Israeli genocide: Where’s the Vatican, the American Pope Leo XIV?
EVERY weekday (except Monday) that I watch “Democracy Now!,” probably the only remaining news program independent of all the world powers, I get so angry and even depressed, as its first news feature for the past two years shows in vivid video clips the continuing genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza by the Israel Defense Force (IDF). Some days, my eyes get misty watching children if not maimed and crying, starving to their deaths, a pile of bones.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is incontrovertibly genocide; 60,199 Palestinians so far killed by the IDF, 18,430 were women and children, 31 percent of the total. Not a single corpse of the Hamas (Palestinian Resistance Movement), which reportedly started the war, has been found. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened, hospitals bombed, food and water cut off, thousands of children starving and 120 journalists assassinated by laser- or radio-guided precision bombs dropped by drones. This is not “self-defense.” It is the deliberate destruction of a people.
Yet the West refuses to call it what it is. Instead, the United States, Britain and Europe repeat the same tired script: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” The Western press dutifully frames the story around Oct. 7, 2023, when the Hamas killed 1,195 civilians and soldiers in a raid into a few kilometers of Israeli territory — amazingly not detected by the Israel’s Mossad, Shin Bet and Aman, purportedly the world’s three best intelligence services, after the Central Intelligence Agency.
And the Catholic Church, with its claim to moral authority, has largely retreated into silence — issuing vague calls for “peace” while avoiding the one word that matters: genocide.
Isn’t it a cruel joke of history that 8 million Israelis claiming — falsely — to be the descendants of the Jews of biblical times are systematically killing Muslims in Palestine, whose religion have the same set of books (the Tora, which the Christians call the Old Testament), which both fantastically claim are the words of God himself?
Cruel
And more ironic perhaps, Christians, the third of the “religions of the book” (Americans and Europeans) have been arming and funding the Jews’ genocide of Muslims?
I thought I would be witnessing how God works in mysterious ways with the assumption to the papacy of Pope Leo XIV on April 21, 2005, the first American to be St. Peter’s heir. He is an American citizen, living most of his life in Chicago. Doesn’t he know Israel’s genocide is being funded by American tax dollars, and the day the US stops aiding Israel will be the day the genocide, the starvation of children ends? He therefore shares the same US complicity in the Gaza genocide, if he doesn’t protest it.
I suspect an American pope not speaking forcefully against the US-funded Gaza genocide is one reason why Filipinos and most of the Catholic are uncaring about this atrocity we see every day in TV news.
Doesn’t it even cross Pope Leo XIV’s mind that if he makes a call to end Israel’s genocide, and is recited every day in each of the Church’s 240,000 parishes all over the world, to be heard by 1.4 billion Catholics, global public opinion will change overnight to condemn this horrendous crime shown in TV every single day? That even the Filipino catolico-cerrado elite, such as editors of newspapers, won’t ever put a photo of the Israeli ambassador smiling on its front page as if Israelis indeed was God’s chosen people and was undertaking a genocide, even a televised one?
Opinion
Doesn’t the American citizen Pope Leo XIV know that he does have the power to change public opinion when he acts decisively? In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae vitae, and ordered priests to read it and explain it in every parish pulpit. It was a manifesto against all forms of birth control, except by “natural means.”
The encyclical slowed down birth control efforts in the world, by at least two decades in Catholic-dominated countries in South America, and especially in the Philippines, nations where the high growth rate of the population worsened poverty — and infant deaths. Because of Humanae vitae, which our Catholic legislators believed in, the government enacted a law promoting artificial contraception only in 2014, 47 years after the United Nations supported it as a legitimate means of slowing down population increase as means of developing economic growth.
The Catholic Church has always claimed to be the world’s moral conscience. For two millennia, it has held itself as the custodian of the Gospel’s central message: to defend the poor, the oppressed, the hungry and the voiceless.
Now the world faces another such moment: Israel has been undertaking the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, in the past month cruelly saving bullets and bombs, by starving them to death by blockades so they’ll be forced to leave their homeland.
Pope
And yet, the Catholic Church — the largest organization on Earth autocratically headed by one man — remains silent. Pope Leo XIV cannot even name the crime. He has not demanded accountability from the state that wages this war, and his country that finances that state.
It is time to say it clearly: if the Church continues in silence, it betrays the Gospel it claims to guard.
Israel insists it is merely defending itself after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack. But the response has gone far beyond self-defense. If the Jews invoke the biblical eye-for-an-eye dictum, that’s the most unfair and brutal — 50 Palestinian eyes for every Israeli. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Every bomb dropped on “militant targets” has in reality meant the deaths of children, mothers and elders.
The Church’s timidity is rooted in fear — fear of being accused of antisemitism, fear of offending Western powers that support Israel, fear of appearing “political.” Or let’s face reality: the renowned political scientist John Mearsheimer says the US is joined at the hip with Israel. Is the US also joined at the hip with the Vatican?
It seems so, but not always. Its opposition to the Nazi’s genocide of European Jews wasn’t weak. The Church didn’t condemn as the worst genocide in human history the nuclear bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima and, a few days later of Nagasaki, without giving Japan’s leaders time to consider a surrender. It was only decades later that Pope John Paul II called these nuclear bombings “morally unacceptable.” The Vatican, pressured by American bishops, implicitly supported the US war against the Vietnamese people, condemning it only as world public opinion went against it, and a few years before the defeat of South Vietnam.
To its credit, the Vatican implicitly — that is, through US bishops’ declaration — opposed the US invasion of Iraq. That is a source of hope for us, that there is that precedent that the Vatican can ask the US and Israel to end the war now.
Skeptics might argue: what difference would papal statements make? Israel ignores UN resolutions, shrugs off world opinion and acts with US backing. Why would it heed the pope?
But the Church’s influence is not in coercion — it is in conscience. A strong, unequivocal papal denunciation would demolish the US and Israeli brainwashing that Israel is merely defending the state God Almighty gave them — 10,000 years ago. That is a myth: scientists have found little DNA evidence that the Israelis of today are the descendants of Moses’ Jews. Rather, much of Israelis’ DNA are similar to those of Slavs — the ethnicity of Jews of Eastern Europe, where many Israelis came from after World War II — and ironically, present-day Palestinians whom the IDF are trying to exterminate.
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Israeli genocide: Where’s the Vatican, the American Pope Leo XIV?
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