Pope Leo XIV has had a busy week. On Friday, he held a prayer vigil at St. Peter’s, denouncing the “delusion of omnipotence” driving the war in Iran. On Sunday, Donald Trump called him “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” on Truth Social. On Monday, aboard the papal flight to Algeria, Leo told reporters he has “no fear of the Trump administration” and will “continue to speak out loudly against war.” Brave stuff. The head of the Catholic Church going toe to toe with the president of the United States over the Iran war. Real courage.

So where was this courage on Christmas Eve, when Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi wrote Leo a personal letter begging him to speak up for Christians being imprisoned, flogged, and threatened with execution by the Iranian regime? The Vatican never answered. The Pope who fears no president apparently fears a theocracy too much to say one word about his own flock rotting in its dungeons. Confronting the democratically elected leader of a Christian nation — that he can do. Confronting the Islamist regime that persecutes his own faithful — that’s a step too far. Priorities.

Last year, the Islamic Republic of Iran sentenced 73 Christians to a combined 280 years in prison. The charges range from “promoting Zionist Christianity” to “propaganda contrary to Islamic law” — which in practice means getting baptized, attending a house church, or owning a Bible. The year before, 96 Christians were sentenced to 263 years. A pregnant woman, Narges Nasri, got sixteen years. A man undergoing chemotherapy got three and a half. Another convert, Yasin Mousavi, got fifteen years — ten for “membership in disruptive groups” (a Christian organization) and five for participating in protests.

The death penalty for apostasy remains on the books. Iran executed over 900 people in 2024, scores of them on religious charges. Even after release, converts face flogging, internal exile, forced Islamic re-education classes, denial of employment and healthcare, and — I kid you not — compulsory grave-digging duties as a form of community service. The Center for Human Rights in Iran reports that imprisonment of Christians jumped sixfold in a single year. A judge told one Christian defendant: “It’s a disgrace that you are even breathing the air in this sacred courtroom.”

This is happening right now, in April 2026, as you read this.

The details of Pahlavi’s letter are worth dwelling on. He didn’t ask Leo for a political statement. He asked him to use diplomatic channels, to say something public about converts seeking communion with the Catholic Church who face torture for the crime of baptism. The Vatican didn’t respond. Two months later, when the United States and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear program, Leo suddenly found plenty to say. He called the war “unjust”, warned of a “tragedy of immense proportions”, called Trump’s rhetoric “truly unacceptable”, announced a prayer vigil, and urged American citizens to phone their congressmen.

Not one word about the Christians in Evin Prison, about Narges Nasri, about the 280 years of cumulative sentences or the floggings or the forced re-education. The Vicar of Christ — the shepherd of the global flock — had nothing to offer Christians being imprisoned and whipped by the very regime he was now rushing to shield from American and Israeli bombs.

A Muslim prince in exile showed more concern for Iran’s Christians than the most prominent Christian leader on earth. Sit with that for a second.

The Middle East Forum’s Giulio Meotti nailed it: Leo’s silence “follows the very cautious and fearful line of his predecessor Bergoglio, who always pretended not to see even the long trail of blood of thousands and thousands of girls, mostly students, brutally massacred, raped, often hanged by the Ayatollah regime.” Two popes running. Two pontificates spent looking the other way while an Islamist theocracy grinds Christians into dust — and then sprinting to the microphone the moment someone actually confronts the regime doing the grinding.

There was a time when the Vatican actually defended Christendom. Popes rallied armies and broke sieges protecting the faithful from exactly the kind of theocratic persecution that Iran practices today. That Church is gone. What replaced it is an institution that won’t even write a letter back to a Muslim prince begging it to speak up for persecuted Christians.

It gets worse. Look at what Pope Leo tweeted on April 10: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” Never. Any conflict. Not a word of qualification. Pope Urban II — the man who launched the First Crusade — might want a word. John III Sobieski, who saved Vienna and Christian Europe from the Ottomans in 1683, might want two.

And yet the Pope’s most ardent defenders, the same crowd rallying to his side with AI-generated crusader march videos and templar armor edits, imagine Catholicism as a warrior faith. They fantasize about swords and siege warfare and the reconquest of Jerusalem. And their own Pope just told them, from his own official account, that a disciple of Christ is never on the side of those who wielded the sword. That means you too, Godfrey. That means you too, Richard. That means every crusader whose image these guys stick on their profile pictures is, according to their own Pope, on the wrong side of God. And they don’t even notice.

Give it a month. The moment Leo posts something about climate change, these same crusader LARPers will be calling him a communist, just like they did with Francis. They don’t actually follow the Pope. They follow an imaginary warrior Pope who doesn’t exist. The real one is an embarrassment to them, and they are an embarrassment to the real one.

You’d think that people who spend this much energy cosplaying as defenders of the faith would be beside themselves about what Iran does to Christians. You’d think the imprisonment of a pregnant convert would keep a self-described crusader up at night.

Wrong. What keeps them up is a handful of ultra-Orthodox extremists in the Old City of Jerusalem who spit at Christian pilgrims during Sukkot.

Let me explain exactly what happened in Jerusalem, because the trad bros never do. In October 2023, videos surfaced of ultra-Orthodox youths spitting toward Christians carrying a cross near the Church of the Flagellation. It was ugly and stupid and completely indefensible. It was also immediately condemned by everyone who matters in Israel. Netanyahu called it “sacrilege and simply unacceptable” and pledged “immediate and decisive action.” Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau said such acts “certainly should not be attributed to Jewish law.” Chief Sephardic Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef called it “a desecration of the name of heaven.” Religious Services Minister Malkieli — himself ultra-Orthodox, from the Shas party — stated flatly that “there is not a single rabbi who supports and legitimizes such despicable behavior.” Religious Zionist leaders issued a joint statement calling it “a religious and moral abomination.” Five people were arrested. Undercover police were deployed along the Via Dolorosa. Israel’s Foreign Minister personally called the Vatican to express condemnation.

That’s what a functioning democracy looks like. A fringe does something disgusting. The state apparatus identifies it, condemns it, arrests the perpetrators, and deploys resources to prevent it from happening again. You don’t have to like it. You can still think the spitting is a problem — the Latin Patriarch Pizzaballa does, and he’s said so publicly. But there’s a difference between a problem that a society acknowledges and fights, and a policy that a state enacts and enforces. The trad bros refuse to see that difference. Or maybe they see it fine, and it doesn’t bother them.

Because in Iran, the persecution of Christians is the system working as designed. It’s in the legal code. Revolutionary courts hand down the sentences, intelligence agents enforce them, and state media celebrate it all as defending Islamic order. No Iranian official has ever condemned the imprisonment of converts. No Iranian president has ever called the Vatican to apologize. The judges hand down the sentences and the guards administer the floggings and the state labels Christians “spies” and “Zionist agents” — and the whole machine exists to crush the faith that the trad bros claim to defend.

They know all of this, and they just don’t care. Caring about persecuted Christians in Iran would force them to reckon with a fact that wrecks their whole worldview: the Islamist regime is the actual enemy of their faith, and the country doing the most to confront that regime is the Jewish state they’ve built an identity around despising. That’s the knot they can’t untie. The entire trad bro persona runs on a fantasy of civilizational confrontation — Christendom versus the infidel, the Cross versus the Crescent. But when that confrontation shows up in real life, in 2026, with real Christians in real dungeons, they pick the Crescent. Every time.

They’d rather rage over a handful of spitters in Jerusalem — who were arrested and condemned by their own government — than acknowledge the industrial-scale destruction of Christianity happening in the country they now want shielded from American ordnance. Siding with a regime that imprisons pregnant women for converting to your own faith — while calling yourself a defender of Christendom — is moral, intellectual, and spiritual bankruptcy, and no amount of Crusader memes will change that.

The uncomfortable truth is that a Jewish state — one that didn’t ask for the job and doesn’t frame it in these terms — is doing more for persecuted Christians in Iran than their own Pope. Israel didn’t set out to defend Middle Eastern Christians. But the practical result of degrading the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and military infrastructure is that the single greatest state persecutor of Christians in the region is weaker today than it was a year ago. That’s more than any papal homily has accomplished for Iranian believers in the entire history of the Islamic Republic. Leo XIV has issued statements, scheduled prayer vigils, and urged dialogue with a regime that flogs people for getting baptized. Israel sent jets.

Godfrey of Bouillon left his duchy behind and fought across a continent so that Christians could worship freely in the Holy Land. Richard the Lionheart spent years, his health, and his kingdom’s treasury defending pilgrims from the armies of Saladin. Baldwin IV governed the Kingdom of Jerusalem from a leper’s sickbed rather than cede ground to forces that would have erased the Christian presence from the Levant. Pope Urban II called the First Crusade because Christians in the East were being persecuted, and whatever you think of what came after — and plenty of it was brutal, politically ruthless, and often fought for reasons that had as much to do with land and power as with faith — those men were not cowards. They named the enemy and they went to where the fight was, instead of holding prayer vigils for the people trying to destroy their civilization.

These are the men the trad bros put on their profile pictures. So what would Godfrey say about a generation of cosplay crusaders shilling for an Islamist theocracy that executes people for converting to his faith? What would Urban II make of a pontificate that ignores the imprisonment of pregnant converts and then denounces the military campaign against the state that jailed them?

The trad bro patron saint is Pius X, the pope who told Herzl in 1904 that “the Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.” They love that quote. They circulate it like a baseball card. Pius X — the hammer of modernism, the scourge of liberalism, the trad bro pope par excellence. I’ll grant them that one. But think about what Pius X actually was: a man of absolute theological conviction who took the defense of the Church and its faithful with deadly seriousness. A man who saw the world in starkly civilizational terms and did not flinch from naming enemies of the faith. Do you honestly believe that Pius X — confronted with an Islamic regime that imprisons pregnant women for embracing Christianity, that flogs believers, that sentences converts to decades in prison for the crime of baptism — would shrug and call for “dialogue”? That he’d spend his energy on spitting in Jerusalem while Christians rot in Evin? I think Pius X, for all his hostility to Zionism, would look at what Iran does to Christians and be disgusted to his core. And I think he’d look at the Jewish state that confronts that regime militarily and, however begrudgingly, however much it grated on him theologically, recognize that Israel is doing more for the safety of his flock than his own successors have managed in over a century.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is growing. Christian holy sites are protected by law. Converts worship openly. You can preach the Gospel without worrying about a midnight knock from intelligence services. When extremists harass pilgrims, the prime minister condemns it the same day, and police arrest people by the end of the week. Put that next to Iran — where courts sentence pregnant women to sixteen years for their faith, where converts are told they’re a “disgrace” for “breathing the air” in a courtroom — and tell me with a straight face that the spitting is the bigger scandal. I dare you.

But admitting any of this would mean admitting that the Jewish state is a better guardian of Christian life and liberty than every Muslim-majority country in the region. And that single fact is something the trad bro worldview cannot metabolize. So they scroll past the news from Tehran, repost another Crusader woodcut, and type “Deus Vult” under a meme about reclaiming Jerusalem — while the Christians who could actually use some reclaiming rot in Iranian prisons and the trad bros do absolutely nothing for them.

The Christians of Iran deserve a Pope who says their names before he says the word “ceasefire,” and coreligionists who care more about their suffering than about point-scoring against Jews. At a bare minimum, they deserve someone in the Western Christian establishment willing to say out loud that a regime which imprisons, flogs, and threatens to execute people for believing in Christ is a worse enemy of Christianity than a democratic state where some teenagers spit and got arrested for it.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)