The New Pope Should Go to Gaza. Now.

Pope Francis and John Paul II were repentant for the moral failings of the Roman Catholic Church. It should now do the right thing in real time.

Kathy Boylan is a member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community. Video of her -- "Pope Francis, go to Gaza for God’s sake!" -- last year went viral on Instagram. Pope Francis didn’t do so, after all, he was basically bedridden. But the new pope, Pope Leo XIV is not.

He can make a real impact by choosing Gaza as the first place he travels as Pope.

Pope Francis of course made many statements condemning Israel’s attack on Gaza, see a few of them below.

And Pope Francis requested that his popemobile be turned into a health clinic for the children of Gaza. Before that happens, perhaps we can discern another meaning in the action: The popemobile should be used by his successor in Gaza.

Make the word flesh.

The words of Pope Francis about Gaza should become the actions of Pope Leo XIV.

The conservative John Paul II wanted in the Jubilee year 2000 to go to Iraq and then Jerusalem, but was not able. He actually did a “virtual pilgrimage” to Ur. A year and a half before the 9/11 attacks were used as pretext for war after war, he said: ''With us, the Jews and Muslims also view the figure of Abraham as a model of unconditional submission to the will of God.”

Victor Gaetan in Foreign Policy would write when Pope Francis finally visited Iraq in 2021: “The Vatican opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is well known that Pope John Paul II sent a personal delegation to plead with U.S. President George W. Bush to call off the attack. Vatican officials warned the president that military action would unleash extremism, instability, and the scapegoating of Christian communities. The Bush administration did not heed this advice, even as it sought religious sanction for the invasion.”

Gaetan also reported:

The pope’s trip to Iraq was more than the visit of a Catholic spiritual leader to a predominantly Muslim country: Francis’s pilgrimage was a symbolic act of contrition for what remains one of the most destabilizing, destructive military adventures of the twenty-first century.

Speaking to officials and diplomats on the first day of his visit, the pontiff expressed remorse for the “death, destruction, and ruin” inflicted on Iraq for close to 20 years. He explained that he came “as a penitent, asking forgiveness from heaven and my brothers and sisters.” Although he did not explicitly blame other countries or forces by name, he specified the guilty as “those outside interests uninterested in the local population.” In the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, he is more direct, highlighting how geopolitical superpowers and transnational economic interests function to “divide and conquer” weaker, poorer parts of the world, indifferent to local culture, faith, or values. And last year in Bari, Italy, at a gathering of bishops discussing the Middle East, Francis lamented the brutality and horrific waste of war. “War, by allocating resources to the acquisition of weapons and military power, diverts those resources from vital social needs, such as the support of families, health care and education,” he said. “It is madness; it is madness to destroy houses, bridges, factories and hospitals, to kill people and annihilate resources, instead of building human and economic relationships. It is a kind of folly to which we cannot resign ourselves: war can never be considered normal.”

In this spirit, Francis convened an interfaith prayer service on March 6 near the dramatic ocher ziggurat of Ur. The site—the biblical birthplace of Abraham, the father of the three monotheistic religions—signifies a shared culture that transcends modern antagonisms, and it was a fitting place to plead for unity among believers of different faiths: “Hostility, extremism and violence are not born of a religious heart: they are betrayals of religion,” said Francis.

In 1985, Pope John Paul II asked for forgiveness for the colonial practice of slavery in the New World and for the transatlantic slave trade. Today, Pope Francis seeks to apply the sacrament of reconciliation not to historical transgressions but to contemporary problems, from the rejection of refugees in parts of Europe to the legacy of Western intervention in the Middle East. He journeyed to Iraq not just to encourage its people to reject hatred and unite across sectarian divides but to grant them the simple but powerful act of recognition, acknowledging the wrongs committed against them.

Can the Catholic Church stop asking for forgiveness after allowing or enabling mass criminality — and instead strive to stop the slaughter in real time? Not to wash their hands of the crucifixion, but to halt it?

Boylan’s words ring even more strongly today: "The Pope should go to Gaza -- immediately. I think the Pope has a responsibility to go. The Pope knows that God has commanded us not to kill. Killing on a genocidal level is going on in Gaza. The Pope has to denounce it, has to be with the victims. This is a violation of all the commandments of God. Pope Pius XII could have gone to one of Hitler’s concentration camps -- but Pope Pius XII did not do that.

"The Pope has got to go to the concentration camp called Gaza. I’m sure Israel would find it very difficult to say 'no' to the Holy Father’s presence in Gaza -- and he might stop the bombing and he might stop the killing. And he should stay there, not just go and visit for a while. The Pope should stay -- we beg the Pope to do that.

"And I have a message for all the other people, if you’re not the Pope, I’m asking everyone who is paying taxes to refuse to pay even a portion of their federal taxes, to end their complicity."

Boylan was arrested with 12 other activists while praying for peace at the Russell Senate Office Building Rotunda. See piece by Art Laffin, one of the activists. She is also a long-time tax resister and has worked with the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

Pope Francis, in his final Christmas message this past December, said: "Yesterday, children were bombed. Children.” He said: “This is cruelty, this is NOT war."

He was talking about Israeli airstrikes.

Pope Francis made numerous statements on Israel’s attack on Gaza, calling it "very serious and shameful…We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country's energy network has been hit."

In his book Hope Never Disappoints published in 2024, he cited experts saying: “What is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be investigated to determine whether it meets the definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

When Israeli snipers shot dead two Christian women in Gaza, the Pope said: “It is terrorism.”

Kathy Kelly of World Beyond War reports: On days when he learned that the bombing was particularly heavy, Pope Francis would call the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza to check in on them as many as five times a day. (Special thanks to Kathy Kelly also for having pointed out the Gaetan piece quoted above.)