The Pope’s actual job
The Pope’s actual job — the irreplaceable, specific, urgent job for which he was selected — is to proclaim the uniqueness of Christ and to guard the faith.
The incarnation, the resurrection, the insistence that God entered history at a fixed point in human form.
This singularity is the hinge on which all human existence turns.
Either it is the most consequential fact in the history of the world, or it is nothing.
The Holy Father has spoken again about Islam from the papal plane, expressing a sincere hope that Christians and Muslims can live together in friendship and peace.
We should all share that hope.
However, hope is not the same thing as truth.
When the Pope presents Lebanon as a shining example of Christian-Muslim harmony, and suggests that the two faiths can easily become friends, he is speaking from an idealism that simply does not match reality — neither the reality on the ground in Lebanon, nor the clear teaching of the Quran itself.
The Quran is not ambiguous on this subject.
if you want to know why faithful Muslims will not respond to the papal under-informed optimism we need to turn to their authoritative text.
In Surah 5:51 it states:
“O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians as protectors. They are protectors of one another. And whoever among you takes them as protectors, then surely he is one of them.”
So far from entertaining friendship, Islam requires a different course fo action:
Even more explicit is Surah 9:29:
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah nor in the Last Day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the jizya willingly while they are humbled.”
The respect is not mutual.
And Surah 98:6 adds:
“Indeed, those who disbelieve from the People of the Book and the polytheists will be in the fire of Hell, abiding eternally therein. Those are the worst of creatures.”
These are not obscure or marginal verses. They are foundational to Islamic theology.
Lebanon was once a Christian-majority country. Christians have gone from roughly 50–60% of the population in the mid-20th century to around 30% today.
Villages have been destroyed. Communities that have lived there for centuries are shrinking and, in some places, disappearing.
This is not ancient history. It is recent, documented, and ongoing.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it plainly in today’s Daily Mail: the strategy is no longer conquest by the bomb, but conquest by the womb.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential Islamist theologians of the modern era, openly told his followers not to waste time with violence.
“Conquer Europe through immigration, through settlement, through the wombs of Muslim women.”
That doctrine of demographic conquest is being followed, and it is working.
We do not honour the Pope, nor do we serve the Church, by pretending otherwise.
After the experience of Pope Francis, many of us had hoped for greater clarity. The Abu Dhabi agreement is an offence against the Magisterium which must be corrected, – especially, if as we are told the misunderstanding is contingent upon a mistranslation.
It is therefore with genuine sorrow that I find myself having to say these things so soon into this pontificate.
But silence in the face of illusion, misinformation or mistake is not charity. It is cowardice.
The truth may be uncomfortable, but it remains the truth.
Let us give the last word to a Muslim convert, who fled Islam for Christ and the Catholic Church, Ayaan Hirsi Ali :
“Now, as the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime that recently massacred tens of thousands of its own citizens, races toward a nuclear weapon, Leo’s answer is to lend his moral authority to the opposition. He has provided effective cover for a theocratic regime under which one of the world’s largest underground Christian churches has grown. After all, this is a regime that murders people for converting.
Those Iranian Christians, worshipping in secret at mortal risk, deserve a Pope who will name their oppressor. They have received instead a Pope who extends gestures of solidarity to the civilization that persecutes them.
Moral leadership — the articulation of what is worth defending, why the foundations of Western civilizations matter, why the Church produced universities and hospitals, and the concept of individual conscience — that is the Pope’s domain. That work is not being done.
Scripture itself named this failure long before Leo arrived to repeat it. The men who made this papacy bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the Pharisees of Christ’s own time — guardians so consumed by the maintenance of institutional power that the faith has become incidental.
The appropriate response to this kind of corruption was demonstrated once, in that most sacred of spaces, leaving no room for ambiguity. When Christ found the temple occupied by men who had remade it in their own image, he didn’t seek common ground with them.
Instead, he drove them out.
That same refusal to mistake the vessel for what it carries, that same willingness to act on what the faith actually demands, is what ordinary Catholics, and all those who understand what is at stake in the Church’s decline, must now find the courage to insist upon.
None of this forecloses the possibility of coexistence. The world’s civilizations must find ways of living alongside one another and that work is certainly worth doing. But coexistence built on erasure rather than honest reckoning has never outlasted the differences it refused to name.
The clash of civilizations observes no Vatican calendar. It proceeds on its own terms, indifferent to ill-advised pronouncements and diplomatic communiqués and it will reach its conclusion with or without the Church’s participation.
The only question history will ask is whether the shepherds were tending their flock or signing guest books in foreign mosques when the hour finally came.”
The Church does not exist to make the world feel comfortable.
She exists to proclaim an uncomfortable, exclusive, and saving truth — that Jesus Christ is Lord, and there is no other name under heaven by which men must be saved.
