In Beirut this week, the country paused its collapse so a motorcade could glide through. The same footage loops on every channel: Pope Leo XIV descending the steps; Pope Leo at Baabda; Pope Leo haloed by yellow-and-white Vatican flags and Lebanese tricolors.

Billboards beam his smiling face above the words “Blessed are the peacemakers,” as though a slogan and a three-day visit could cauterize a bleeding nation. This morning, a rainbow arched over the Port of Beirut’s scarred shoreline — biblical staging for a pontiff who will pray tomorrow at the site of the 2020 blast that killed 218 and shattered a city already in freefall.

Even Hezbollah has stepped into the choreography. One official letter “warmly welcomed” the pontiff and praised Lebanon as “a civilizational bridge between Christianity and Islam.” Another vowed to rely on his “stances rejecting the injustice and aggression inflicted on our homeland by the Zionist invaders and their backers.” Imam al-Mahdi Scouts — crisp uniforms, raised salutes — were sent to line the airport road while the convoy passed.

For 72 hours, the party of armed resistance wrapped itself in the soft vocabulary of Vatican diplomacy, performing the sectarian balancing act that passes for national unity in Lebanon.

Ordinary people play their assigned roles with equal fervor. A woman who waited hours on the Baabda road, clutching both Lebanese and Vatican flags, told reporters: “He brings peace.” Another said the visit might be “positive,”then immediately added she dreads what happens the day he leaves. In the south, Christians who spent the past year sheltering from Israeli shells now pray the papal visit will give them “strength to stay” in villages already half-empty. When the currency is ash, the power flickers, and emigration is the only growth industry left, hope is so scarce that a papal schedule is mistaken for salvation.

There is no salvation in that motorcade.

While Lebanese television anoints the visit an eschatological event, Gaza is being razed and starved, southern Lebanon lives under permanent threat of fresh bombardment, and the regional order disintegrates in real time.The Pope’s public message, by contrast, is weightless: be “true peacemakers,”cherish Lebanon’s “model of coexistence,” repeat the old formula of a Palestinian state beside Israel. Peace language deliberately drained of politics, served to a country whose every wound is political.

That chasm — between choreographed reverence and lived ruin — is not Pope Leo XIV’s personal failing. It is encoded in the Vatican’s political DNA.

Lebanon’s Reverence and the Colonial Architecture

Lebanon’s reverence for the Pope — and Hezbollah’s attempt to appear non-sectarian — reveal a country still trapped inside the political architecture designed by a colonial power a century ago. A system built to prevent national cohesion is now being asked to conjure it out of thin air.

When France carved out “Greater Lebanon” in 1920, it did not simply draw borders; it engineered a sectarian operating system that distributed political power by confession, cementing fragmentation as the basis of governance.

Image: Pope Leo XIV addresses Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, government officials, as well as religious, business, cultural and civic leaders at the presidential palace in Beirut Nov. 30, 2025. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

The Mandate promised protection for minorities, especially Maronite Christians, but its real function was to stabilize French control by ensuring no unified national project could emerge. The logic was simple: Lebanon would survive only if its communities distrusted each other more than they distrusted the colonial administrator.

That blueprint survived independence, the civil war, Israeli invasions, Syrian domination, and the Taif Agreement. It still structures the political reflexes of every actor, Hezbollah included. Their warm welcome to the Pope — the letter praising Lebanon as a “civilizational bridge,” the insistence on “coexistence and national consensus,” even the spectacle of Imam Mahdi Scouts lining the airport road — is not a departure from sectarian politics but its purest expression.

Hezbollah knows that to claim national legitimacy in a system engineered so that every community lives in dread of losing its share of power, it must constantly reassure Christians that it is a guarantor, not a threat. In a landscape where each religious community was taught to fear demographic eclipse and political marginalization, public reverence for a Christian leader becomes a strategic gesture.

But the reality that undercuts this performance is the same one the Mandate produced: Lebanon is not a nation free to choose unity; it is a patchwork designed to require endless performance of unity.

Its institutions remain structurally partitioned — a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister, a Shiite speaker of parliament; parliamentary seats allocated by sect; personal status laws adjudicated through separate religious courts; ministries informally assigned according to a system built on the fear that one religious community will eclipse or marginalise the others; security services balanced through unwritten sectarian formulas; public-sector hiring determined less by merit than by communal quotas.

Every budget negotiation, university appointment, municipal council, and judicial decision is filtered through this 1943 National Pact logic. Even the army’s senior command positions are apportioned to maintain sectarian equilibrium. Lebanon does not merely remember its divisions; it is governed by them.

The Vatican’s Political DNA

This is not the first time a Pope has come to Lebanon, but the contrast with earlier visits is striking. When John Paul II arrived in 1997 to launch the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation for Lebanon, the country was emerging from the civil war and trying to imagine a future beyond it. His visit carried the mood of reconstruction — a bid to sanctify national reconciliation, however fragile.

Benedict XVI’s 2012 visit also unfolded in a moment of relative stability: Lebanon was tense but intact, Syria had not yet collapsed into full-scale war, and the idea of coexistence still carried some political meaning. Both popes spoke into a Lebanese landscape where the state, though dysfunctional, was still standing.

This visit is different. Pope Leo XIV is stepping into a country on the brink of structural failure — a state hollowed out by corruption, economic implosion, mass emigration, and the spillover of Israeli attacks.

Lebanon today is not negotiating reconciliation; it is negotiating survival. And yet the Vatican’s vocabulary has not changed. The Pope is still speaking the same language of “coexistence,” “dialogue,” and “Lebanese unity,” as though the country were still capable of performing the version of itself imagined in the 1990s.

The discrepancy is not accidental. It reflects the deepest reflexes of the Holy See: a diplomatic posture designed to bless stability, even when the ground beneath it has rotted.

Understanding this requires looking beyond the individual Pope to the structure that shapes him. For more than a century, the Vatican’s approach to the Middle East has been governed by three core instincts: protect Christian minorities, avoid direct confrontation with powerful states, and speak in universal moral terms that never fully enter the domain of politics.

This diplomatic grammar emerged during the colonial era and hardened during the Cold War, when the Vatican realised that in the age of superpowers and secular states, its only remaining leverage was the right to be present — speaking plainly would forfeit even that. It has never shed that reflex.

The result is a political style that treats conflicts as symmetrical disputes between suffering peoples, rather than as systems of domination. The occupation of Palestine becomes, in Vatican language, a “cycle of violence.” Gaza’s destruction becomes a “tragedy.” Israeli strikes on Lebanon become “escalation.” Oppression dissolves into circumstance. This is neutrality not as principle but as default — a kind of cultivated blindness that allows the Vatican to remain a “mediating voice” even when mediation is impossible and the violence is overwhelmingly one-sided.

That neutrality is not moral; it is strategic. The Vatican has long feared that taking explicit political positions could endanger Catholic institutions in the region: churches, patriarchates, schools, hospitals, holy sites. Its priority has been to preserve presence, even at the cost of silence. It prefers preserved over speaking truth to power with the reckless courage the Bible calls prophetic.. And so every Pope inherits a script that treats the Middle East as a delicate mosaic where naming perpetrators could shatter the whole design.

But Lebanon today does not need a guardian of access. It needs a witness willing to say what the situation actually is: that the country is collapsing under a political order built to fail; that Gaza is being annihilated under the full protection of global powers; that Israel’s repeated violations of Lebanese sovereignty are part of a continuous architecture of coercion; that peace without justice is not peace but paralysis.

Instead, Lebanon receives a message crafted for a world that no longer exists.

The Vatican and Israel: A Century of Institutional Caution

The hollowness of the Pope’s message in Beirut cannot be understood without the Vatican’s long, anxious relationship with Israel — a relationship governed less by moral clarity than by fear and institutional self-preservation.

When political Zionism emerged, the Holy See opposed it, not from solidarity with Palestinians but from dread that a Jewish state would disrupt Christian custodianship of the holy places. For decades it insisted on an internationalized Jerusalem and, after 1948, refused to recognize Israel — longer than nearly any Western power. Even this refusal, however, was protective, not principled: the Vatican feared absorption of its patriarchates, schools, and shrines into an assertive new state more than it feared the dispossession of Palestinians.

The turning point came after the Holocaust and Nostra Aetate (1965). A theological reconciliation with Judaism produced a lasting political anxiety: any sharp criticism of Israel could be weaponized as antisemitism. No pope has fully escaped that shadow. By the time the Vatican finally established diplomatic relations in 1993, recognition was a survival strategy — to secure access to Jerusalem’s Christian sites and pilgrimage routes — rather than an endorsement of Israel’s policies.

The price was a permanent self-censorship. Since the Fundamental Agreement, every Vatican statement has been calibrated to avoid direct confrontation with Israeli power. Asymmetry is erased, violence is rendered symmetrical, and the language defaults to “cycles,” “tragedies,” and “suffering on all sides.” Gaza can be starved and flattened, southern Lebanon bombarded with impunity, and still the Holy See speaks as if the parties possess equivalent agency and moral weight.

This is not ignorance. It is a diplomacy built on the conviction that naming the structures of domination — occupation, blockade, repeated violations of sovereignty — would endanger Catholic institutions across the region and reopen old wounds with the Jewish world. The Vatican chose preserved access over prophetic witness. It chose manageable ambiguity over justice.

And so Pope Leo XIV arrives in Beirut bound by a century-old compact:affirm a two-state solution in theory while remaining institutionally incapable of confronting the power that prevents it in practice. The result is a moral voice that condemns suffering in the abstract but flinches from naming its authors — a neutrality that, in the face of annihilation, functions as complicity dressed in pastoral robes.

The Mismatch: Asymmetry on the Ground, “Balance” in the Vatican, and the Silence on Justice

The most striking gap between the Pope’s message and the reality of the region is not only the asymmetry of violence — it is the Vatican’s refusal to speak the language of justice in a place where injustice is the core of the crisis.

As southern Lebanon was burning under Israeli strikes, Lebanese media speculated intensely about whether the Pope would dare visit the south. Some hoped he would stand with the communities — Muslim and Christian — who have lived as internal refugees for over a year. Others doubted Israel would permit the airspace coordination such a visit would require. The question was not merely logistical; it was political: could the Pope allow himself to be seen witnessing injustice?

He did not go. And that absence revealed everything.

Southern Lebanon is not a zone of “mutual escalation.” It is a territory repeatedly subjected to unilateral bombardment, drone incursions, and incursions that violate the Blue Line with impunity. Tens of thousands of Lebanese, including families from Rmeish, Alma al-Shaab, Aitaroun, Kfarkila, and Marjayoun, remain displaced — not by an earthquake or economic strain but by a neighboring state’s constant military pressure.This is not symmetry; it is exposure. This is not “conflict”; it is a condition imposed on civilians who have no say in whether their land becomes a battlefield.

And yet the Pope’s language flattens this reality into abstraction. He speaks of “dialogue” as though both sides possess equivalent power. He urges “de-escalation” as though Lebanon commands an air force. He appeals to “Lebanese unity” while avoiding any mention of the fact that unity is impossible when entire communities cannot return to their homes because those homes sit inside an Israeli-defined kill zone.

But beyond asymmetry lies something deeper: the question of justice, which the Vatican consistently avoids. The suffering of the south is not an unfortunate accident; it is the predictable result of a longstanding structure in which Israel acts without accountability and Lebanon absorbs the consequences. Justice would require naming this. It would require saying that displacement is not neutral, that bombed orchards and schools are not atmospheric tragedies, that international law is not being “strained” but violated.

The Vatican does not speak this language. It cannot. Justice demands specificity: naming perpetrators, identifying structures, calling for accountability. Vatican diplomacy has no vocabulary for this. Its lexicon is built for symmetry, for parallel moralities, for universal suffering detached from political cause. In this grammar, the south becomes a “front” rather than a community under siege; Gaza becomes a “humanitarian crisis” rather than a population subjected to annihilation; Israel’s ongoing violations of Lebanese sovereignty become “instability.”

In a moment when the region is being reshaped by force, the Pope offers a language built for preserving balance. But balance is not justice. And without justice, peace is an illusion.

This is the core mismatch: a Vatican that speaks as if all suffering were interchangeable, visiting a country where suffering has an author — and everyone knows who it is.

Peace Without Justice: The Vatican’s Theological Comfort Zone and Political Evasion

The Pope’s insistence on “peace” without any reckoning with justice is not a stylistic choice; it is the Vatican’s most enduring evasion. For the Holy See, peace is an abstract moral horizon, a universal good, a spiritual ideal that stands above politics. But in regions where injustice is the engine of violence, appeals to peace that refuse to name injustice serve only to protect the status quo. They become a shield for power, not a challenge to it.

This is not new. Across the 20th and 21st centuries, the Vatican’s diplomatic posture in global crises has been consistently pastoral, ceremonial, and symbolic — rarely substantive, rarely disruptive. Its theology privileges reconciliation over accountability; its diplomacy privileges stability over liberation. Nowhere in modern history has Vatican neutrality been enough to alter the trajectory of a conflict driven by structural violence.

The Vatican’s insistence on a negative peace — mere cessation of hostility without accountability — is not unique to the Middle East. In 1970s–80s Latin America, Rome urged “reconciliation” while local bishops often collaborated with death-squad regimes and the Holy See itself stayed silent on the disappeared; Oscar Romero’s pleas for intervention were ignored. In Rwanda, priests and bishops participated in the genocide while Rome issued only vague laments about “violence,” delaying any reckoning with its own complicity for years. From Buenos Aires to Kigali, the pattern repeats: the Vatican comforts victims in the abstract, protects institutional access, and refuses to name perpetrators or endorse movements for justice.

Even in the Middle East, the Vatican’s most emotionally charged region, its role has remained symbolic. It condemned the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 but exerted no influence on the decision. It pleaded for peace in Syria while the country disintegrated. It prayed for Lebanon in 2005, 2006, 2019, 2020 — but each time the Vatican’s words hovered above the wreckage without ever touching the structures that produced it.

This is the theological core of the problem: the Vatican defines peace as the cessation of hostility, not as the presence of justice. It is a negative peace, not a positive one. A peace that demands forgiveness from the oppressed and restraint from the powerful, but never accountability from the oppressor. The Vatican fears siding with the marginalized explicitly because it fears losing access, influence, and diplomatic “balance.” In its worldview, justice is divisive; peace is safe.

But peace without justice is not peace. It is a request for the oppressed to quiet themselves while the powerful continue undisturbed.

And so today, as Gaza is reduced to rubble and southern Lebanon is held hostage to Israeli firepower, the Vatican once again offers a peace that demands nothing of the perpetrators and everything of the victims. A peace that asks the wounded to reconcile with their wound, not with their rights. A peace that heals no one because it confronts nothing.

The result is a moral vacuum. A Vatican that claims to be a global conscience but declines to touch the mechanisms of harm. A church that can comfort but cannot liberate. A papacy that arrives in Lebanon preaching serenity while the region burns under forces it refuses to name.

Nothing meaningful ever happens because the Vatican does not speak in the register that meaningful change requires.

Conclusion: Reverence as a Survival Mechanism in a Collapsed Political Order

What Lebanon staged for the Pope was not merely hospitality or piety; it was a collective act of survival when the political order itself has collapsed.

In a country where the state has ceased to provide security, accountability, or even basic services, symbolic authority rushes in to fill the void.Reverence itself becomes the coping strategy, a temporary architecture of meaning built atop a landscape where institutions have evaporated. Lebanon is not venerating the Pope because it believes he can save it; it is venerating him because there is no one left to ask.

This is the tragedy of a failing political order: it turns citizens into supplicants and leaders into talismans. When the government cannot protect its borders, people look for protection in ceremony. When the political class cannot govern, the population looks for order in ritual. When justice is absent, hope becomes a commodity purchased through symbolism rather than struggle. The Pope’s visit became a national event not because of what he represents theologically, but because of what Lebanon has been stripped of politically.

In this sense, the spectacle reveals something deeper than despair. It reveals a population trying to manufacture coherence as everything beneath them fractures. The flags, the children waving, the meticulously choreographed motorcade routes — these are not signs of national unity but desperate substitutes for a unity that no longer exists. In a functioning state, the Pope’s visit would have been ceremonial; in Lebanon, it became existential.

What the Vatican sees as pastoral reassurance, Lebanon experiences as a brief suspension of collapse. And that is why the emptiness of the Pope’s message matters: when a society is this fragile, even silence carries weight. A visit that avoids naming injustice reinforces the sense that the world will only ever look at Lebanon when it performs reverence, never when it demands rights. A diplomacy that avoids the language of justice teaches the abandoned that their suffering must remain tasteful to be acknowledged.

This is the final cruelty of the moment: Lebanon is asked to applaud a peace it does not have, to welcome a neutrality that does not protect it, and to celebrate a presence that confirms its own political absence. The spectacle ends, the motorcade leaves, the cameras turn off — and the country returns to the same ruins, the same displacement, the same unanswered violence.

In the end, the reverence says less about the Pope than it does about a nation forced to cling to symbols because the world has denied it justice.When political orders collapse, rituals expand. When institutions fail, performances intensify. And when a people are left without protection, they learn to survive on ceremonies that promise meaning but deliver no shelter.

The Pope’s visit was not a miracle, nor a reckoning, nor even a balm. It was an unintended reminder that Lebanon is governed by ghosts and held together by gestures and by the fragile hope that someone, somewhere, might one day speak not of peace, but of justice.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. Visit the author’s blog.

She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from the author

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