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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)