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And any Catholic League Church built over the un-memorialized graves of victims is no true Church at all, but what Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen called an “Ape Church.”
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‘Again and again and again and again’
Now, as our Palestinian Catholic brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank face an onslaught of attacks, it’s all happening again. And I have noticed that it is all the same players – snarky priests, slick public figures in bishop’s miters, and fat, worldly Catholics in three-piece suits – who are once again acting on the demonic impulse to dismiss the abused.
But while they build their Catholic League Church up in the eyes of the world, they are once again on track to drive a generation away from the sacramental life Christ died to give us all.
Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well, the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain
For, Willy McBride, it’s all happened again
And again and again and again and again
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The worst of it is this, while Donohue provides a perfect example of the spirit of coverups I’m talking about, the complicity is very widely spread.
Where are the American Catholic influencers on the abuse of Palestinians?
Where are the celebrity bishops?
The pro-life advocates?
When a generation loses faith in all of these people who present themselves as the public face of the Church in America, and when more souls find themselves lost, may Christ have mercy on the victims first of all.
Stand with us, side by side with our brothers and sisters in the Holy Land. Sign VPP’s petition now to end illegal West Bank settlements that threaten to eradicate ancient Christian communities in the Holy Land.
Reprinted with permission from The Jason Jones Show.
