He Preached Love, But Missed Gaza

For Catholics and all Christians, the world over, Pope Francis’ death last night, marked the end of a papacy defined by compassion, humility, and reform—but it was also stained by a profound moral omission.

Revered for his radical openness, championing of the poor, and commitment to dialogue over division, Jorge Mario Bergoglio leaves behind a legacy many will rightly celebrate. And yet, as the white smoke clears once more in Rome, it’s impossible to ignore the glaring silence that accompanied his final years as leader of the Catholic Church: his failure to stand unequivocally with the people of Gaza amid one of the most catastrophic human rights crises of our time.

For more than a decade, Pope Francis shaped global conversations around climate change, capitalism, migration, and inequality. He washed the feet of prisoners, embraced refugees, and sought interfaith understanding in a world spiralling toward division. His encyclicals were bold, gestures sincere. In many corners of the world, he restored faith not just in the Church but in the possibility of moral leadership itself.

But leadership, especially of the moral kind, demands clarity in the face of atrocity. And it’s here Pope Francis faltered.

As Gaza descended into unimaginable devastation—blockaded, bombarded, starved, and silenced—Francis remained painfully equivocal. While he issued calls for peace and condemned violence “on both sides,” he failed to take the one step that might have pierced the indifference of world powers and galvanized the global moral conscience: he never went to Gaza.

The power of that image—dressed in white, walking through the ruins of Khan Younis, standing before a mass grave in Jabalia, meeting children orphaned by Israeli airstrikes, and demanding, in the name of Christ and humanity, the world bring an end to the genocide. The political and spiritual pressure such a gesture would have applied—not only to Israel and its enablers, but to world leaders’ content to issue statements while millions suffer.

Instead, the world saw caution where there should have been courage. The Vatican, concerned with diplomacy, feared rupture. But it shouldn’t have been a moment for balance. It was a moment for witness.

Pope Francis modelled witness throughout his life. He embraced lepers, visited war zones, and spoke openly about the sins of the Church. Yet when it came to the slaughter in Gaza—a horror documented in real time, by journalists, doctors, and human rights monitors—he failed to leverage the full moral authority of the papacy to say: this must stop.

His predecessors weren’t always so cautious. Pope John Paul II’s visit to Sarajevo in 1997, against the advice of NATO and his own security team, is remembered as one of the most powerful acts of papal defiance in modern history. He went not because it was safe or prudent—but because it was right.

The world had seen this before in Francis, too. His visits to Myanmar and the Central African Republic were high-stakes, high-risk moments of compassion. But Gaza—its children dying for lack of medicine, its hospitals bombed, its people penned in like cattle and genocided—was denied this moral solidarity. The Pope didn’t come.

It's not to say he was indifferent. On several occasions, he expressed sorrow for the Palestinian people. He called for ceasefires. He wept. But the Vatican’s approach remained a cautious balancing act—false equivalences drawn between occupier and occupied, between state-sponsored annihilation and desperate resistance.

For Palestinians, particularly the Christian community in Gaza, Francis’ absence was a deep wound. At a time when their existence is being erased before the eyes of the world, the Pope Francis’ absence sent a bitter message: even their spiritual shepherd wouldn’t come.

And now he can’t.

With his death, the world mourns a Pope of great empathy. But it must also reckon with his silence, his inaction, and his missed moment. For all the love Francis embodied, he leaves behind a Church that failed, in this defining crisis, to show what love looks like when it costs something.

The task now falls to his successor.

The next Pope inherits a world reeling from war, polarisation, and ecological collapse—none of these crises more urgently demand moral clarity than the genocide in Gaza. The next Pope has the chance to do what Francis didn’t: to stand in Palestine, with the oppressed, and speak not as a diplomat, but as a prophet.

This isn’t politics. It’s scripture. Isaiah calling to “loose the chains of injustice.” It’s Christ, who said, “Whatever you did for the least of these… you did for me.”

The new Pontiff mustn’t be content with prayers and platitudes. The Catholic Church, if it’s to be more than a monument, must be a movement—that places the pain of the people above the preferences of the powerful.

There’s still time for the Church to redeem its silence. And show the world its mission isn’t comfort, but courage, and say where there’s oppression, there the Church must be also.

Pope Francis walked with the poor, touched the wounded, and tried to open a Church that had grown distant from its people. But in Gaza, the people waited for him, and he didn’t come.

The next Pope must answer the call.