Will Pope Francis Ever Speak Honestly about the Muslim Persecution of Christians?

Raymond Ibrahim, 7/24/24

Pope Francis recently acknowledged an otherwise widely suppressed topic—the persecution of Christians, especially throughout the Middle East. On June 27, 2024, during a meeting held in the Vatican with members of the Reunion of Aid Agencies for Oriental Churches (ROACO), Francis made some refreshing, because true, remarks: 

Many Eastern Churches are bearing a heavy cross and have become ‘martyr Churches.’ They carry the marks of Christ’s wounds. Just as the Lord’s flesh was pierced by nails and a lance, so many Eastern communities are suffering and bleeding because of the conflicts and violence they endure. 

To remedy the situation, he urged those who are already involved in alleviating the suffering of the Eastern Church—that is, ROACO itself—to stay the course:

Brothers and sisters, we cannot remain indifferent. The Apostle Paul made clear the instruction he received from the other Apostles to be mindful of the neediest members of the Christian community (cf. Gal 2:10), and called for solidarity with them (cf. 2 Cor 8-9). This is God’s own message, and you, the members of ROACO, are the hands that give it flesh, hands that aid and lift up those who suffer. This is why you have met in these days: not to make speeches and develop theories, not to engage in geopolitical analyses, but to discern the best ways to draw close to our brothers and sisters in the East and to alleviate their sufferings.

All fine words and counsel, to be sure. That said, surely the first step in solving a problem—in this case, “to alleviate the sufferings” of Christians—one must first identify its source? This, unfortunately, Francis never does. Yet, for those with a discerning eye, the nations that he named during the meeting for being home to the worst forms of Christian persecution go some way to indicate their collective source: aside from “the Holy Land and Ukraine,” he named Syria, Lebanon, Karabakh (Armenian territory controlled by Azerbaijan), and Tigray (Ethiopia). He also named “the entire Middle East”—a massive umbrella term which, along with Syria and Lebanon, includes Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Yemen, Iran, the Gulf States, the PA territories, and possibly more (for most people, even distant Morocco is part of the “Middle East”).  

What all of these nations have in common is Islam: they are either Muslim majority, or else are roughly half Muslim, half Christian (as in the case of Lebanon and Ethiopia). Moreover, and unlike Ukraine, most of these nations regularly make it on the annual reports of which nations Christians are most persecuted in. Every year, 37 or 38 of the 50 worst nations on Open Doors’ World Watch List are Islamic or have large Muslim populations.

None of this should be surprising. After all, centuries of Francis’s predecessors knew what Islam was all about—including its bad habit of persecuting Christians and destroying their churches—and had no qualms declaring it to their flock. That is what prompted the Crusades. Here is a tiny sampling of papal observations concerning Islam’s perennial assault on Christianity and its adherents in no particular order: 

• For Pope Sixtus IV, “The Turks have sworn the extinction of Christianity. A truce to sophistries! It is the moment not to talk, but to act and fight!” (1470s).
• Pope Adrian IV called on Christians to subdue these “barbarous peoples and wild nations, that is, the madness of the Saracens, who are a most destructive pestilence” (c. 1157).
• Pope Innocent III called on Christians everywhere to rise up “against the enemies of the cross of the Lord who not only aspire to the destruction of the Spains [where Muslims were then making deep inroads and committing the usual atrocities], but also threatened to vent their rage on Christ’s faithful in other lands” (c.1210). 
• Pope Gregory VII  issued an encyclical “to all who are willing to defend the Christian faith” against “a race of pagans”—elsewhere named “Saracens”—that “has slaughtered like cattle many thousands of Christians” in Asia Minor (c. 1074).
• Pope Urban II called for the refortification of Tarragona, near the Pyrenees between Spain and France, “as a barrier and bulwark against the Saracens for the Christian people” (1089).
• Pope Pius II said, “can we expect peace from a nation [Ottoman Turks] which thirsts for our blood, which has already planted itself in Hungary after having subjugated Greece? Lay aside these infatuated hopes. Mahomet [II] will never lay down his arms until he is either wholly victorious or completely vanquished. Each success will be only a stepping-stone to the next until he has mastered all the Western Monarchs, overthrown the Christian Faith, and imposed the law of his false prophet on the whole world” (c. 1459).
• Pope Eugene IV implored Christians in the Balkans to maintain the crusade and “hurl back the infidel sect of Muhammad overseas,” whence it could no longer terrorize the Christian West (1443).
• Pope Callixtus III deplored the “fury of the savage Turk,” whom he likened to a “serpent which now hides and now emerges to do damage to the Christian people and breaks forth and tortures them” (1450s).
• Pope Nicholas, soon after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, encouraged Europeans to travel by sea in search of allies in distant lands “not as yet infected by the Mahometan plague.”

Needless to say, it was not just the popes who understood Islam, but the entire Christian hierarchy. In 1433, Cardinal Julian chastised the rest of Christendom’s factious nature and indifference to the jihad being waged against their Eastern coreligionists: 

Look all around you, and see how the people of Christ are trodden upon and devoured by Turks, Saracens and Tartars. Why do you not commiserate with the many thousands of your brothers, who year after year are reduced to the harsh servitude of the infidel?… But what is more pitiful, is that many of those who are led into captivity, and who are not able to bear such a hard servitude, deny the Catholic faith, and are led to the abhorrent sect of Mohammed. How many kingdoms, provinces, cities, towns are daily seized and depopulated? They have now cornered you in a small area in the west… Discord among Christians is the cause of all these calamities. If they would only grow wise and harbor love, this sort of persecution would soon end.

Even Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, knew what Islam was all about. In 2006 he quoted an Eastern Roman Emperor (“Byzantine”) saying, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” (As if to prove him correct, Muslims the world over responded with violence—including by murdering a nun in Somalia and torching churches in several other nations.) 

So what happened to Francis? Nothing seems to have changed—Muslims are still openly persecuting Christians, as Francis himself (indirectly) indicated when recently naming the worst persecutors, almost all Muslim nations. Yet he has repeatedly insisted that “Islam, in truth, is a religion of peace,” arguing that: 

I don’t like to speak of Islamic violence because every day, when I browse the newspapers, I see violence, here in Italy… this one who has murdered his girlfriend, another who has murdered the mother-in-law… and these are baptized Catholics! There are violent Catholics! If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence… and no, not all Muslims are violent, not all Catholics are violent. It is like a fruit salad; there’s everything.

Unlike his predecessors, apparently Francis is incapable of distinguishing between violence committed in keeping with a religion’s teachings (Islam), and violence committed in violation of a religion’s teachings (Christianity). 

In short, the only thing that does seem to have changed is that Francis, far from maintaining his traditional and historic office of unabashedly spearheading any effort to protect Christians, has succumbed to the spirit of the age, willing only to say that which is “acceptable” and in vogue—hence his celebration of “multiculturalism” and commitment to (futile) “dialogue” with (two-faced) Muslim leaders. 

To be clear, no one is suggesting that Francis unnecessarily disparage or declare violent crusades against Islam. Such is hardly necessary. Previous popes did resort to calls to arms because that was all that was left to Christian peoples—fighting back any which way they could against an unstoppable and committed foe who was terrorizing Christendom.  

Today, the tables have turned: Islam is weak and the West is strong (for now anyway). As such, and as many human rights activists have argued for years, all that the West in general and the U.S. in particular need do is make their ongoing, and often considerable, economic aid to Muslim nations conditional on the latter ensuring religious freedom for Christians.

Ironically, some of the worst Muslim nations that persecute Christians—including those which made Francis’s list—receive the most economic aid from the U.S.: Ethiopia ($1.95 billion), Egypt ($1.43 billion), Afghanistan ($1.19 billion), Somalia ($1.13 billion), Yemen ($1.05 billion), and Syria ($896 million). Even if the leaders of such nations share in the same jihadist dislike for Christians harbored by the Muslim populace, do you really think they care that much about mistreating Christians as to jeopardize all those billions?

But before calling Muslims out for persecuting Christians, the source of the problem—shari‘a, Islamic law, which calls for discrimination against and persecution of Christians and all non-Muslims, and which many Muslim nations enshrine at least elements of in their constitutions—must first be acknowledged. Otherwise, the persecution will continue to be attributed to “sectarian conflicts” and “climate change”—things outside of the rulers’ hands. 

And of all “world leaders,” Francis is most charged with making this honest assertion—again, not in anger or disparagement, but with truth and sincerity—and, most of all, love for those at the receiving end of the persecution. 

If even he—a man who holds the office which historically most cared for the wellbeing of Christians—will not, opting instead to play at politician, who will?

Will Pope Francis Ever Speak Honestly about the Muslim Persecution of Christians?