Something odd keeps bothering me about the young Catholic traditionalists who’ve turned anti-Israel. Not the politics — the emotion. It runs too hot. It has that scalded quality you get from people who feel personally betrayed, not people working through a disagreement about foreign policy. And once you notice it, the whole phenomenon starts to make a different kind of sense.

But first, two snapshots.

Snapshot one: Palm Sunday, St. Peter’s Square, March 29th. Pope Leo XIV — American-born, cautious by temperament, still finding his feet after barely a year in the job — drops a line from Isaiah into his homily that lands like a grenade. God, he tells the crowd, “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: your hands are full of blood.” He’s clearly aiming at Pete Hegseth, who five days earlier stood at a Pentagon pulpit and prayed — on a livestream, no less — for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” in Iran. But the shrapnel hits wider than Hegseth. A month into the joint US-Israeli campaign that put Khamenei in the ground and turned the Revolutionary Guards into rubble, the Pope has effectively told anyone holding a rifle in the Middle East that heaven’s switchboard is down.

Snapshot two: a detail from last October. The Vatican Apostolic Library — Sixtus IV, 1475, one of the crown jewels of Latin civilization — has a room now with a prayer rug angled toward Mecca. Visiting Muslim scholars asked for it, and the library’s vice-prefect obliged without blinking. “Some Muslim scholars asked us for a room with a carpet to pray, and we gave it to them,” Father Cardinali told La Repubblica. That was the whole conversation. A rug on the floor of Christendom’s memory palace pointed at the Kaaba. Done.

Hold both snapshots. Now think about who’s watching.

Specifically, think about a particular kind of teenage boy — the kind drawn to the Crusades not out of scholarly curiosity but out of hunger. He’s fifteen, he’s restless, and he stumbled onto something that lit him up: Jerusalem crosses, Latin chanting, Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, the whole lost world of Christendom armed and unashamed. He went from YouTube to the Latin Mass to Thomas Aquinas (or a Substack approximation). He bought the package. The Church was once magnificent, the West has gone soft, and the answer is a return to tradition — swords optional but preferred.

That kid has two screens open. On one, the successor of St. Peter lays carpet for Muslims. On the other, the Jewish state — a few million people on a coastal strip — is absorbing ballistic missiles from Persia, hammering Hezbollah in Lebanon, and shooting down drones from Yemen, all at the same time, while its pilots drop ordnance on Tehran. The Iron Dome crackles over Jerusalem. Actual Jerusalem. The city those Crusaders marched two thousand miles to take and couldn’t keep for a hundred years.

Which screen gets his pulse going? Please.

This is the dirty secret behind the eruption of anti-Israel hatred in the trad Catholic internet. Fuentes, Prejean Boller, the whole Catholics for Catholics crowd — they dress it in theology, coat it in supersessionism, cite the old deicide charge that the Vatican buried in 1965, and that keeps clawing its way out of the grave. But the engine underneath is not doctrinal. The engine is envy. Green, choking, irrepressible envy.

Because Israel has the thing. The real thing. Not the fantasy, not the movie trailer, not the Crusader cosplay — the real, functioning, steel-and-concrete version of what these young men thought the Church would give them. A people fused to sacred ground by an ancient covenant. A civilization that fights for its survival without cringing or apologizing or asking the UN’s permission. A country where the weights-and-measures language of daily life — Hebrew — is the same tongue the Psalms were composed in. David’s city defended by David’s descendants in David’s language. A country where 78% of young adults call themselves right-wing and the fertility rate is 2.9 — nearly double the OECD average — because the culture still believes it’s building something worth passing on. Sweden, Germany, and South Korea have thrown fortunes at pro-natal subsidies and can barely crack 1.4. Israel never had to try. You can’t manufacture that kind of civilizational confidence. You can only stand outside it and seethe.

And seethe they do. Fuentes praises Hitler and blames Jews for the Crucifixion — a position the Church officially abandoned six decades ago, though nobody told his Telegram channel. Prejean Boller pinned a Palestinian flag to her jacket at the White House Religious Liberty Commission, right there in the room where Jewish witnesses were describing what antisemitism feels like in 2026 America, then went home and reposted Candace Owens calling Jews “occult Baal worshipers.” Joe Kent walked out of the National Counterterrorism Center, blaming “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” and got treated like a returning hero by Catholics for Catholics. You don’t need a decoder ring for this.

The theological excuse — supersessionism, the covenant transferred, Jews as Christ-killers — is real enough as history. Bishop Williamson of the SSPX denied the gas chambers. There is a well-documented ecosystem of radical traditionalist Catholic antisemitism, and Fuentes has openly promoted rejection of Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration that absolved Jews of collective guilt for the Crucifixion. Leo XIV had to personally reaffirm Nostra Aetate last October, which tells you everything about how alive this poison remains in certain veins of the Church.

But theology explains the vocabulary. It doesn’t explain the voltage. Covenant arguments are for faculty lounges. What’s crackling through Catholic X right now is something rawer. These are young men who tattoo Jerusalem crosses on their skin and post Crusader edits set to Powerwolf tracks, then discover that the institution they pledged allegiance to — the one they chose because it once stormed the walls of Acre — is hosting Muslim prayer services on Vatican grounds. The betrayal is visceral. And so the rage needs an outlet. Enter Israel.

Right crusader, wrong church

What makes the irony almost unbearable is Pete Hegseth. The man has Deus Vult – the Crusaders’ rallying cry, “God wills it” – tattooed on his arm and a Jerusalem cross on his chest. He hosts monthly worship services at the Pentagon. Two weeks ago, he recited a combat prayer originally given to troops before the Venezuela raid, asked God to “break the teeth of the ungodly,” and closed in the name of Jesus Christ. He wrote a book called American Crusade, arguing that anyone who enjoys Western civilization should “thank a crusader.”

Hegseth is, in every visible respect, the Crusader prince the trad bros dream about. Except for two details. He’s an evangelical Protestant, and he’s fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Jews against an Islamic theocracy that wants both of them dead. The living Deus Vult is a Protestant allied with Zion. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, is calling for ceasefire and providing prayer rugs. The medieval world the trad bros worship has been brought to life — by the wrong religion.

And they cannot forgive that.

The National Catholic Reporter — no neocon outfit — noticed the selective outrage. The trad Catholic voices screaming about the Iran war have never shown comparable concern for any other conflict or military action. The concern for civilian life and just-war principles kicks in only when Israel stands to gain. Their antiwar stance, the paper wrote, “has more to do with anti-Zionism and isolationism” than with anything Leo XIV or Aquinas actually taught. When Prejean Boller got pinned at the hearing — are you antisemitic, yes or no — she deflected. All she could manage was that Catholics shouldn’t be coerced into “affirming Zionism.” Rabbi Ari Berman of Yeshiva University answered for her: if you deny statehood to Jews and only Jews, there’s a word for that, and the word isn’t theology.

I’m not claiming every Catholic who criticizes the war in Iran is running on antisemitism. Leo’s call for peace draws from a long and serious tradition. Proportionality can be argued about. But let’s get something straight about the trad bros specifically. These are people who idolize the Crusades — who treat the siege of Jerusalem in 1099 as peak Christendom. Fulcher of Chartres, the chaplain who marched with the First Crusade and chronicled it with relish, wrote of the fall of Jerusalem: “None of them were left alive; neither women nor children spared.”

The trad bros post this stuff with pride. They put “Deus Vult” in their bios. They consider the wars against Islam in the Holy Land the high-water mark of Western civilization. And now Israel — in the same Holy Land, against the ideological descendants of the same enemy — is actually doing the fighting, and suddenly these Crusader enthusiasts discover they’re antiwar? Suddenly, they’re marching under the Palestinian flag? The same people the Crusaders fought, the trad bros now weep for — because the ones doing the fighting today are Jews, not Catholics. That tells you everything you need to know about what’s really driving this.

The trad movement online is not questioning proportionality. What it’s doing is staring at a Jewish state that prays, fights, buries its war dead, and refuses to vanish — and seeing, with nauseating clarity, the civilizational vitality that they believed they’d found in the Church and now realize was never coming back. The rootedness. The defiance. The permanence. Everything they wanted, owned by someone else.

And here’s the part that really gets under my skin — the real titans of traditional Catholicism, the serious ones, the ones the trad bros claim to revere, don’t share this hatred at all. Robert Cardinal Sarah — the Guinean cardinal who was every conservative Catholic’s dream candidate for pope — went on Figaro TV just last month and said what the trad bros pretend not to hear: “Wake up. Islam is a danger. If Christians don’t start caring about our faith, Islam will take over the West. They’ll impose their laws and culture… We will decline.”

This is the most respected traditionalist voice in the Church. He’s written that the Jewish people are “God’s chosen people.” He called the Holocaust “the greatest scandal of humanity” and wrote that the Nazis “wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai.” He grew up under a Marxist dictatorship in Guinea. He was made archbishop at thirty-four. He has spent his entire life fighting the exact forces the trad bros claim to oppose — secular nihilism and Islamist totalitarianism. And he sees no contradiction between traditional Catholicism and respect for the Jewish people and their state. Because there isn’t one.

The truth the trad bros refuse to accept is that Israel and conservative Catholics are natural allies. They face the same enemy in radical Islamism — and the same progressive establishment that calls traditional Catholics bigots calls Israel an apartheid state. Jews are not Christians, sure. Neither are most Japanese, and somehow nobody on Catholic X has a problem recognizing Japan as a valuable civilizational partner. The hostility toward Israel has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the specific psychosis of a very specific online subculture — mostly American, mostly converts or reverts, mostly young men who built their identity around a romanticized past and can’t handle the real present. As I argued in an earlier piece, the global Catholic right is pro-Israel. It’s America’s extremely online converts who are the exception — and a fringe one at that.

The great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton warned that the modern world is full of old Christian virtues gone mad — “cut loose from one another and wandering alone.” The trad Catholic obsession with Israel is civilizational pride in exactly that condition — severed from charity, running feral, biting at the wrong ankles.

If the trad bros want answers about what happened to Christendom militant, the address they need is in Rome, not Jerusalem.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)