Papal Bull

1,894 words

This month, the Catholic Church’s new seemingly left-wing and open-borders pontiff, Leo XIV, visited Lebanon. A truly benighted country, but one whose very existence, as this Vatican News headline summarizing the Pope’s thoughts rather optimistically put it, “stands as witness to interreligious dialogue”. I think there must have been some kind of a misprint.

“Here in this beloved land,” the Pope said, “may every bell toll, every adhān, every [Islamic] call to prayer, blend into a single, soaring hymn—not only to glorify the merciful Creator of Heaven and Earth, but also to lift a heartfelt prayer for the divine gift of peace.” The only bell truly tolling in today’s Lebanon, however, is that which tolls for Lebanese Christianity itself.

A Sunni Outlook

Although nowadays a global byword for incoherent and dysfunctional sectarianism (to everyone but Leo, anyway) Lebanon was once considered a fundamentally Christian country, the Middle East’s only real remaining such enclave.

Yet today it is a Muslim-majority land, where, in a shaky attempt to prevent the different religious ‘tribes’ from systematically slaughtering one another, there is a complicated formal arrangement, whereby the President must always be Christian, the Prime Minister Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament Shia Muslim. The minority Druze get the building’s Chief Receptionist role, whilst the Jews are occasionally allowed to clean the toilets.

Between 1975 and 1990, Lebanon suffered a bloody civil war which killed perhaps 150,000 people. Today, citizens mainly vote along ethno-religious lines: for a Christian to vote for a Muslim, or vice-versa, would be like a turkey voting for Christmas. Even the main religious groups are splintered into a mosaic of other, smaller, sects, Lebanese Christians being Maronites, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and many more things you’ve never even heard of, so none of the competing minorities are even united amongst themselves. Truly, Lebanese diversity is indeed its strength!

According to one estimate (and it can only ever be an estimate, as Lebanon has mysteriously had no full census since 1932), in 1975, when the civil war began, Christians made up nearly 2 million of Lebanon’s 3.5 million population. By 2019, this same Christian population had ‘grown’ to … 2 million. Unfortunately, Lebanon’s Muslim population across this same period did not remain quite so static.

Refugees From Reality

The CIA World Factbook (if you choose to trust such a source) guesses Lebanon is now 68 percent Muslim, 32 percent Christian, and 4.5 percent Druze. Yet even this evaluation does not include the insane number of Syrian and Palestinian Muslim refugees allowed into Lebanon over the past decade or so, giving Lebanon the largest number of refugees per capita anywhere on Earth, even surpassing Minnesota.

Lebanon’s official, settled, population is supposed to be around 5.5m; but there are over two million allegedly ‘temporary’ refugees living there too, who, realistically, are going absolutely nowhere. Some of the nation’s original Christians are going somewhere though – they’re leaving the country as refugees themselves, to escape from all the refugees whom the Pope says have been brought in to live peacefully “alongside” them.

Despite what Il Papa preaches, many of these incomers do not prove exactly grateful to their non-Muslim hosts. The domestic Islamist terror organization Hezbollah (the armed, Iran-backed wing of certain Shias in Lebanon’s Parliament) doesn’t much like Lebanon’s non-Muslims either, repeatedly attacking and killing both ordinary Lebanese Christian voters, and their formal political representatives, rendering them an embattled and persecuted second-class minority in their own rightful homeland.

Understandably, several important high-ranking Lebanese Christians, including Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rai, are calling for Lebanon’s Muslim refugees to be repatriated, citing not only their own severe civilizational dispossession, but the fact the unaffordable incomers have helped crash the national economy. Did the Pope bother to listen to any of those particular disillusioned religious community leaders on his blinkered Islamophilic trip to Imaginary Interfaith Utopia earlier this December?

He certainly did not bother to listen to Amine Iskander, President of the Maronite Union, who had to settle for telling the truth about the Vatican’s own wrong-headed role, in cahoots with the EU and UN, in the systematic annihilation of Lebanese Christianity to a more honest interviewer from The European Conservative website instead:

The UN and especially the EU have annually injected billions of US dollars to maintain the Syrian migrants on Lebanese soil. Any Syrian who would leave Lebanon was threatened by NGOs financed by the EU with losing his financial aid … In 2022, the Vatican exhorted each parish in Lebanon to help integrate Syrian migrants and help their families in finding housing and jobs. No such [Vatican] appeal was made for the thousands of Christian Lebanese families devastated by the 2019 [economic] collapse … This disparity left many Christians with no option but to emigrate.

At the end of his trip, Pope Leo expressed the desire to fly into Algeria next, “to visit the places of St Augustine’s life.” Whilst he’s there, he should ask his kind, tolerant, Muslim hosts precisely where all those vanished French Catholic pieds-noirs and their burned and demolished churches went too?

Shia Lies

You can easily see the embarrassingly self-evident parallels between what has been going on in Lebanon with the mass Muslim incomers, as described above, and what is going on with the simultaneous influx of these very same unbearable and unassimilable hordes in Europe and America today – or to be more accurate, you can, but the Pope can’t. What is even worse than Leo XIV’s apparent ignorance (deliberate or otherwise) of the plight of Lebanese Christians, however, is that he then went on to recommend that the merciless process of demographic and cultural replacement they are currently undergoing be exported wholesale to the wide-open lands of the Christian West too! (The previous Pope was just as bad, as I have demonstrated here and here.)

On the flight back to Rome, soon to be twinned with Mecca, Leo took the opportunity to criticize what he characterized as false populist fears against unchecked Muslim immigration into Europe and America. Stories about Muslims oppressing Christians in the Middle East, he implied, were mere bigoted lies being “generated by people who are against immigration and trying to keep out people who may be from another country, another religion, another race.” In the Pope’s view:

One of the great lessons that Lebanon can teach to the world is precisely showing a land where Islam and Christianity are both present and are respected, and that there is a possibility to live together, to be friends. Stories, testimonies and witnesses that we heard even in the past two days of people helping each other, Christians with Muslims, both of whom had had their villages destroyed, for example, were saying that we can come together and work together.

Yes, Pope Leo, but why was it that the Lebanese had “their villages destroyed” in the first place? Surely it wasn’t because their country is so incredibly harmonious that the settlements all spontaneously combusted out of pure ecumenical joy one day, just like an overjoyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki once did back in 1945?

Following the October 7 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas, their nutjob Islamist allies Hezbollah began a simultaneous campaign of launching rockets into Israel too, over the Lebanese border. They often hid their militia in predominantly Christian towns in the south of the country like Aitou and Rmeish, for one obvious reason: when Israel inevitably retaliated with strikes of their own, it would be Christian civilians, their homes, workplaces and spaces of worship, that ended up incinerated as collateral damage, not Muslims and their precious mosques.

According to Christian aid organization Barnabas Aid, who operate in Lebanon, during the period of cross-border shelling, Christians under fire mainly began fleeing only to where more of their fellow co-religionists lived. This was because many Lebanese camps for displaced persons, supposedly open to all, are in fact quietly run by Hezbollah, and so in practise Shia-only. Contrary to Leo’s assertions, Hezbollah intercepted aid donations to ensure they went purely to their supporters, not Leo’s much-praised “interfaith community” of mutual nation-rebuilding at all.

An Absolute Peace of Fake

Is Pope Leo sure Lebanese Muslims have been generously helping Christians rebuild their shattered villages, rather than opportunistically moving in to purchase their properties in ‘voluntary’ sales with the backing, both financial and intimidatory, of Hezbollah? Worse, Lebanon’s Christians – who historically made up much of the nation’s productive middle-class – are expected to actively fund their own slow-motion genocide by paying what amounts to an undeclared jizya tax for Hezbollah. So, Christians give the terrorists tax-money, then the terrorists’ families use it to buy Christians’ own houses off them. President of the Maronite Union Amine Iskander explains how:

Since […] 1990, Christians have been paying taxes that are entirely spent in the districts controlled by Hezbollah. Their own regions have been completely abandoned, and their infrastructure has deteriorated terribly. The public sector has the highest ratio of state officials in the world. It is mainly made up of fake jobs and serves to transfer the wealth from the Christian provinces to the Hezbollah […] families. This has led, after 30 years, to the complete impoverishment of the historically prosperous Christian Lebanon, accelerating the emigration process.

Is that really what Western Catholics should be helping to fund via their own church collection-plates? Essentially, implies Iskander, the naïve Vatican is complicit in a programme of disguised anti-Christian genocide:

Today, every house, every apartment, every shop that is abandoned is immediately occupied by millions of non-Christians [i.e., Muslim refugees-cum-settler-colonialists] all over the Christian mountains of Lebanon and East Beirut. By exhaustion and by impotence, Christian leaders [like Pope Leo] are refusing to take this crucial fact into consideration. The Church still imagines that after this calamitous decade, things will go back to normal […] This analysis is disconnected from reality.

If you wish to see just how badly Christians are truly treated in Lebanon today, a comprehensive report from the OpenDoors Christian foundation provides clear evidence of everything from baptisms being forbidden, to the distribution of Bibles being suppressed. Strictly speaking, none of this is actually legal, but if you have a large rocket-launcher to point in someone’s face instead of a law-book, that often functions just as well, doesn’t it?

The Bad Samaritan

But don’t worry, none of this is even happening at all, because Islam, as always, is a blessed religion of peace! The Pope’s visit has allowed useful idiot Western media companies like ABC to run demonstrably false assessments of the situation like these:

Over the past few decades, hundreds of thousands of Christians have left parts of the Middle East for good, driven by wars and the rise of Muslim extremists. In Lebanon, it has been different. Despite the many crises that have battered the small nation, Christians continue to enjoy religious freedom and significant political influence. Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Lebanon over the weekend is a recognition of the importance of Lebanon’s religious pluralism and a message to Christians not to abandon the region.

Praising 2020s Lebanon as an all-time global center for interfaith co-operation, peace and friendship, as Pope Leo has ludicrously just done, is a bit like praising early 1990s Yugoslavia as a great world model for interethnic goodwill and harmony. And we all know what happened there, don’t we?

Or, then again, judging by Pope Leo XIV’s complete refusal to acknowledge what is truly currently going on in Lebanon, perhaps we all don’t?

Who sane could ever want to transform Rome into Beirut?