Hezbollah’s Digital War Against the Maronite Patriarch: A Symptom of the Post-Conciliar Church’s Collapse in the East
EWTN portal reports that Hezbollah supporters have launched a digital campaign employing AI-generated manipulated images to attack Cardinal Bechara Boutros al-Rai, the Maronite Patriarch of Antioch and All the East. The patriarch condemned the attack as “a war of words, not freedom of opinion, but a worrying decline in the standards of language and values, and a violation of human dignity that no one has the right to infringe upon, regardless of its source or form.” Lebanese civic activist Jowelle M. Howayeck characterized the campaign as “both intimidation and sectarian provocation, and it is deliberate,” linking it to Hezbollah’s declining political fortunes and describing it as “crisis management through fear, distraction, and division.” The article frames the patriarch’s authority as “moral legitimacy anchored in national identity” that Hezbollah finds threatening because it “cannot be coerced or absorbed.” What this article reveals, beneath its veneer of concern, is the catastrophic failure of the post-conciliar Church to defend the Faith and the faithful in the lands where Christianity was born — a failure rooted directly in the modernist revolution that gutted the Church’s supernatural mission and replaced it with the empty language of “dialogue,” “human dignity,” and interreligious accommodation.
