Tree art by Stephen King
A man and a journalist fly into Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. They get off the plane and take a taxi to the fence separating Israel from the Palestinian ghetto on the other side. Israeli jets are flying overhead, siting "targets" for the day's bombing runs. They cross into the Gaza Strip and walk toward a lone set of apartment buildings where Palestinians, mostly children, are waiting for their daily meal of thin soup and a piece of bread. The war planes start their bombing raids not far away. The concussion of their huge bombs shakes the rubble-strewn earth. The man knows those last few undamaged buildings are probably the planes' next target, but he walks toward them anyway. The journalist is taking video every step of the way, sharing it with the entire world to watch in real time.
To make sure there is no doubt about it, the man removes the plain dress shirt he is wearing and exposes his papal garb. He reaches into a pocket and comes up with a folded facsimile of the papal headdress, the mitre. A close-up shows the world that he is indeed Leo XIV. For still Doubting Thomases, Rome immediately confirms the man walking through the rubble in Gaza is the Bishop of Rome, head of a religion boasting more than a billion members.
The Israeli government see the announcement in Rome. Can they call off the F15s in time, or will the entire planet get to watch a pope vaporized in real time?
Another scenario: The pope flies into Tel Aviv, but not incognito. The Israelis do not dare interfere with him until he gets to the crossing at Gaza. A decision has to be made. Do they stop him from entering, physically block him? If he resists, do they dare arrest him?
In either scenario the pope has fixed the world's attention on Gaza in a way no press release or papal condemnation could do. In the first, the pope reaches the starving Palestinians and comforts them, perhaps getting vaporized when the bombs fall. In the second, his arrest also results in headlines all across the world, remaining in the public consciousness longer than Kim Kardashian's most recent bum-and-boob photo shot.
In fact, either way, the act of a man who claims to speak for a loving God who sacrificed his own life to save his fellow human beings might himself save the people of Gaza from more slaughter and starvation. His act would capture the attention of the European governments enabling the genocide, not to mention the American government and maybe even some Zionists. Millions would take to the streets, defy tear gas and worse.
Most importantly: The killing would stop.
What does it mean to be the Vicar of Christ on earth, the all-but-reincarnation of Jesus himself? Is the pope just another politician like the US president, the British prime minister, the German chancellor? Leo XIV is still front-page news in the major media—his right-wing brother in Florida, his delirious fans in Chicago, the similarity and dissimilarity of his views to previous popes, his favorite color. Imagine what it would be like to see him standing in the rubble of Gaza, or more impressively, lying dismembered alongside a Palestinian toddler. Would that not be a worthy death? A Christ-like one?
The idea of the pope's paying such a visit to Gaza is pure fantasy, of course. Popes have facilitated genocides, not resisted them. They did so throughout Latin America for centuries. Pius XII helped Hitler come to power by dismantling the German Catholic Party so the Führer could gain a majority in the Reichstag. He was silent when Nazis slaughtered their opponents in Catholic Croatia. He considered fascist Spain the ideal nation: a dictator ruling shoulder-to-shoulder alongside the Catholic Church. When parish priests in Bavaria spoke out against the Nazis from the pulpit, their bishops did not support them, though when the Nazis came for those priests, their congregations assembled outside the rectories to protect them.
A few years back the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich wrote a letter to Rome declaring the Church was "morally bankrupt." He did so because of the way the Church had handled the pederasty of its priests and continues to resist any real culpability. Is it less of a moral failure for that church not to do everything it can to stop the killing in Gaza and the West Bank? Where are the other clergy, not to say the millions who believe we are indeed our brothers' and sisters' keepers? Why do the common clergy, the priests, rabbis, and mullahs not speak out? "Bankrupt" seems a weak term to describe such silence. Two thousand years ago Christian martyrs died rather than renounce their faith. Should they not do the same now for the victims of a genocide? Should not the clergy, at least some of them, be sitting in front of government buildings on hunger strike?
What does Christianity amount to if this is not happening? Is it just another multi-national organization concerned with serving itself? Is the pope just a CEO who sends Thanksgiving turkeys to the local charity but pays his workers less than a living wage? Is the pope by his lack of effective action not as complicit in the murders of Palestinians as the Holy See was in enabling the Nazis and fascists in the 1930s?
Shame on him.
