The National Catholic Register (NCR), a portal long compromised by its accommodation to the conciliar sect and its refusal to confront the full scope of modernist apostasy, reports on a carefully staged meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Christian soldiers serving in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The article, published April 29, 2026, presents this encounter as a heartwarming gesture of inclusion, a sign that Israel “values” its Christian minority. Beneath this veneer of goodwill lies a far more troubling reality — one that demands ruthless examination from the standpoint of integral Catholic faith. The NCR’s uncritical reproduction of Israeli propaganda, its silence on the theological abomination of Christian military service in a Jewish state, and its failure to identify the true spiritual dangers facing Christians in the Holy Land render this article not merely inadequate but complicit in a profound deception.
The Idolatry of the Jewish State and the Betrayal of Christian Witness
The article opens with Netanyahu’s own words: “I’m here in the prime minister’s office with an extraordinary group of young men and women. These are Christian soldiers, men and women, in the Israel Defense Forces… They fill all the important positions in our incredible military, and they do incredible work.” The reader is expected to marvel at this spectacle — Catholic and evangelical Christians serving proudly in the army of a state that rejects Our Lord Jesus Christ, that crucified Him, and whose official religion is the Talmudic Judaism condemned by the Church for two millennia. The NCR presents this without a single word of theological censure. Not one sentence reminds the faithful that the State of Israel is a political entity erected on the foundation of Jewish unbelief, that its very existence as a sovereign nation claiming divine sanction is a blasphemous parody of the true Israel — which is the Catholic Church.
Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, proclaimed with unmistakable clarity that Christ the King reigns over all nations, and that no state may legitimately exclude Him from its public life. The State of Israel does precisely this. It is a confessional Jewish state, governed by rabbinic law in matters of personal status, whose Declaration of Independence makes no mention of God the Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, and whose Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against the rights of Christians to evangelize. That Catholic soldiers serve in its army is not a sign of “inclusion” — it is a sign of apostasy. These young men and women have placed their bodies, the temples of the Holy Ghost, at the disposal of a state that is fundamentally ordered against the Kingship of Christ. St. Paul’s admonition rings with terrible relevance: “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men” (1 Cor. 7:23). Yet here they are — slaves not merely of men, but of a political order built on the rejection of the True God.
The NCR’s Silence on the Theological Status of the Jewish State
The article notes, with apparent approval, that “up to 1,000 of the roughly 185,000 Christians with Israeli citizenship serve in the IDF” and that “the majority serve as volunteers.” Voluntary service. The word is chosen carefully, and it is damning. These are not conscripts dragged unwillingly into an army; they are willing participants in the military apparatus of a state that the Church has never recognized as having any divine mandate. The NCR does not ask the most fundamental question: What does it mean for a Catholic to swear an oath of loyalty to a state whose constitution and legal order are rooted in a religion that denies the Divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and the Redemption?
The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX condemns, in Proposition 77, the notion that “in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.” The State of Israel is the living embodiment of this condemned proposition — a state where Catholicism is not merely not the official religion, but where the official religion is one that the Church regards as a superseded and rejected covenant. That Catholics serve in its military is not merely imprudent; it is a public act of solidarity with an order that is, in its foundations, anti-Christian.
The Destruction of Christian Symbols and the Theater of Contrition
The article acknowledges, almost in passing, that “on April 19, an IDF soldier destroyed a statue of Jesus in the village of Debel in southern Lebanon” and that “a video showed an IDF vehicle destroying a large solar energy panel near the same Lebanese Christian village.” These are not isolated incidents. They are the natural fruit of an army operating in a theater of war where Christian villages are collateral damage in a conflict between the Jewish state and Hezbollah. The NCR reports these facts with the detachment of a wire service, without drawing the obvious conclusion: the IDF, in which these Catholic soldiers serve, is an instrument of destruction against Christian communities in the Middle East.
The article further notes that “there were 180 reported anti-Christian incidents — from spitting at Christian clergy to defacing church property — in Israel in 2025.” One hundred and eighty incidents in a single year. And yet the NCR presents the meeting with Netanyahu as though it were a genuine gesture of reconciliation rather than what it manifestly is: a public relations exercise designed to shore up Israel’s image among its Western Christian allies at a moment of intense international criticism. The appointment of George Deek, an Orthodox Christian diplomat, as “special envoy to the Christian world” is described in the language of Israeli statecraft: “Israel ‘attaches great importance to its relations with the Christian world and with its Christian friends around the world.'” The NCR does not question whether this “friendship” is anything other than instrumental — whether Israel values Christians as allies or as useful idiots.
Zionism Disguised as Christian Witness
The most revealing passage in the article comes from Juergen Buehler, head of the evangelical International Christian Embassy Jerusalem: “We are Zionists, but there are issues when you are a minority.” Here the mask slips entirely. These are not Catholics who happen to serve in the IDF out of civic duty; they are Zionists. They have adopted the political ideology of Jewish nationalism as their own. They have subordinated the universal mission of the Church to the particularist claims of the Jewish state. This is not Christianity; it is a syncretistic heresy that has been condemned repeatedly by the Church’s authentic magisterium.
Pope St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu, condemned the modernist proposition that “the Church is an enemy of the progress of natural and theological sciences” (Proposition 57) and that “truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (Proposition 58). The Zionism professed by these Christian soldiers is precisely this kind of evolutionary heresy — a “truth” that has developed not from divine revelation but from the political exigencies of the 20th century, a “faith” that is not the Catholic Faith but a grotesque hybrid of biblical literalism and nationalist ideology. The NCR, by failing to identify and condemn this heresy, becomes its accomplice.
The Demographic Crisis and the Flight of Christians
The article notes that “Christian emigration from both Israel and Palestine has increased in recent years, fueled by wars, financial instability, and anti-Christian acts by both Jews and Muslims.” This is a devastating admission, buried in the middle of an article that purports to celebrate Christian presence in Israel. The Christian population of the Holy Land has been in freefall for decades. In 1948, Christians constituted approximately 18% of the population of Palestine. Today, they represent less than 1.5% of the population of Israel and the Palestinian territories combined. This is not merely a demographic trend; it is the systematic erasure of the Christian presence in the land where Our Lord walked, preached, suffered, died, and rose again.
The NCR does not ask why Christians are fleeing. It does not examine the role of the Israeli occupation, the construction of the separation barrier, the confiscation of church property, the restrictions on movement between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the harassment of Christian clergy, and the steady encroachment of settler movements on Christian villages in the Galilee and the West Bank. Instead, it presents the meeting with Netanyahu as though it were a solution rather than a symptom of the disease. The disease is the State of Israel itself — a state that cannot coexist with a thriving Christian population because its very identity is predicated on Jewish supremacy.
The False Ecumenism of Christian-Zionist Collaboration
The article’s treatment of the meeting as a positive development reflects the broader disease of false ecumenism that has infected the post-conciliar Church. The conciliar sect, since the declaration Nostra Aetate (1965), has pursued a policy of “dialogue” with Judaism that has consistently sacrificed Catholic truth on the altar of political expediency. The NCR, as a portal that operates within the orbit of the conciliar establishment, reproduces this false ecumenism without critical examination.
But the pre-conciliar Church taught something radically different. Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned indifferentism — the proposition that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (Proposition 15) and that “man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation” (Proposition 16). The collaboration between Christian soldiers and the Jewish state is not “dialogue”; it is indifferentism in action. It treats the Jewish religion as though it were a valid path to God, as though the rejection of Christ were a matter of cultural difference rather than the most fundamental act of spiritual rebellion in human history.
The Omission of Christ’s Kingship
The most damning silence in the entire article is its complete omission of the Kingship of Christ. Not once does the NCR invoke the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ over Israel, over the Jewish people, or over the nations of the Middle East. Not once does it remind the reader that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12) — not the name of Israel, not the name of Zion, not the name of any political entity, but the Name of Jesus Christ alone.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, declared: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The State of Israel, by its own self-understanding, rejects this authority. It claims to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, the restoration of the Davidic kingdom, the embodiment of God’s covenant with Abraham. It is, in Catholic theological terms, a counterfeit kingdom — a political order that mimics the language of divine election while rejecting the One whom God truly elected: His Only-Begotten Son.
The NCR’s failure to articulate this truth is not an oversight. It is a symptom of the same modernist apostasy that has hollowed out the conciliar Church from within. The portal that publishes this article is itself part of the structure that has replaced the supernatural mission of the Church with naturalistic humanism, the preaching of the Gospel with the promotion of “interfaith dialogue,” and the worship of Christ the King with the worship of political power.
Conclusion: The Cross Cannot Serve the Synagogue
The meeting between Netanyahu and Christian IDF soldiers is not a sign of Christian vitality in the Holy Land. It is a sign of Christian capitulation. It represents the final stage of a process by which the Church’s children have been co-opted into serving an order that is fundamentally hostile to their faith. The NCR, by reporting this event without theological censure, reveals its own complicity in this capitulation.
The true Catholic response to the crisis of Christians in the Middle East is not to celebrate their service in the IDF. It is to pray for their conversion — not to Zionism, not to the false ecumenism of the conciliar sect, but to the integral Catholic Faith that recognizes no king but Christ, no kingdom but the Church, and no salvation but through the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass offered by validly ordained priests in communion with the true successors of St. Peter. Until that Faith is restored — until the abomination of desolation is cast out from the Holy Place — there can be no true peace in the Holy Land, and no true witness from the Christians who remain there.
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam.
Source:
Christian IDF Soldiers Meet Netanyahu Amid Rising Tensions (ncregister.com)
Date: 29.04.2026