Saint Joseph Catholic Church

Following the attacks, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchate announced that “Easter celebrations would be reduced to prayers inside churches,” EWTN News reported.

Stating that “mission is not a heroic adventure reserved for a few, but the living witness of a Body with many members,” Pope Leo XIV celebrated the Holy Thursday Chrism Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica this morning (video) and reflected on the “mission to which God calls us as his people,” in a time the Pope described as “this dark hour of history.”

“The message that comes to us today from St. Francis, who echoes Jesus’ message, is to love everyone, even our enemies,” said Cardinal Parolin. “It is only from this love that we can draw hope: a love that is all things to all people and that seeks to build a reality of peace.”

The suspect “poured a drink into the baptismal font, removed an undisclosed amount of money from a donation box, and took a cloth from the altar” on March 28, according to a local media report.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has documented over 400 acts of vandalism, arson, and other destruction at parishes and other Catholic sites in the United States since 2020. A tracker at CatholicVote.org lists additional attacks.

“I took inspiration from the Gospel texts, favoring the Evangelist St. John, who has a penetrating view of the mystery of the Lord’s Passion; and then from the writings of Saint Francis, which are a treasure trove of Christian spirituality,” said Father Patton, who led the Franciscan province in the Holy Land from 2016 to 2025 and is now a friar at Mount Nebo.

Commenting on the current situation in the Middle East, Father Patton said:

We could say that the “zealots,” who at Jesus’ time justified violence in God’s name, have come back into fashion.

Today, “zealots” are everywhere: we find them in the Muslim world through a galaxy of armed fundamentalist movements; we find them in the Jewish world, well represented by settlers and those who politically support them locally and internationally; we also find them among Christians, who unfortunately invoke strange blessings going in the opposite direction to that indicated last Sunday by Pope Leo XIV and 2,000 years ago by Jesus in Gethsemane; we even find them in secular form in state laicisms that censor religious expressions in a discriminatory and persecutory way.

In Gaza, “two million people are still suffering: the issue is unresolved,” he told Vatican News. “80% of the infrastructure is still destroyed.”

Referring to the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank, Bishop Shomali said that Israeli settlers “enter whenever they want, set fire to vehicles, and prevent farmers from working their fields.”

A “new settlement will now be built near Bethlehem, in Beit Sahour, in an area called Osh Ghrab, on land that belongs to Christian families,” he added. “They cannot even approach it.”