Alwaght- The visit of Pope Leo XIV to West Asia as the cradle of Abrahamic civilizations comes at a time the world is experiencing intensification of the humanitarian crises, targeted Islamophobia by some Western powers, and an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Pope is not only a religious leader with a unique position among the Christians but also a personality with moral legitimacy and political weight on the world stage. So, this visit marks not only a step to bolster inter-religion dialogue but also, given the Pope’s spiritual position, his visit represents a historic opportunity to transform a symbolic move into an effective measure in defense of justice, peace, and the oppressed.
Pope’s position: From symbol to action
The past two years have displayed one of the darkest chapters in modern history. A regime that falsely claims to follow Judaism and the teachings of the great prophet Moses has written years of bloodshed, devastation, and death in Gaza, crimes that leading legal scholars and human rights advocates describe as one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of this century. Thousands of women and children have been killed in bombardments. Millions face systematic policies of starvation, siege, and displacement. And now, the cold Mediterranean winter descends upon displaced families left without the bare minimum to survive.
The silence and inaction of governments, which place economic interests, geopolitical calculations, and power politics above justice and morality, have placed a historic burden on the world’s religious and moral leaders. Unlike politicians, their mission is anchored in truth, justice, and human dignity. The Pope, who has earlier called for an end to the atrocities in Gaza and stood in defense of its defenseless people, now faces a sacred and historic duty: to leverage his global moral authority in defense of a people whose only crime was being born in an occupied land, a land whose suffering world powers prefer to ignore in the name of political expediency.
Lebanon, a host state under shadow of aggression
Lebanon is hosting the Pope while the Israeli aggression has stolen peace from hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Christians, and Druze, and the shadow of threat on Lebanon is looming seriously in the days to come. Lebanon is the country with the largest Christian population, as it hosts over 1 million Syrian and Palestinian refugees.
In a land where religions and cultures coexisted for centuries, airstrike sirens now drown out church bells and mosque prayers. Daily life has been paralyzed by Israel’s relentless assaults.
The global powers' silence in the face of these actions has redoubled the responsibility of religious leaders like the Pope to expose this injustice. Mere days before the Pope’s visit, in a brazen act of defiance against his pilgrimage and its peace-seeking aims, Zionists carried out a terrorist assassination of a senior Hezbollah official in Beirut. And on the eve of the Pope’s journey from Turkey to Lebanon, Israeli forces refused to halt their artillery barrage against Lebanon, a deliberate and malicious move aimed at undermining his mission.
On Monday at Harissa, the Catholic sanctuary atop a mountain overlooking the Mediterranean Sea north of Beirut, the Pope states: “Prayer… gives us the strength to remain hopeful and to keep working, even when the sound of weapons surrounds us.”
Pope’s role in ideological disarming of Zionism
What is even more painful is how any criticism or call to human conscience is met with accusations of anti-Semitism, a strategy that cynically weaponizes religion to whitewash these crimes among Western public opinion. Pope’s visit provides a good opportunity to counter this approach, to an extent that the international media lenses are focused on this visit. In such a climate, a clear, direct and moral criticism of the Pope of these policies can create a deep crack in the largely faked Zionist discourse and will play an effective role in ideologically disarming the Israelis, neutralizing Zionist lobbies’ media propaganda, and further draw solidarity of Christian public opinion with the nations neighboring the Israeli regime.
