What Pope Leo won’t say about Gaza
JVL Introduction
A rupture is developing the Catholic church over Palestine.
While the first year of Leo’s pontificate has consistently revolved the need for empathy as the hallmark of both personal and collective conduct, writes Paula Caridi, there is a glaring absence.
Pope Leo is prepared to invoke the immense suffering of the Palestinian people but not – yet? – to name the perpetrator, Israel, or to describe the reality as a genocide.
This fudging is something of a retreat from Pope Francis’s clear moral stance but others in the Church are not so cautious.
In May, the Association of Priests Against Genocide, a network of roughly 3,000 clergy from 58 countries founded in September 2025, sent an open letter urging Italy’s bishops to abandon their cautious language on Gaza and warned that “the ambiguities of governments, institutions and sometimes even Christian communities risk becoming complicit.”
And Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem is becoming increasingly outspoken insisting, for instance, on naming the asymmetry between occupier and occupied.
This is occurring a time where the Israeli far right no longer make exceptions for Christian Palestinians, and desecration of churches and Christian symbols and institutions is now a popular yob activity (so much for Israel as the “guardian” of all religions’ holy places…).
It remains to be seen whether pressure from within will swing Pope Leo to a more consistent moral stance.
This article was originally published by +972 Magazine on Fri 10 Jul 2026. Read the original here.
What Pope Leo won’t say about Gaza is testing the Catholic Church
Leo XIV has embraced his predecessor’s ethic of empathy. But across the Church, many are demanding he speak out more clearly against Israel’s crimes.
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On 13th June 1921 Benedict XV attacked Zionism in his speech to the Cardinals.
In the 1920’s the Vatican opposed zionism and called it anti-religious. But maybe they need to stress the difference between Judaism which they accept and Zionism which they oppose.
On March 6, 1991, Pope John Paul II, closing the synod of bishops from the Middle East, said: “We have spoken of the Holy Land where two peoples, the Palestinians and that of the State of Israel, have been engaged in conflict for decades; the injustice of which the Palestinian people is a victim demands engagement by all men.
It can be done…