Did Pope Francis use his moral voice effectively for peace?
Published in the April 25th edition of The Edinburgh Evening News and in The National, April 24th.
Tributes are pouring in from world leaders after Pope Francis’s death.
I paid particular attention to what Israel’s President Isaac Herzog had to say:
Such hypocrisy is off the charts. Herzog doesn’t mention the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that Israel has exterminated not just since October 7th 2023 but since 1948, people Israel regards as sub-human.
Israel is busy “cleansing” Palestine of Muslim and Christian Palestinians to create Eretz Israel. What understanding or mutual respect has Israel ever shown the Palestinians, or the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Yemenis, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Somalis, the Libyans or the people of any other nation who have opposed its warmongering and killing?
Most of the world views Israel negatively. Even a majority of Americans now hold an unfavourable view of the Zionist state.
But did Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, use his moral voice as effectively as he could have for peace?
On February 25th, National Public Radio (NPR) said:
Pope Francis has been outspoken in his criticism of Israel ‘s military campaign in Gaza. Last month [January], he described the humanitarian situation there as shameful and he said there should be an investigation into whether Israel’s sanctions in Gaza constitute genocide.
Was the Pope unaware that the United Nations had already investigated what Israel was doing and called it a genocide, or that 15 months ago the ICJ said it was committing a plausible genocide, or that the ICC indicted Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes?
Although he was in poor health these past few months, he could have gone to Gaza last year to tell Israel to stop the killing. Imagine what impact that would have had.
A Catholic archbishop, Óscar Romero, took such a stand over 45 year ago and in 2018 Pope Francis made him a saint. Romero was assassinated by a sniper from a US-backed Salvadoran death squad in March 1980 while celebrating mass in San Salvador. The day before he was murdered, he directly addressed members of the military:
It is time to regain your conscience. In the name of God and the name of the suffering people, I implore you, I beg you, I order you, stop the repression!
Romero believed that Christians should speak out loudly against injustice and confront evil.
Another Pope, John Paul II, sent an emissary in March 2003, Pio Cardinal Laghi who knew George W. Bush’s father well, to dissuade the President from attacking Iraq. He failed in his mission, but he tried.
Now there’s an even bigger disaster looming. Benjamin Netanyahu has been begging the US to attack Iran for years - not because it’s on the brink of developing a nuclear bomb, it isn’t - but because it’s the last country, other than Yemen which the US is mercilessly bombing, to oppose Israel’s genocide and complete domination of the Middle East.
It’s well documented that the Bush administration planned to remake the Middle East via a series of wars on Israel’s targets in the Middle East (Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Syria) and Islamic East Africa (Libya, Somalia and Sudan). All of these countries, apart from Iran, are in ruins. Now Israel wants the US to do the same to Iran.
Will church leaders find the moral courage to forcefully condemn this and the other horrors we are witnessing?
I looked for what the Church of Scotland has said and found this on its FB page, posted after the ZOF bombed Gaza’s last functioning hospital earlier this month:
Many were unimpressed:
Our ‘moral leaders’ should remember what Archbishop Oscar Romero said in 1979:
A church that doesn’t provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin in the society in which it is being proclaimed, what kind of gospel is that?
To paraphrase: How many fighter-aircraft, missiles and tank-divisions does Rome possess? Had Pope Francis set-foot in Gaza of recent months, no army nor armaments would've been necessary (as Leah suggests), in order to make his unmistakable point to the world.
I have no faith or interest in religious organisations which think they can get involved in politics. I have doubts that this last pope and any before him, no matter what they say, have any effective input on world affairs regardless of what shape they take.