Jerusalem: daily contempt for Christians is growing

Spitting on priests, insults, vandalism: Aleteia presents an overview of the slow harassment that is worsening the Christian hemorrhage in the Holy Land.

The fact

Aleteia publishes on July 9, 2026, a state of affairs regarding the harassment suffered by Christians in Jerusalem: spitting on priests in the streets of the Old City, repeated insults, vandalism of ecclesiastical properties, violent occupations of convents and monasteries. The phenomenon is not new; it is structural. What has changed is the normalization. It adds to the 80 attacks against Christians documented in three months by the Religious Freedom Data Center, which we reported on, and continues in the silence of the Israeli authorities.

Our reading

The Christian community of the Holy Land has gone from nearly 20 percent of the population of Mandatory Palestine in 1948 to less than 2 percent today. This figure is no longer a demographic statistic; it is an ecclesiastical hemorrhage. The Patriarchs of Jerusalem, in their joint appeal of July 3, 2026, asked the States and the faithful of the world to protect the Christian presence: liturgical presence, pastoral presence, living stones presence. The Catechism No. 2199 reminds us that human law must preserve "the security of persons and goods"; when it fails in the face of repeated religious aggression, it abandons its most vulnerable citizens. Today, in Jerusalem, crossing the sorrowful path in a cassock is an act of daily resistance.

To ponder

Pilgrimages, donations to Eastern Catholic communities, prayer for the Patriarchs: three concrete ways to prevent the city where Christ lived, suffered, and resurrected from becoming, through our inaction, a city without Christians.