The Gaza Pietà
How Pope Francis Divinized Palestinian Suffering
Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936 in Buenos Aires to Italian immigrant parents, is dead at 88 after a prolonged illness. Almost alone of Western leaders, he showed enormous sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza. He called the small Catholic community there every evening. In honor of his passing, I’m presenting here a slightly revised version of an essay that first appeared last fall.
Pope Francis’s last book, Hope never disappoints. Pilgrims towards a better world (2025), called for an investigation into whether the Israeli war on Gaza is a genocide.
The Pope mentioned Gaza on several occasions in the book. At one point he expressed concern about migration crises around the world, colored as they are by “violence and hardship,” in the Sahara, the Mexican-US border, and the Mediterranean, “which has become a large cemetery in the past decade.” He added, “also in the Middle East,” because of the “humanitarian tragedy” in Gaza. (Quotes are my translation from the Spanish edition, which appeared before the English.)
Pope Francis said that Christians must feel the pain of migrants forced to leave their homes, noting that for many it is easier to empathize with the hopes of an entrepreneur who emigrates to found a business or a retiree who goes abroad to make their pension stretch further than with the hopes of refugees forced abroad by violence or famine, seeking a more peaceful existence.
He made an interesting point here. I wonder if the difference is agency. We see ourselves in persons who take decisive steps to achieve a goal, but are alienated from those who are forced to do something against their will. Those with agency are admirable to us, are self, while those deprived of it are lesser and Other. I tell my students that they think of becoming a refugee as something that happens to others, but it can happen to anyone. I was trying to study in Beirut in my youth when war broke out and I had to flee to Jordan. My money was frozen in the bank because the banks all closed when war broke out. A kind man, at the American University of Beirut, Dean Robert Najemy, arranged for my parents to wire me airfare. He was later killed by a gunman, an event that still hurts my soul. Of course, I wasn’t a refugee the way the Palestinians are—I still had my homeland and could ultimately return there. But I gained sympathy regarding those who suddenly have to abandon their domiciles. I don’t think of them as lacking agency or being Other, which I hope comes through in my book on Gaza.
The Catholic leader lamented that so many Ukrainians have been forced to flee, and praised countries that took them in, such as Poland. He then turned to the Middle East, where, he said, we have seen something similar. He praised the way Jordan and Lebanon welcomed refugees. He was writing before mid-September 2024, when Lebanon got caught up in the Israel-Hezbollah feud. Some 1.5 million Syrians had taken refuge in Lebanon from the Syrian civil war. Ironically, hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Lebanese subsequently fled to Syria. Earlier, Jordan took in so many Palestinian families that a majority of Jordanians today have Palestinian ancestry. Jordan also took in hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Syrians.
Francis said he was thinking especially of those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has hit the Strip. We think about 100,000 Palestinians from Gaza managed to flee to Egypt before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu occupied the Rafah crossing with Israeli troops.
Then Pope Francis dropped his bombshell. According to some experts, he wrote, “what has been happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide.”
He insisted that a painstaking investigation be carried out to determine whether the situation fits the technical definition formulated by jurists and international organizations. He was likely referring to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the Genocide Convention of 1948, on the basis of which the International Court of Justice is deliberating on whether what the Israelis are doing in Gaza is a genocide.
Although he appealed to international law in this passage, he was pessimistic that war is ever compatible with it. Elsewhere in the book he pointed out that no war avoids indiscriminately killing civilians. He recalled the images we have all seen coming out of Ukraine and Gaza. “We cannot,” he says, “allow the killing of defenseless civilians.” These are war crimes. Inflicting wounds on these innocents to the point where they have to have limbs amputated or their natural environment is destroyed cannot be dismissed, he says, as mere “collateral damage.” “They are,” he asserts, “victims whose innocent blood cries out to heaven and begs for an end to all war.”
His last mention of Gaza came in a passage where he recalled a photograph of a Palestinian grandmother in Gaza, her face not visible, holding in her arms the lifeless body of her five-year-old granddaughter, who had just been killed in an Israeli bombing, along with other family members. He noted that the image has been called “The Pietà of Gaza.”
The Encyclopedia Britannica explains, “Pietà, as a theme in Christian art, depiction of the Virgin Mary supporting the body of the dead Christ. . . . the great majority show only Mary and her Son. The Pietà was widely represented in both painting and sculpture, being one of the most poignant visual expressions of popular concern with the emotional aspects of the lives of Christ and the Virgin.”
He said that the photo, taken in a hospital morgue, conveyed strength, sorrow and the unimaginable pain inflicted by war. He ends by again insisting that innocents must be protected even in the midst of warfare, a principle, he said, that is engraved on the hearts of all people.
The consequence of the Pope’s comments throughout was a humanization of the Palestinians—a humanization of which US and British media outlets have largely proved themselves incapable. The only way they can be all right with over 17,000 dead children in Israel’s campaign against Gaza is that they do not see them as truly human. Otherwise, even the death of one little granddaughter would have us all weeping uncontrollably.
Not only did the Pope humanize Palestinian suffering, refusing to lose his empathy in the face of the magnitude of the slaughter and the sheer number of children in burial shrouds, but in a sense he even divinized Palestinian suffering. The dead little girl in her grandma’s arms is a Christ-like figure—Christ-like in her innocence, which did not prevent her from being brutally killed. And the heart-wrenching mourning of her grandmother is like the grief of the Mother Mary over her crucified son, himself the incarnation on earth of the divine.
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Baptized and Confirmed Catholic; Atheist. My life has been bookended by deeply religious leaders. Pope Francis, Pope John XXIII, Dalai Lama, Franklin D. Roosevelt, etal. I see no great leaders in US government right now.