The Holy Land is not just a problem for diplomats. It is a problem for Christians who have forgotten what the place is for. For two thousand years the Church has spoken of the Holy Places as stones of memory. That is true. It is also incomplete. The more urgent question is whether the living stones — the baptized families who still walk the same roads as Our Lord — will still be there in fifty years. If they are not, the shrines become museums, and the political quarrel between two peoples will go on without a third people who once made the land something other than a binary of Jew and Muslim.
I am not a Christian Zionist. The Catholic Church is the Kingdom of Israel now. The modern Israeli republic is a man-made state. It has the same right to exist and the same right to defend itself, as any other country, no more and no less. It has no unique prophetic mandate over the Gospel. Palestinians are not a theological category either. They are neighbors. The only people the Church is bound to treat as a people with an unrevoked covenant are the Jews — and that covenant does not require us to pretend that empty churches in Bethlehem are a victory for anyone. The best practical contribution Christians in the West can make to the political mess is not another peace plan. It is to help Christians become a larger share of the population in both Israel and the Palestinian territories.
That claim will be dismissed as naive. The numbers say otherwise. They say the naive position is the one that keeps sending thoughts and prayers while the oldest Christian communities on earth thin out until only pilgrims remain.
What the numbers actually say
Israel’s population is now a little over ten million. Jews are roughly three-quarters of it. Arabs are about one-fifth. Christians are under two percent — on the order of one hundred eighty-four thousand (184,000) people as of the latest official Christmas count. About seventy-nine percent of those Christians are Arab Christians, concentrated in Nazareth, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Galilee. The largest groups are Melkite Greek Catholics and Greek Orthodox, then Latin Catholics. A smaller share arrived with Jewish family members under the Law of Return after the Soviet collapse.
In the Palestinian territories the picture is worse. West Bank Christians are estimated at roughly forty-five thousand (45,000) — a little more than one percent of the population. In 1967 they were around six percent. Gaza’s Christian community has been reduced to a remnant measured in hundreds. Historic Palestine as a whole was roughly ten to twelve percent Christian a century ago. That is gone.
Bethlehem is the exhibit that ends the argument. In 1950, Christians were about eighty-six percent of the city. Under British, Jordanian, and then Israeli administration the share fell, but the collapse after Oslo is what finished the majority. By the last Palestinian census cycle, Bethlehem was around ten percent Christian. Since October 2023, more families have left. Taybeh, the last fully Christian town in the West Bank, is a village of about twelve hundred people watching families pack. This is not a theory. It is a completed demographic event in the town where the Nativity is celebrated for cameras.
Inside Israel, the Rossing Center’s survey work is equally blunt. Roughly one Christian in three has considered leaving. Among those under thirty, the figure approaches half. That is the future walking out the door.
Why “a larger share” is the only lever that is not another slogan
Peace plans assume two national movements can be talked into a map. Fifty years of maps have produced illegal settlements, checkpoints, rockets, and ruins. A two-state line that was merely difficult in 1993 is now physically shredded by facts on the ground. A one-state slogan produces either Jewish minority-rule or Palestinian majority revenge, depending on one’s perspective. Confederation talk dies in the first election. The status quo is not stable. It is an ongoing machine that manufactures emigration. Some say that is by design. Whether it is or not, it is the reality.
Christians are the people already living next to both Jews and Muslims. Their schools in Galilee and the West Bank have long enrolled mixed classrooms. Their hospitals treat whoever comes through the door. They are the only community whose existence does not require the other side to disappear. That is not sentiment. It is the social fact of a minority that cannot survive by conquering anyone and has no desire to.
A larger Christian share does not mean a Christian state. It means enough baptized households that the land cannot be reduced to two tribes and endless holy war. Empty Christian quarters do not produce peace. They produce a simpler, uglier map.
What will not produce a larger share
Three fantasies need to be buried.
First, outbreeding. Christian fertility in Israel is already low — about one and a half children per woman, lower still among Arab Christian women. Jewish fertility is above three. Muslim fertility has fallen but remains higher than the Christian rate. Christians will not win a birth contest. Anyone selling that as a plan is not looking at the Central Bureau of Statistics.
Second, mass immigration of Western Christians. Israel’s Law of Return is for Jews and those with Jewish ancestry. Ordinary Christians do not get a passport, or a visa, just because they read the New Testament. Family reunification is tightly restricted. There is no legal pipeline that turns Texas into a demographic rescue for Nazareth.
Third, treating Jews as just another mission field. The Church reads Romans nine through eleven as saying the Jewish covenant was never revoked. That is why Jews are the only people Rome treats this way. It is theology, not ethnicity. Coercive evangelism and material inducements are illegal in Israel. Non-coercive witness is not. Yes, it’s okay for Catholics to evangelize Israeli Jews in friendly (non-coercive) conversation, yet that is neither a five-year plan for a Christian majority, nor even a fifty-year plan. Pretending otherwise is unrealistic. Both Jews and Muslims have a conditioned, psychological response of rejection to the Gospel. Christian missionaries have been trying to reach these two groups for centuries, all to no avail.
What remains is the only mechanism that has already been measured: stop the hemorrhage. Keep the families who are already there. Give their children an education that leads to a job in the land, not a visa. Pay the rent and the tuition before the house is sold. A community that loses its young every year will never become a larger share of anything.
Who is already doing the work
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Melkite hierarchy already work together through the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land. The Latin Patriarch is president of that assembly; the Melkite Archbishop of Akka is vice-president. They share sacraments. They coordinate schools, family aid, and pastoral guidelines. This is not two rival franchises. It is one Catholic Church in two rites on the same ground.
The Patriarchate runs on the order of forty schools and tens of thousands of students across Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan. You can give on lpj.org and restrict the gift to humanitarian aid or educational aid. You can also use a bank transfer and put the restriction in the reference line.
The cleanest Catholic tool for keeping Christians in Israel and the Palestinian territories is the Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land. That is its reason for existing. University scholarships, vocational grants, family aid, hundreds of graduates: almost none of them are emigrating after receiving this aid. Most are employed locally. That is not a press release. That is the only outcome that matters.
Protestants are thinner on this specific task because most evangelical money still flows toward Jewish immigration, settlements, or general war relief. That is their business. A few groups do what Catholics have been doing for decades. The Raymond Davis Foundation funds Christian school and university scholarships so families can stay. The Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation pays Christian school tuition across Latin, Orthodox, Melkite, and Lutheran schools. Smaller outfits work the remaining communities in Bethlehem, Taybeh, and Gaza. If an Evangelical wants to help the living Church rather than a prophecy chart, those are the doors that actually open onto Christian households.
What the politics actually do to Christians
Israeli policy toward the West Bank is not a mystery. Settlement expansion, Area C control, and annexation talk from figures on the religious right are a strategy of facts on the ground. Catholics should not ignore that. Settler violence against Christian towns is documented. It is not the whole story, and treating every Israeli as a settler is slander. It is enough of the story that Taybeh’s families are leaving.
Palestinian Authority rule in Bethlehem is not a mystery either. The Christian majority did not evaporate because of Christmas lights. Discrimination, economic collapse after the pilgrimage economy died, Islamist pressure, and the simple fact that a small community cannot hold a municipality when it is no longer a majority — all of that is on the record. Hamas in Gaza is not a misunderstood social program. Gaza’s Christians have been reduced under that regime and then under the war that followed October 7.
Both national projects (Israeli and Palestinian) treat Christians as a rounding error. That is why Western Christians who pick a team and ignore the living Church are useful idiots for someone else’s map.
The theological point that cannot be bargained away
The Church does not need the Israeli republic to fulfill the Old Testament. Jesus Christ already did that. The Church does not need a Palestinian state to prove that she loves Arabs. She already baptized them. What she needs is the people who were baptized in that land to remain in that land.
Antisemitism is a sin. I have written on that specifically. Jews remain beloved for the sake of the fathers. That is Nostra Aetate and it is St. Paul. It is also not a blank check for any government, any settlement, or any war. Zionism as a secular-political choice is one thing. Zionism as a substitute for the Gospel is another. Catholics cannot be religious Zionists. We Catholics can be neighbors, allies of convenience, or critics. We cannot baptize a secular republic as the Kingdom of David. It is not.
The same rule applies in the other direction. Palestinian nationalism is not the Gospel. Killing civilians is not resistance in any sense the just-war tradition would recognize. Using Christian towns as a moral shield while those towns empty is a fraud.
What to do…
Give where the gift can be restricted to Christian families and Christian schools in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Use the Latin Patriarchate and specify education or family support.
Use the Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land and specify scholarships. It’s probably the quickest and easiest way, with proved results.
If you are Protestant, use the Raymond Davis Foundation or the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation and specify tuition.
Pray for the Patriarch and the Melkite bishops. Stop treating the Israeli republic as the Israel of the Bible. Stop treating Palestinian Christians as an inconvenience to someone else’s end-times timetable.
The Church is not called to manage other people’s nations. She is called to remain where her Lord walked. That remaining is now a demographic project. Either the living stones stay and multiply as best they can, or the Holy Land becomes a dispute between two peoples over the graves of a third. As Jesus rhetorically asked, “when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Luke 18:8 (RSVCE). Will he find faith even in his own homeland? The answer to that question is largely left up to all of us.
Sources
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Christmas 2025 — Christians in Israel: https://www.cbs.gov.il/en/mediarelease/Pages/2025/Christmas-2025-Christians-in-Israel.aspx
- KnowIsrael, religious composition of Israel: https://www.knowisrael.org/explainers/religious-composition-israel
- Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem: https://www.lpj.org/en
- Latin Patriarchate educational aid: https://www.lpj.org/en/sectors/educational-aid
- Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land: https://ffhl.org/
- FFHL donate page: https://ffhl.org/donate-now/
- Aid to the Church in Need USA: https://www.churchinneed.org/
- Aid to the Church in Need UK Holy Land Appeal: https://acnuk.org/holy-land-appeal
- Catholic Near East Welfare Association: https://cnewa.org/
- Raymond Davis Foundation: https://raymonddavisfoundation.org/
- Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, Children’s Education Fund: https://hcef.org/programs/cef/
- Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land: https://www.aocts.org/the-assembly
- Rossing Center / reports on Christians considering emigration (one in three overall; about half under 30): summarized at https://cath.ch/newsf/un-chretien-sur-trois-envisage-de-quitter-israel
- West Bank Christian population estimates and postwar emigration: https://www.straitstimes.com/world/middle-east/exodus-west-bank-hardships-drive-out-palestinian-christians
- Bethlehem Christian share collapse (1950s majority to roughly 10 percent): Jerusalem Post summary of JCFA research: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-834585
- Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate: https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html
- Romans 9–11.
- Shane Schaetzel, “The Church is Kingdom Israel”: https://realclearcatholic.com/2021/06/21/the-church-is-kingdom-israel/
- Shane Schaetzel, “Against the Antisemites”: https://realclearcatholic.com/2021/12/21/against-the-antisemites/
Shane Schaetzel is an author of Catholic books and he is an Evangelical convert to the Catholic Church. His articles have been featured on LifeSiteNews, The Remnant Newspaper, Forward in Christ, and Catholic Online. You can read Shane’s books at ShaneSchaetzel.Com
