When Pope Leo XIV announced in October that his first pastoral visit would be to Turkey and Lebanon, many Lebanese looked ahead with a mixture of anticipation and dread. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, a conflict that seems never to have ended. Not only was the war a period of off-and-on sectarian fighting between Christians, Muslims and the Druze; it also witnessed the first invasion of Lebanon by Israel, though it would not be the last. Over the first several months of this year, Lebanon attempted to recover from a devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah, which cost the country thousands of lives and billions of dollars in damage. Despite a ceasefire in November 2024, most of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances assumed that the fighting was not over, as Israel continued to launch almost daily attacks on alleged Hezbollah targets in the south, where the IDF still occupies several villages. For at least an hour or two on many days this fall the hectoring buzz of a military drone could be heard over Ras Beirut, where I live.
Monuments to Lebanon’s complex religious history are everywhere. On a Saturday last spring I drove from Beirut to Tripoli on the autostrade that runs up and down the Mediterranean coast. Tripoli boasts a Crusader castle reconstructed from a twelfth-century original built by invaders on their way from Europe to Jerusalem; the castle was then occupied by a Sunni militia at the outbreak of the Civil War. (Ramparts, it seems, never go out of style.) By November the autostrade was festooned with signs and billboards welcoming the Pope to Lebanon. The prime minister had declared his visit a national holiday, in part to ease traffic around the metropole. The billboards’ message—Yureedu Lubnan e salaam baba e salaam (Lebanon wants peace, father of peace)—belied a pervasive anxiety that Israel and Hezbollah would resume their fighting once he left. The expectation of violence is endemic to Lebanese society, and though sometimes people speak of the fighting like a bout of bad weather, it’s more like a bad memory: following a pause for Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1997, the two sides resumed fighting less than 72 hours after he departed. What would in almost any other country be enthusiastically welcomed—the first visit of a new pontificate, complete with a large outdoor mass—is, for Lebanon, a replaying and delaying of inevitable violence.
A pope’s first pastoral visit is, among other things, a statement of his priorities and direction for the Church. In an interview with Ross Douthat shortly after Pope Francis’s death, the Jesuit writer James Martin had expressed his hope that the new pope would visit a refugee camp in Africa, if not Lourdes or the Sea of Galilee. Lebanon gives Pope Leo close proximity to the Holy Land as well to one of the major humanitarian crises of our time: the approximately 250,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who can neither return home nor fully integrate into society. Under Lebanese labor law, Palestinians are barred from many professions, and Lebanese women are not able to pass citizenship to children from marriages to foreign men. (The law is widely understood as a means of preventing Lebanon’s sectarian “balance” from being disturbed by the ostensibly higher birth rates among Muslim families.) The visit, however, seems to have been less an act of intervention than of simple recognition.
Leo’s visit to Lebanon was the fourth by a sitting Pope since Paul VI visited in 1964. For comparison, the United States, with approximately forty times the number of Catholics, has also had four papal visits in the same time period. Lebanon is thus a small yet symbolically essential part of both the global Catholic Church and the Vatican’s relations with the Muslim world. Despite its recent history, Lebanon is viewed as an emblem of interreligious coexistence: Emmanuel Macron, visiting Lebanon earlier this year, called it un miracle. Political power is constitutionally distributed among the three dominant sects (Joseph Aoun, the president, is Maronite), and in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, the enormous Mohammad al-Amin Mosque sits opposite the grand Saint George Cathedral. The so-called Green Line that used to divide Christian from Muslim areas of the city is now virtually nonexistent, allowing families like mine to move freely between the seaside public spaces of the former West Beirut and the fancy shops and restaurants in the East.
On the day the Pope arrived, my family and I took a weekend trip to Byblos, a seaside town a few miles away. More signs had been put up welcoming Leo to the country, with each municipality and even many corporations—chain gas stations and bakeries—displaying its piety. On my phone I watched videos of the pope blessing crowds and addressing a large youth gathering. At one of these events, all of them highly choreographed, a woman named Loren, a Filipina migrant worker, reads a short address to Leo about the difficulties of life far from home. She represents the substantial populations of south and southeast Asian migrants who attend mass at the English-language parish in Beirut’s upscale Achrafieh neighborhood. She is the kind of person whose devotion was especially emphasized during Francis’s papacy, and her testimony suggests that Leo, too, will emphasize the global subaltern. In his first apostolic exhortation, entitled “Dilexi te” (an echo of Francis’s last encyclical, “Dilexit nos”), Leo writes, “Love for the Lord … is one with love for the poor.”
We return to Beirut on Monday, beating Leo’s convoy down the highway by a matter of minutes. There are so many Lebanese soldiers stationed along the route, and pockets of well-wishers waving Lebanese and Vatican flags, that it is strange to be driving down this highway and not be the pope. That evening, Leo attends an interreligious gathering of various sects, including the minority Druze as well as various Christian and Muslim leaders. This gathering is, if nothing else, a feast of sumptuous headgear. Notably but not surprisingly absent is the single most important religious figure in the country, the current head of Hezbollah, Naim Qassem. (His predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated by the IDF in September 2024.) Instead, the Shi’ite community is represented by the head of the Supreme Islamic Shia Council, Sheikh Ali al-Khatib, who claims, “We are certainly not lovers of weapons nor of the sacrifice of our sons.”
●
My ticket to the outdoor mass comes with instructions to arrive at the Beirut waterfront by 9 a.m., a full hour and a half before the service is supposed to begin. I do not really know what to expect, so I arrive early and wait in an overflow lot muddy from the previous day’s rain. Large, outdoor papal masses combine the logistical and technological apparatus of rock concerts with the essentially theatrical character of Catholic ritual. It was, after all, the twelfth-century theologian Honorius Augustodunensis who first promoted a demythologized explanation of liturgy, who saw it as a performance of salvation in something like the modern sense of that word. Stadium-sized screens display events on the stage for those sitting or standing in sections too distant from the stage to make them out, which is almost everyone.
The first miracle of the day is that the mass begins on time. The liturgy moves slowly, but I lose track of the different languages employed—is that Armenian? Mostly it bounces between Arabic and the Pope’s Spanish-tinged French. In the row behind me, three members of the civil defense force, whose most visible function is to rescue people buried in bombed-out buildings, are dozing, their chins lowered to their chest. The Old Testament reading, from Isaiah, is one of the Bible’s most well-known verses: The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. I wonder: Who is the wolf in the context of modern Middle Eastern politics, and who is the sheep? What are they saying about this very verse in the yeshiva just across the border, not a hundred kilometers from here?
After the mass, walking along the waterfront toward my apartment, I meet a Lebanese woman with curly, purple-tinted hair, who tells me that she’s not a believer but went out of sociological interest. She wonders aloud whether Leo might not stay a few more weeks in order to spare Lebanon impending warfare. She smiles at this comment, which reminds me of comments I hear around campus about Westerners who come to the university on their way somewhere else—up the career ladder, or to a more stable country. The ranks of my own department are depleted after a decade of crisis after crisis, a small reflection of the larger out-migration that has plagued Lebanon for more than fifty years. Pope Leo acknowledged as much in his homily and in an address the day before to Lebanese youth, which called on them to remain in the country as “peacemakers.”
Back at home, I watch a video taken from Beirut’s airport later that day of Leo’s plane lifting into the sky. I am filled with sadness for Lebanon, but not for myself, because I know that if war broke out, I could easily fly away, too. After his departure, a Lebanese reporter asks about the possibility of peace following his visit, and Leo demurs, hewing closely to the minimalist script of the Vatican’s foreign policy and referring vaguely to conversations he’s had with regional leaders.
Outside my window the sound of the Israeli drone settles back over the city. Airstrikes in the south did not stop over the course of the Pope’s visit. Peace is as distant as ever.
This dedication to embodying what he taught ought to strip away the too-popular delusion that Francis’s teaching was vague or indefinite. If anything, it was scandalously concrete: evangelical living forces us to confront the fact that what is preached about on Sundays or argued about at theological conferences must, at some point, be lived. We may read the story of the Good Samaritan, but to show mercy to others in our lives is to make a deliberate choice about how to do it; it demands a decision about the right way to love someone.
Interested in submitting to Forms of Life?
Pitch us! Forms of Life pieces are short (no more than 1,000 words), and are grounded in a concrete experience or current event. Send your FoL ideas to the editors via Submittable.
Since it was founded in 2009, The Point has remained faithful to the Socratic idea that philosophy is not just a rarefied activity for scholars and academics but an ongoing conversation that helps us all live more examined lives. We rely on reader support to continue publishing.
