Pope Leo, in his two Christmas homilies during the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day masses and his Christmas message from the balcony above St. Peter’s Square, showed himself to be unusually focused on Gaza. He seemed more exercised by the plight of Ukrainians and (Muslim) Gazans than by the mass slaughter and oppression of Christians across the Middle East and Africa. He also found time to attack immigration enforcement and capitalism. I know that, being Jewish, I’m the ultimate outsider, so I devoutly hope I’m not offending anyone here, but the whole thing struck me as a weirdly political way to welcome in the Christmas season.

Leo’s odd messages began with the Christmas Eve mass, when he attacked capitalism:

While a distorted economy leads us to treat human beings as mere merchandise, God becomes like us, revealing the infinite dignity of every person.

Yes, capitalism can be abused, but he’s got the whole thing bass-ackwards. It’s in Marxist economies where people are simply widgets of the state, forced to work at its command.
In a truly capitalist economy, one in which the state acts to prevent fraud and other criminal acts, individuals strive for themselves and, along the way, enrich others. There’s a reason that the wealth of the world—a world in which almost all people had once lived in abject poverty— skyrocketed when capitalism finally took hold.

By the next day— the Christmas Day homily—the Pope lost his focus on Christ’s birth and his ministry on Earth. Instead, he directed a lot of energy to Gaza:

Dear brothers and sisters, since the Word was made flesh, humanity now speaks, crying out with God’s own desire to encounter us. The Word has pitched his fragile tent among us. How, then, can we not think of the tents in Gaza, exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold…

Is it just me, or is it peculiar that the Pope—the head of the world’s largest Christian denomination—would include in his homily poetic tears for the Muslims in Gaza, and not mention the slaughter of thousands of Christians across the Middle East and Africa? (Incidentally, Muslims in Africa are also slaughtering their co-religionists, if they’re the wrong type of Muslim.) And of course, there’s the now-routine slaughter of Christians in Muslim Middle Eastern countries.

It also strikes me as a complete lapse into moral relativism, something the Church once stood against, that the Pope seems unconcerned with what led to Gaza’s destruction: Namely, the genocidal October 7 attack on Israel, followed by the Gaza population’s wholehearted support for Hamas to wage war, rather than to return the hostages and disarm. But again, I’m Jewish, so maybe my bewilderment is unique to me.

The Pope’s intense focus on Gaza continued in his later speech on the same day from St. Peter’s balcony. This time, he threw in the (Muslim) Yemenis for good measure:

In becoming man, Jesus took upon himself our fragility, identifying with each one of us: with those who have nothing left and have lost everything, like the inhabitants of Gaza; with those who are prey to hunger and poverty, like the Yemeni people…