Foreign aid should offer resources, not liberal ideology



When news breaks that foreign aid programs are being paused or restructured, many Christians understandably fear the world’s most vulnerable will be left behind.

It is a fair concern. But it also raises a harder question: What if some of what we have called “help” was not helping in the way we thought?

The recent restructuring of foreign aid creates an opportunity. It allows the United States to reconsider not only how much it gives, but how it gives.

Imposed values

For decades, American foreign assistance has done real good in many places. But too often it has also come with expectations that placed struggling nations in an impossible position. Funding was tied to adopting policies on family life, sexuality, and bioethics that did not reflect the values of the communities receiving that aid. Governments that resisted those conditions risked losing support their people depended on.

From a Christian perspective, that should give us pause. Care for the poor is a moral calling. But care that requires communities to compromise their deepest convictions is not compassion. It is pressure, even if it is delivered in the language of progress.

Scripture calls us to love our neighbor, not to remake our neighbor in our own image.

Pursuing the good

That is why the Geneva Consensus Declaration matters. Today, 41 nations representing more than 2.5 billion people have joined this coalition, affirming that international law does not establish a universal right to abortion and that each country has the authority to determine its own laws on life and family.

These nations were not forced into agreement. Many joined because they were weary of outside institutions attempting to impose agenda-driven frameworks through funding conditions and international pressure. What they were seeking was not isolation, but partnership. They wanted to be treated not as projects to be managed, but as nations capable of shaping their own future.

This reflects a principle Christians should recognize. Human dignity includes moral agency. It includes the freedom of communities to pursue the good, before God, without coercion from more powerful actors.

RELATED: New book from Eric Metaxas shares the American Revolution's forgotten Christian roots

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The Protego framework

There is also a practical reality the United States cannot ignore. Countries like China are expanding their influence across Africa and Latin America by offering infrastructure and investment with fewer visible conditions. America's advantage lies in offering something China cannot: genuine partnership that respects the nations it serves.

In practice, that means moving from a model of control to a model of partnership.

At the Institute for Women’s Health, we have sought to do this through what we call the Protego framework. Instead of arriving with predesigned solutions, we work alongside national leaders, faith communities, and local institutions to build programs that reflect the values and needs of each country.

In one African nation, this has meant developing a national framework for health and life-skills education with input from across society, including interfaith leaders. It is designed to reach tens of thousands of educators and health workers. The program belongs to that nation. The values behind it are its own. And when the partnership ends, the capacity to sustain it will remain.

This kind of work is slower. It requires listening, humility, and trust. But it reflects something essential to a Christian understanding of service.

Human flourishing

We are not called simply to deliver outcomes. We are called to serve people as people, not as instruments of our own priorities.

Faithful foreign engagement takes seriously the dignity of every nation and every community. It refuses to make care for the vulnerable conditional on ideological agreement. It invests in what supports human flourishing, strong families, healthy communities, and the well-being of women and children, while ensuring that these efforts are shaped locally rather than imposed from outside.

The recent restructuring of foreign aid creates an opportunity. It allows the United States to reconsider not only how much it gives, but how it gives.

For Christians, the goal should not be to defend every existing program. It should be to ensure that our engagement reflects the character of the One we serve. We are called to help the vulnerable. But faithful service cannot be separated from humility, respect, and truth about the human person.

How ‘wet noodle Christians’ surrendered America to Marxists



A particular species of Christian now flourishes in America. I call him the “wet noodle Christian.”

He is easy to recognize. He attends Bible studies, laments the moral collapse of the nation over coffee after church, and speaks with deep concern about the culture. But ask whether Christians should publicly oppose evil or contend for the moral direction of society, and he recoils as though you had proposed human sacrifice.

When Jesus taught believers to turn the other cheek, he addressed personal vengeance, not civilizational surrender.

“Oh, I don’t get involved in politics,” he says.

Or: “The world is supposed to get worse anyway.”

Or, with special confidence: “Jesus told us to turn the other cheek.”

He says all this as though Christian ethics can be reduced to the consistency of warm pudding.

This attitude springs partly from biblical illiteracy, partly from a successful Marxist strategy, and entirely from sin.

Biblical confusion

Christians often invoke the crucifixion as though Christ’s death requires believers to become passive spectators while evil marches through every institution of society. That confuses the unique work of Christ with the ordinary duties of Christians.

Christ’s death was the once-for-all atoning sacrifice of the Lamb of God. No Christian is called to redeem the world by offering himself as a substitute for sin. That office belongs to Christ alone. Nor did Christ go unwillingly or by force.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus rebuked sin, denounced hypocrisy, drove money changers from the temple with a whip, and told adulteresses to stop sinning. Hardly the behavior of a celestial yoga instructor murmuring therapeutic affirmations beside a Himalayan stream.

When Jesus taught believers to turn the other cheek, he addressed personal vengeance, not civilizational surrender. The command restrains sinful retaliation. It does not abolish justice, civil authority, or moral responsibility.

The same Christ who taught mercy also stands behind Romans 13, where the civil magistrate bears the sword as a minister of God against evil. The same Jesus appears in Psalm 2 as the enthroned king while rebellious rulers “take counsel together, against the Lord and against His Anointed.”

The biblical picture is one of advance, not retreat.

In the Great Commission, Jesus does not tell Christians to preserve their private religious feelings until death mercifully arrives. He commands them to make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that he has commanded.

One searches the text in vain for the line: “Go therefore and quietly lose every institution while avoiding conflict.”

And here the second problem appears: Marxists understood the wet noodle instinct long before many Christians did.

RELATED: Adults are refusing to grow up, and their children are paying the price

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Marxist subversion

For roughly 70 years, leftist media, academic institutions, and entertainment industries have carefully catechized Christians into believing that public Christianity is somehow immoral.

Christians were told that bringing moral convictions into public life is divisive. They were taught that the First Amendment requires a functionally atheist public square, though this alleged neutrality somehow never excludes progressive secular dogmas. The Christian could privately believe whatever he wished, provided he kept it quarantined like a contagious disease.

Meanwhile, the left marched through the institutions with all the subtlety of Sherman marching through Georgia.

One suspects many Marxists privately thought: “I cannot believe how easy this is.”

They taught Christians that offending anyone is the supreme moral evil, that strength itself is suspicious, that certainty is oppressive, and that masculinity is toxic. They insisted public Christianity was dangerous, and most Christians agreed to stop speaking publicly.

The remarkable thing is not that Marxists advanced their agenda. The remarkable thing is that so many Christians surrendered before the battle even began.

Part of this surrender also comes from bad eschatology, the notion that Christians should expect inevitable defeat in history. If collapse is certain, why resist anything? Why build institutions? Why fight corruption? Why educate children? Why preserve civilization?

This mentality looks far more like ancient Israel than faithful Christianity.

The Old Testament repeatedly shows Israel absorbing the gods and practices of surrounding nations, surrendering covenant distinctiveness, and then coming under divine judgment. Defeatism was never treated as humility. It was treated as faithlessness. One can almost hear an ancient pagan telling his Israelite neighbor that the Temple sacrifices and the Law of Moses are simply not nice.

The New Testament continues the theme. Hebrews 12 reminds believers that God disciplines his people for their good, though “for the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant.” Divine chastening does not mean abandonment. It means fatherly correction.

Perhaps America is living through precisely such discipline now.

RELATED: New book from Eric Metaxas shares the American Revolution's forgotten Christian roots

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Recovering the truth

Many Christians anxiously avoid offending anyone while ignoring Christ’s explicit command to disciple the nations. They have become highly obedient to a command Jesus never gave — be inoffensive at all costs — while neglecting the one he did give.

Christians often speak as though courage belongs to secular revolutionaries, while faith belongs to timid people waiting for evacuation. But biblically, faith grounds courage because faith rests on the certainty of Christ’s victory.

Christ will have the nations as his inheritance. The gospel will go into all the world. Faith lives here and now in light of what we know will be then and there.

The Great Commission is not a suggestion to attempt cultural survival until the batteries die. It is a declaration of conquest grounded in Christ’s authority: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me” (Matthew 28:18).

All authority. Not partial authority pending polling data.

The remedy for the wet noodle Christian, therefore, is not anger, resentment, or partisan hysteria. It is the courage of faith.

Christians must recover confidence that truth is true, that Christ reigns now, and that obedience does not become optional simply because it provokes pushback. They must stop confusing passivity with holiness and cowardice with kindness.

Above all, they must understand the strategy that has been used against them. The first step in losing a civilization is convincing its defenders that defending it is somehow unchristian.

The most dangerous country to be a Christian will shock you — here's what's happening



Christians face persecution across the globe — but one country has made it almost impossible for them to practice their faith, threatening torture, imprisonment, and execution simply because they believe in Jesus Christ.

That country is North Korea.

“If you’re even found to be in possession of a Bible, you and your entire family are likely going to be thrown into a concentration camp — a work camp — for the rest of your days, never to be heard of, never to be seen again,” CEO of Open Doors Ryan Brown tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey.

“To be identified as a Christian — to be found as a Christian — is the equivalent of a death sentence,” he says, pointing out that in North Korea, the highest authority isn’t God, but the state.


“And so, for Christians, who have a higher authority than the state — Christians are immediately seen as enemies of the state. They’re assumed to be enemies of the state or, in some cases, assumed to be allies of the West,” he explains.

There are also public executions of Christians.

“In many cases, if they feel like, OK, it’s been a little too long; we need to remind people that we’re in charge; we need to remind people what the consequences are,” he says.

However, despite the threat Christians face in North Korea, they refuse to give up.

“There are about 400,000 Christians in North Korea … and it is growing,” Brown says, explaining that Open Doors has set up safe houses across the border where “individuals are able to come be nursed back to physical health.”

“It … humbles me to see that there are men and women that have, in essence, escaped from North Korea, come to these safe houses, been nursed back to health, and their goal and their intent and what they have done is to go back to North Korea so they can continue to minister,” he explains.

“They’ve … taken a posture of ‘How can I be equipped so that I can go back and continue to share the gospel with my friends and neighbors?'" he adds.

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Why leftism as a mental illness is a ‘comforting fiction’



As the divide between the right and the left continues to deepen, BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre explains that Americans are writing off what they don’t understand about each other as a “form of mental illness.”

“This is understandable when it comes to horrific crime. Someone like a serial killer is so violent and twisted that it's hard for us to comprehend their actions, and there is certainly a fair amount of mental illness that plays a factor,” MacIntyre says. “But today people often use this explanation when it comes to political disagreements.”

“Abortion, hatred for Christians and white people, the mutilation of children to turn boys into girls — these beliefs are so horrible that they can only possibly be explained by a malfunctioning brain,” he continues. “Of course, that's not the only explanation.”


“The other option is that some people have a very different set of values that drive them to pursue goals that we view as evil. The average American would like to avoid this truth, because it comes with an unnerving conclusion: Your political enemies aren't crazy; they are sane people who hate you and want to hurt you,” he adds.

MacIntyre explains that believing that a radical leftist who wants to mutilate children is mentally ill “is far easier than addressing the alternative.”

“The idea that half of America is crazy because they don’t share your political views is obviously absurd," he says. "The truth is much darker. We’re at least two societies, with mutually exclusive understandings of morality and purpose, trapped in one country.”

“The theoretical neutrality of the liberal system allowed this drift to occur under the surface, but the differences have become too extreme to ignore. Both sides have their own internally consistent understanding of the world, but they’re entirely incompatible with each other,” he explains.

“One side is going to win and one side is going to lose, and the winning side is going to impose its way of life on the other. There is no way to avoid this reality,” he continues. “And obscuring the truth with comforting fictions about mental illness only ensures that you’ll be on the side that loses.”

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Why Biden’s targeting of Christians was EVEN WORSE than you thought



A newly released Department of Justice task force report is confirming concerns that religious Americans — particularly Christians — were unfairly targeted by their own government. And Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has seen it herself.

“We’ve been compiling this stuff for a while now, and I experienced this type of anti-Christian and really anti-religious bias as a lawyer in private practice over the last several years,” Dhillon tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck on “The Glenn Beck Program.”

“I’ll just give you one example. Our government, not just the DOJ but, you know, various aspects of the government, viewed people seeking religious accommodations to not have to get the COVID vaccination if they were government employees as not legitimate,” she explains.

“They basically internally labeled all of those accommodation requests illegitimate,” she adds.


The Supreme Court Bostock ruling, Dhillon explains, “basically made it illegitimate for any person employed by the government to have a Christian viewpoint on gay marriage and issues like that, which are very much spiritual and religious in nature.”

“And so, there was just a complete lack of respect for the Christian,” she adds.

Dhillon explains that according to a FACE Act weaponization report, “disparaging remarks were made by DOJ prosecutors in [her] department” regarding “a magistrate judge being a Catholic, keeping people of faith off of juries, and going after and seeking sentences that were more than double for Christian protesters outside abortion clinics than for really domestic terrorists going after pro-life centers in Florida.”

“So these disparities were marked, they were open, they were written down in emails. And thank goodness that we have a president today who is not just dedicated to changing that but to also documenting what happened so that people should feel ashamed to do this to other people of faith in our country because our country is founded on faith,” she continues.

“And specifically,” she adds, “on the Christian faith.”

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College professors want your child's soul. Here's how you can stop them.



As this school year comes to an end, I hear parents talking about what university their children got into and how excited the family is about this next phase of life. As a university professor, I relate to this wholeheartedly. Raising your children to finish high school and go on to university is one of the biggest duties Christian parents will accomplish.

But there is a question Christian parents almost never ask: Why do we send our children into institutions that will work against the very faith we spent 18 years trying to instill?

You will routinely find professors lambasting Christianity in their classes as an oppressive colonizer religion that must be deconstructed.

No one says it that way, of course. Instead, the conversation sounds something like this: “We’ve found a good campus. There’s even a strong Christian student group.”

Now, let me say plainly: Those groups can be wonderful. I thank God for them. But pause for a moment and consider what that assumption reveals. You are already expecting that Christian community will exist outside the mission of the university. You are hoping your child will find a refuge within an otherwise hostile environment.

In other words, you are not sending your child into a place that reinforces truth, but into a storm, and praying they find a bunker. And you are probably paying tens of thousands of dollars to do it.

That should trouble us more than it does, because it wasn’t always this way. Institutions like Princeton, Harvard, and Yale were not founded as neutral arenas of inquiry. They were explicitly Christian. Their purpose was to cultivate piety, train ministers, and teach the knowledge of God to all students.

Universities have always had a vision of truth. The only difference now is that the vision has changed.

RELATED: The pipeline from university radical to would-be assassin

Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images

Today’s university is not neutral. It is structured around a set of ideas that systematically undermine Christianity while presenting themselves as morally superior. Take the influence of Michel Foucault. Students are taught, often implicitly, that truth is not something discovered but constructed. Knowledge is tied to power. What earlier generations called “truth,” we are told, is really just the perspective of those who happened to win.

Then there is Paulo Freire, whose approach to education has become foundational in teacher training and pedagogy. Education, in this view, is not about learning what is true but about liberating the oppressed. The world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and students are trained to dismantle the oppressors.

Guess which category Christianity lands in?

Add to this the ever-present language of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” along with intersectionality. These frameworks redefine truth itself as something tied to identity. Moral authority is assigned based on lived experience, and disagreement is often recast as harm.

The Bible, under this lens, is no longer read as the word of God. It is treated as a cultural artifact, one that has historically supported systems of oppression.

None of this is presented as an attack on Christianity. That would be too obvious. Or at least, you would have thought so even 10 years ago. But now you will routinely find professors lambasting Christianity in their classes as an oppressive colonizer religion that must be deconstructed.

And all of this is framed to the students as compassion and empathy. It is justice. It is only fair. And “that’s not fair!” is a very powerful argument for university students.

Young people have a strong instinct for fairness. When they hear, “That’s not fair,” they lean in. But what they are rarely told is that the definition of fairness itself has been quietly replaced.

Disagreement is recast as harm, hierarchy becomes injustice, and truth becomes a tool of whoever is in power. The Bible is a social construct invented by the patriarchy to retain power.

First comes disorientation: “Everything I learned growing up is being questioned.”

Then pressure: “If you don’t agree, you’re part of the problem.”

Then isolation: fewer Christian friends, fewer edifying conversations. More immoral filth where “love is love” is used to justify the basest forms of lust.

Then internal shift: Doubt feels like intellectual maturity.

And finally, exit or compromise. Some abandon the faith outright. Others keep the label but redefine it until it fits comfortably within the system that once challenged it.

Parents are often blindsided by this. They assume education is neutral. Sure, they had atheist professors and the standard left-wing nut, but those professors were just that: nuts.

Now, the crazy is normalized and the sane, holy, and faithful are institutionalized. Don’t assume that if your child finds a good group, everything will be fine.

This is not a neutral environment occasionally disrupted by bad ideas. It is an environment structured in a particular direction, with occasional pockets of resistance. Those Christian groups we celebrate are the bastions, not the foundation.

So what should parents do?

RELATED: Christian students are pushing back — and universities are cracking

WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/Getty Images

First, don’t just ask whether your children will succeed academically or professionally. Ask whether they will remain faithful to Christ. Help them equip themselves with the armor of God described in Ephesians chapter 6.

Second, prepare them intellectually. They need to understand not only what they believe, but why, and how it contrasts with the frameworks they will encounter. Teach them the Bible and the historic Christian faith.

Third, help your children make faith in Christ their own. This is not merely an intellectual enterprise. Teach your children to love Christ and put their trust in salvation by Christ alone. When they know Him as their savior and trust His promises, they will stand firmly in that day of spiritual battle.

Third, expose hostile frameworks early. Teach them about Foucault, Freire, and the assumptions behind DEI before they hear those ideas in a classroom. If they have already heard the anti-Christian, anti-Bible arguments because you covered them together as preparation, they will be ready to dismantle them.

Fourth, stay engaged. Ask what their professors are teaching. You can look up their professors on the university webpages. Their bios probably won’t say “DEI anti-Christian radical,” but you will get a good sense of what they think by looking at their published works and conference presentations.

Above all, stop assuming neutrality where none exists. This is a spiritual battle of good vs. evil.

The real question is not whether universities shape your children’s beliefs. They will. The question is whether you will prepare your child to recognize that shaping and to stand firm in the truth.

Because if Christ is Lord of all truth, then no institution gets to undermine Him under the guise of “social justice advocacy.”

All parents should prepare their children for this spiritual reality. These university professors want your child’s soul.

'Nobody's rights are safe': DOJ counsel gives Allie Beth Stuckey EXCLUSIVE view of Biden regime's anti-Christian campaign



Christians were told in the first century that the world that hated and persecuted their Savior would similarly hate and persecute them. This divine counsel certainly holds up two millennia later.

'The Biden administration was willing to tolerate Christians up to a point.'

According to the watchdog group Open Doors, over 315 million Christians today face very high or extreme persecution, with thousands murdered yearly over their faith. While the top 10 worst countries for Christians are all in Africa, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, Christians are also routinely subjected to violent attacks, discrimination, and state suppression in purportedly civilized Western nations.

In America, for instance, hostility toward Christians, their faith, and their institutions came to a head during the Biden administration, which not only turned a blind eye to a rash of anti-Christian attacks but adopted policies that formalized the underlying animus.

Seeking to "end the anti-Christian weaponization of government and unlawful conduct targeting Christians" and rectify the wrongs committed by his predecessor's government, President Donald Trump established the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias last year.

Camille Varone, senior counsel at the Justice Department, gave Allie Beth Stuckey, host of BlazeTV's "Relatable," an exclusive look this week at the culmination of the task force's efforts to date: a damning report detailing both the anti-Christian bias propagated by the federal government during the Biden administration and what the Trump administration has done and is doing to protect Americans' religious liberties.

"The Biden administration used transgenderism as an excuse, as a justification, for discriminating against Christian doctors, medical facilities, against churches, against Catholic schools, specifically," Stuckey said in summary. "And then, of course, there was the targeting of the pro-lifers. Even within the DOJ, there was an attitude of anti-Christian discrimination and the feeling that Christians really didn't count as a protected class, and that manifested itself in very real, illegal prejudice against Christians."

RELATED: The anti-Christian myth of First Amendment 'neutrality'

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

"What we found is that across the board, the Biden administration was willing to tolerate Christians up to a point, and that was when they held their views privately or in the four walls of their churches," Varone told Stuckey.

"When Christians were trying to live out their faith — to see where the Bible, where religious tradition should inform how they actually, you know, went to school, went to work — that's where they ran into policy issues."

Varone — drawing from the findings of the 200-page written report, which is accompanied by over 300 pages of receipts plus thousands of footnotes — highlighted in her conversation with Stuckey numerous anti-Christian governmental abuses and policies advanced under President Joe Biden, who professes to be Catholic, including how Biden's

  • DOJ pursued aggressive prosecutions against nonviolent, pro-life Christian demonstrators under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act while taking a markedly less enthusiastic approach to holding leftists, such as members of Jane's Revenge, responsible for attacks against pregnancy resource centers;
  • Internal Revenue Service apparently targeted churches and Christian organizations whose religious values aligned with conservative political views but did not similarly hound churches where progressive views and Democratic causes were championed;
  • administration, working off a liberal reading of the Supreme Court's ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, sought to mandate the adoption of its views on sexual preferences and gender ideology; and
  • administration ran roughshod over "sincere religious objections" to the COVID-19 vaccines.
The report also details how Biden's
  • Equal Employment Opportunity Commission implemented a rule requiring employers — including Christian organizations — to accommodate workers' efforts to abort their unborn children;
  • FBI investigated, surveilled, and stigmatized law-abiding traditional Catholics, in part due to bogus claims from the scandal-plagued Southern Poverty Law Center; and
  • Department of Health and Human Services attempted to bar Christian providers and would-be parents who hold biblical and scientifically grounded views about sex and marriage from the foster-care system.

The task force reached the conclusion that "in its zealous pursuit of its preferred policies and constituents, the Biden administration engaged in anti-Christian bias, seeking to limit Christians’ ability to act in concert with their sincerely held beliefs in their homes, in the workplace, and in the public square. At times, it went still further, leading Christians to reportedly choose between their beliefs and compliance with federal law."

Stuckey asserted that "this should really disturb everyone" regardless of whether they're a Christian.

Varone agreed, reiterating, "What we found here really should disturb everyone who holds religious beliefs because if the government can do that against a majority group, nobody's rights are safe under that kind of system."

"No American should live in fear that the federal government will punish them for their faith," acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, chair of the task force, said in a statement.

"As our report lays out, the Biden administration’s actions devastated the lives of many Christian Americans," continued Blanche. "That devastation ended with President Trump. The Department of Justice will continue to expose bad actors who targeted Christians and work tirelessly to restore religious liberty for all Americans of faith."

Stuckey expressed gratitude that people are being "aware that things like this are happening," in part because it "encourages us to know our constitutional rights, and that can only be a win."

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Questions swirl after IDF claims to have replaced crucifix its soldier destroyed



The Israel Defense Forces may have more explaining to do after one of its soldiers destroyed a crucifix with a sledgehammer in Debel, Lebanon, as more than half a dozen others looked on.

While the IDF tried to resolve the incident with a series of social media posts, more details have emerged in the aftermath of this story, raising more questions about the IDF's account.

'Are they playing us?'

Following the incident, the IDF announced that both the soldier who filmed the incident and the soldier who destroyed the crucifix would be jailed for 30 days, and the onlookers would be questioned. The IDF also posted a still photo of the supposed replacement crucifix that it claimed to have helped provide.

However, a conflicting version of events has emerged.

RELATED: IDF soldier caught smashing Jesus statue with sledgehammer — officials and critics react

Debel Municipality Facebook account

Photos posted to the X account called Hillbilly Catholic on Wednesday afternoon went viral, and the messages accompanying the photos claimed that the Italian forces of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon had replaced the crucifix.

Among those pictured in the photos are several soldiers with Italian flags on their uniforms that seem to match that of U.N. personnel, a few priests, and what appears to be the apostolic nuncio to Lebanon, Bishop Paolo Borgia.

In another post, Hillbilly Catholic included a screenshot of the IDF's post with the crucifix it claimed "replaced" the one its soldiers had destroyed. The crucifixes in the IDF post and the Hillbilly Catholic posts differ in shape, color, detail, and style.

"Are they playing us?" Hillbilly Catholic asked.

The photographs posted by Hillbilly Catholic were part of a larger set of photos and video from what appears to be a local Debel account on Facebook called Debel Alerts.

On Tuesday, Debel Alerts made a post claiming an Italian priest named Father Claudio was coordinating with UNIFIL Commander General Diodato Abagnara to replace the crucifix in its original spot. The post added that Father Claudio revealed that "a gesture of support" was on its way from UNIFIL and expected to arrive within 48 hours.

There is also a video on the Debel Alerts' timeline of the new crucifix statue being transferred.

Debel Municipality

On Wednesday, Debel Alerts posted several photos of the installation of the new crucifix with the help of UNIFIL. The photos show soldiers and priests standing side by side in front of the newly installed crucifix statue.

The new crucifix also appears to have been placed in the exact spot where the old one was destroyed, a comparison of the surroundings revealed.

An official account called Debel Municipality posted more photos confirming Bishop Paolo Borgia's presence during the procession and installation of the new crucifix.

However, this account also revealed something unexpected.

Some online users scoffed at the IDF's post of the new crucifix, claiming that the crucifix looked like a small wall crucifix or that the photo was manipulated.

Yet Debel Municipality posted a photo of what appears to be that crucifix during the procession. A man can be seen standing next to some priests and behind some servers while holding the much smaller crucifix that appeared in the IDF's post.

Debel Municipality

While this photo seems to debunk the claims that the IDF's post was fake or manipulated, other questions remain.

First, neither Debel Alerts nor Debel Municipality make any mention of the IDF's alleged efforts to help replace the crucifix, despite the IDF's claim that "Northern Command worked to coordinate the replacement of the statue from the moment it received the report of the incident."

Similarly, the IDF did not make any mention of UNIFIL's role nor Bishop Paolo Borgia's presence in the town this week, despite their clear roles in the project.

Further, the IDF's "replacement" is not the actual replacement. The crucifix that UNIFIL apparently provided was placed in the same place as the old one and has a similar size and style, while the IDF one, though apparently real, is significantly smaller and not installed in the same place.

Finally, the IDF has not posted any follow-up with a photo of the other crucifix that UNIFIL helped replace, suggesting that the other, smaller crucifix is the only "replacement" they are claiming to have helped with. It is not clear whether the IDF actually provided the smaller crucifix to the community, despite its claim.

Blaze News contacted the IDF, UNIFIL, Debel Municipality, and the Nunciature of Lebanon via the Vatican Press Office but did not immediately receive a response.

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Pope Leo's mosque message misses the hardest truth about Islam and Christianity



Pope Leo XIV wants Christians and Muslims to focus on what unites them.

That was the clear message of his remarks last week inside a mosque in Algeria. But by highlighting common ground, the pope may be downplaying something just as important: the big and enduring differences — not to mention a long, uneasy history — that continue to shape relations between the two faiths.

Speaking at the Grand Mosque of Algiers on April 13, the pope emphasized mercy, solidarity, and what he called “concrete fraternity.” He urged believers to reject violence, warning that religion without compassion loses sight of human dignity. It was a gracious, carefully calibrated message, one that reflects decades of Catholic outreach to the Muslim world.

Real dialogue, if it is to be more than symbolic, requires more than shared language about peace and dignity. It requires clarity.

But it's only part of the story.

Relations between the papacy and Islam stretch back more than 1,300 years to the era of Pope Donus in the 7th century, when the rapid expansion of Islam transformed the Christian world. What followed was not primarily dialogue, but conflict. Muslim armies swept through formerly Christian lands in North Africa and the Middle East. Europe responded with the Crusades. Constantinople fell. Naval battles like Lepanto became defining moments of civilizational struggle. For much of history, Christianity and Islam encountered each other not in shared spaces of worship, but on opposing sides of war.

That history does not dictate the future, but ignoring it doesn’t lend clarity to the present.

The Catholic Church’s modern approach to Islam largely dates to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Its declaration, Nostra Aetate, marked a turning point, stating that the Church “has a high regard for the Muslims,” who worship the one, merciful God. It called for both sides to move beyond past hostilities and work together for justice and peace.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church builds on that framework. It teaches that Muslims, “together with us, adore the one, merciful God” and are included in God’s plan of salvation. That’s pretty remarkable language, especially when viewed against centuries of conflict. They reflect the Vatican’s deliberate effort to emphasize common ground and reduce religious hostility.

But they do not erase fundamental differences.

Islam rejects the Christian understanding of God as Trinity, denies the divinity of Jesus, and does not accept the central claim of salvation through the cross and resurrection. These are not minor disagreements. They go to the heart of what each religion believes about God and humanity’s relationship to Him. Any serious discussion of Christian-Muslim relations must grapple with that reality.

Previous popes have approached this tension in different ways.

Pope St. John Paul II became the first pope in history to enter a mosque when he visited the Great Mosque of Damascus on May 6, 2001 — a groundbreaking moment in interfaith relations just months before 9/11. That same year, he sparked controversy by kissing the Koran. Supporters saw it as a sign of deep respect. Critics saw it as a confusing gesture that seemed to honor a text at odds with core Christian beliefs. Either way, it highlighted the risks that come with symbolic outreach.

Pope Benedict XVI took a more cautious approach. While committed to dialogue, he stressed that it must be grounded in truth and reason, not just goodwill. He argued that peace requires honesty about differences, including disagreements over religious freedom, an issue that remains unresolved in parts of the Muslim world where Christians face legal or social restrictions.

Pope Leo’s remarks in Algeria clearly point to the Vatican’s emphasis on unity. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In a fractured world, a call for peace and mutual respect is not only understandable, but it’s also necessary.

There is, however, a difference between emphasizing shared values and presenting an incomplete picture.

Leo spoke movingly about fraternity but said little about the theological differences that define Christianity and Islam. He called for peace but did not address the question of reciprocity — whether Christians are afforded the same freedoms in Muslim-majority countries that Muslims enjoy in the West. He highlighted what unites while leaving largely unspoken what divides.

That move may be diplomatically prudent. It may even be pastorally appropriate in a mosque setting.

But for a global audience, it risks creating the impression that the differences are smaller, or less significant, than they really are.

Real dialogue, if it is to be more than symbolic, requires more than shared language about peace and dignity. It requires clarity. It requires acknowledging that agreement on some moral principles does not erase profound disagreements about truth. And it requires confronting difficult realities, including the uneven state of religious freedom worldwide.

The Catholic Church’s own teaching reflects this balance. It calls for respect toward Muslims, rejects hatred and violence, and encourages cooperation where possible. But it also insists on the uniqueness of Christ and the truth of the gospel. Those elements are not in conflict.

The challenge is maintaining that balance in practice.

Pope Leo XIV’s visit to an Algerian mosque was a powerful symbol of goodwill. It showed a church willing to engage, to listen, and to seek peace across religious boundaries. But symbols, however compelling, are not the whole story.

If interfaith dialogue is to have real substance, it must be rooted not only in what is shared, but also in what is true — and in a clear-eyed understanding of history, theology, and the world as it is.

That is the harder message. It is also a far more necessary one.

Life can be hard, but don't forget to laugh



This week, I sat down to pay a medical bill. It wasn’t the entire bill, but just my portion.

It came to about $5,300.

That’s the co-pay for my wife’s new prosthetic legs. And that’s after insurance did what insurance does, which is a separate conversation best handled with prayer, patience, and possibly a therapist (who also requires a deductible and co-pay).

On top of that, I’ve had a few medical issues myself lately. A biopsy this week, an MRI last month. More bills trickling in. You don’t even wait for the mail any more. They find you online now.

If what we believe is true, then suffering is not meaningless or random, and it is not final.

So I did what I have done for 40 years of caregiving. I paid what I could and planned the rest while waiting for the insurance payments to sort out.

In four decades, with nearly a hundred surgeries for my wife, every provider — and in a medical journey like hers, there have been many — has always worked with me. Particularly when I showed the initiative and talked with the provider first.

But this week, I didn’t just plan a payment; I accidentally paid the whole thing. All of it. In one click.

There’s a special kind of silence that fills the room when you realize what you have just done. It’s not panic or fear, but that slow, sinking realization that you have just made a very enthusiastic financial decision you did not intend to make.

I immediately called the provider. The person I spoke with voided the payment, set me up on something more manageable, and reassured me that I was not the first person to make such a mistake. Since it was caught on the same day, everything would be fine.

I thanked the reassuring person, hung up, sat there for a moment, and then laughed.

I laughed because it brought to mind a PSA I helped put together years ago during National Caregiver Awareness Month. We riffed on the comic “you might be a redneck …” routine and did it about family caregivers.

Caregiving gives you plenty of material for that sort of routine.

If a hospital bed has ever hampered your love life … you might be a caregiver.

If you’re the one asking for a price check on suppositories … you might be a caregiver.

If you’ve ever hooked up your dog to your wife’s wheelchair just to see if it would work … you might be a caregiver. (It does work — but watch out for squirrels.)

And after that phone call, I laughed because I could add another one: If you’ve ever financed your wife’s prosthetic legs … you might be a caregiver.

This is how we have learned to shoulder the immensity of what we carry.

We live in a culture where outrage is currency and perspective is in short supply. Outrage and victimhood are easy to perform. Caregiving isn’t. When someone you love is suffering, she doesn’t need a performance.

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Brendan SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Caregiving chips away at those cultural indulgences. Bills still come, and bodies still break. Responsibilities don’t pause so that you can craft the perfect complaint. You either learn to carry it, or it crushes you.

If you’re going to endure this, you also learn to laugh. Not because things are easy, but because this isn’t the end.

Scripture tells us there is a time to weep and a time to laugh.

We weep in hospital rooms. We weep in quiet moments when the weight of it all settles in. We weep while watching helplessly as someone we love struggles.

But we also laugh because we are refusing to let the pain define us.

And for the Christian, that refusal is not rooted in being naturally strong or optimistic, but in what we believe to be true. That truth requires something of us, especially in our darkest moments.

If what we believe is true, then suffering is not meaningless or random, and it is not final.

God is not absent from it. If He is Lord at all, then He is Lord of all. The promise of the gospel is not that we learn to cope better, but that Christ redeems completely.

Right now, my wife uses prosthetic legs. Right now, we deal with bills, setbacks, and the daily logistics of a body that has endured more than most people can imagine. But a day is coming when all that will change. No prosthetics, pain, or co-pays. No fragile bodies that wear out under the strain of this world.

Until then, we live here. So yes, we weep. But we also laugh — sometimes right after accidentally trying to pay $5,300 we don’t have. For now, we still crack a smile, even with tears on our cheeks.

“Ten more payments … and you can walk anywhere you want, baby!”

I reach for her hand and help her stand. She chuckles. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s not the end.