After visiting the small cemetery where migrants who died in Mediterranean shipwrecks are buried, Leo stood beneath the Porta d’Europa, a monument to hospitality overlooking the sea. “I am here,” he declared, “following in the footsteps of Pope Francis, who chose to travel to Lampedusa on 8 July 2013 for his first trip as the Successor of Peter.”
By linking his visit to Francis’ first papal journey, Leo was doing more than paying tribute to his predecessor or signaling continuity. He was placing himself alongside migrants who had risked everything only to encounter persecution and violence in Europe and the United States.
Yet his message also extended beyond solidarity with migrants. Like Francis before him, he held humanity as a whole — believers and non-believers alike — to reckon with both our actions and our omissions. Thirteen years earlier, after one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, Francis had condemned what he called the “globalization of indifference.” Leo has returned to the same moral terrain.
Indeed, the first year of Leo’s pontificate has consistently revolved around this theme: the need for empathy as the hallmark of both personal and collective conduct. The Gospel passage he chose for Lampedusa was the parable of the Good Samaritan, who refuses to pass by the wounded stranger, his “neighbor,” on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.
It is precisely on that road — from Jerusalem to Jericho, now choked by military checkpoints — that questions surrounding Leo’s pontificate come into focus. He speaks constantly of peace. He has repeatedly invoked Gaza and the immense suffering of the Palestinian people. Yet he has not named Israel as the perpetrator, nor has he used the word “genocide.” The words Leo does not say, words that Francis was prepared to utter, have become the defining absence of this chapter of his pontificate.
Pressure from below
As grassroots protests across Italy against Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified over the past year — from nationwide strikes and port blockades to student occupations and mass demonstrations — a parallel rupture emerged within the Catholic Church.
It came into public view ahead of the Italian Bishops’ Conference’s (CEI) May assembly in Rome, when 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.
Although the association is composed primarily of Italian parish priests, its members also include two non-Italian cardinals, eight Italian archbishops, and 17 bishops. Consecrated women have no presence, at least officially, despite Catholic sisters having become some of Italy’s most outspoken church voices calling for action on Gaza.
“We ask that a clearer, more prophetic, and more concrete word be raised from the General Assembly of the CEI,” the letter read. “A word calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. A word calling for an end to the siege of Gaza and the free and safe entry of humanitarian aid. A word that calls for full recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people. A word that urges the Italian government to end all military, economic, and diplomatic complicity with policies of occupation, apartheid, and destruction.”
The Association further demanded “commitment to work for the good of this land and of all humanity on the basis of our shared humanity,” and warned that “the ambiguities of governments, institutions and sometimes even Christian communities risk becoming complicit.”
The appeal reflected growing frustration with the Vatican’s increasingly restrained rhetoric, particularly since the election of Pope Leo XIV. Under Francis, the Vatican had often strained relations with Israel by speaking more directly about Palestinian suffering and by maintaining close, personal ties with Gaza’s besieged Christian community. Leo has continued to call for peace, humanitarian access, and an end to the suffering in Gaza, but explicit references to Israeli responsibility have become noticeably rarer.
Some senior figures in the Italian church have nevertheless gone further. The Archbishop of Naples, Mimmo Battaglia, has publicly condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza in direct terms. Yet neither Battaglia nor any other leading Italian bishop — including Leo himself — has described them as genocide, despite the term having been adopted by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations, and more than a dozen states.
That caution marks a departure from the approach established under Francis. Well before October 7, tensions between the Vatican and Israel had already been mounting, fueled by long-running disputes over the legal and tax status of Catholic institutions and properties in Jerusalem, alongside Francis’ increasingly public gestures of solidarity with Palestinians. During his 2014 pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Francis made an unscheduled stop at Israel’s separation wall in Bethlehem, where he rested his forehead and hand against the concrete beside graffiti reading “Free Palestine.” He also traveled between Bethlehem and Jerusalem by helicopter, avoiding the Israeli Separation Wall on the route between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
After Israel’s assault on Gaza began, Francis reportedly called Gaza City’s Holy Family Church every evening at 7 p.m. until shortly before his death, speaking with the parish priest and members of the Christian community who had refused to leave the compound.
Like Pope Francis, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and an Italian Franciscan who has spent more than three decades in the Holy Land, had emerged as one of Israel’s sharpest critics from within the church before October 7. He repeatedly denounced state-sponsored settler violence against Palestinian Christian communities in the occupied West Bank, visited Christian villages like Taybeh that have come under repeated assaults, and criticized Israel’s growing restrictions on Palestinian movement. Following the killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, he also condemned Israeli police violence against mourners during her funeral procession in Jerusalem.
“Attacking mourners, striking them with batons, using smoke grenades, shooting rubber bullets, frightening the hospital’s patients, is a severe violation of international norms and regulations, including the fundamental human right of freedom of religion, which must be observed also in a public space,” he said in a statement.
The Gaza genocide, however, marked a turning point. Following four wartime visits to the Strip, Pizzaballa’s language became steadily more explicit, culminating in a pastoral letter issued in April. “There is a difference between those who exercise power and those who suffer it, between those who govern and those who are governed, between those who possess weapons and those who are threatened by them, between those who occupy and those who are occupied,” he wrote. “The responsibilities are different. Recognizing this difference is an act of respect for justice and truth.”
He has reiterated that distinction in subsequent statements, making him one of the clearest voices within the senior Catholic hierarchy to acknowledge the fundamental asymmetry that makes up Israel’s rule over Palestinians.
The end of Christian exceptionalism
In November 2025, an ecumenical document endorsed by the 13 denominations that comprise Palestinian Christianity invoked kairòs — the Greek word denoting a decisive moment demanding action. Addressed to the global Church, it called on Christians to defend not only Palestinian adherents but the Palestinian people as a whole.
The appeal came at a critical point. Right-wing and religious-nationalist Jewish Israelis have long targeted churches, clergy, pilgrims, and Christian institutions in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. Yet the recent rise in such attacks points to a broader shift on the Israeli right, particularly within the settler movement: the erosion of the informal exceptionalism long afforded to Christians.
During this year’s Jerusalem Day Flag March, Jewish Israeli nationalists assaulted Palestinians in the Old City’s Christian Quarter, while separate footage showed marchers spitting toward a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Since the rise of religious-nationalist figures such as Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in 2022, the distinction successive Israeli governments once drew between Christian and Muslim Palestinians — often favoring the former — has largely disappeared.
For Israel’s religious-nationalist leadership, the top priority is the Judaization of the land between the river and the sea, including Palestinian Christian towns and villages in the occupied West Bank as well as Gaza. Acknowledging Christianity’s historic presence in the Holy Land is no longer viewed as a strategic necessity, nor is preserving the religious tourism and the financial incentive it offers. Israel’s successive wars and genocide in Gaza have made pilgrimage increasingly untenable, prompting many Christians to choose destinations such as Greece, Turkey, or Spain over the Holy Land.
As criticism from church leaders mounted, Israel moved to repair its relationship with global Christianity. In April it appointed George Deek — a Palestinian citizen of Israel and career diplomat — as Special Envoy to the Christian World, charged with “deepening Israel’s ties with Christian communities around the world.” Yet Deek’s public message has been directed less toward Palestinian Christians than toward Western audiences. He has described Israel as the “custodian of the holy places” and “the outpost of the Western world,” bound to Europe through shared “Judeo-Christian roots.”
Those remarks came only days after Israeli authorities imposed a record 40-day closure of Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount during Ramadan and Eid Al-Fitr, and restricted Christian worshippers from reaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Easter. For Jerusalem’s Palestinian Muslim and Christian communities alike, these measures reinforced the notion that freedom of religion cannot be defended selectively, privileging one faith over another.
If Deek’s mission succeeds anywhere, it is likely to be in Italy. The country is not only the geographical heart of global Catholicism, but with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also a key outpost of European far-right values, particularly after the defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Yet even Meloni, whose government has generally aligned itself with both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, recently took a stand against both leaders as relations between Israel and the Catholic hierarchy have deteriorated.
She publicly criticized Israeli authorities after Cardinal Pizzaballa and the Custodian of the Holy Land, Francesco Ielpo, were prevented from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. She also rebuked Trump for his verbal attacks on Pope Leo XIV. Together, these confrontations revealed strains within what had appeared to be a solid transatlantic right-wing alliance.
By acting as the head of a universal church committed to peace rather than geopolitical blocs, Pope Leo unsettled that alignment. Responding to Trump in April, he declared: “I am not afraid,” affirming that the Church would continue to speak in its own voice, regardless of whether that voice was welcome in Washington or Jerusalem.
John Paul II and Francis had often urged the faithful not to be afraid. Leo made the phrase his own. By speaking in the first person, he assumed responsibility for confronting the world’s most powerful political actors, even while stopping short of adopting Francis’ language on Gaza.
Whether that caution endures now depends on the people of the Church. From Palestinian Christians invoking kairòs, to priests demanding that bishops speak more clearly, to figures such as Pizzaballa insisting on naming the asymmetry between occupier and occupied, the pressure is increasingly coming from below. Leo has made empathy the moral center of his pontificate, now the question is whether that stance will compel him to say the words his predecessor was willing to utter.