That severe, systematic inflictions of suffering on whole peoples were going on in the world even on Christmas Day in 2025 did not require a papal announcement for people the world over to be informed of those atrocities. Russia’s military incursion in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza had been going on with international impunity for years. The suffering in Yemen and Sudan was less well-known, but substantial nonetheless. Speaking out against the sordid state-aggressors on the first Christmas of his pontificate, the pope provided an alternative basis for international relations that is so antithetical to military invasion and genocide that the message could seem utopian and thus practically of no use whatsoever. Because “might makes right” had made such unimpeded “progress” even in becoming the default and status-quo, the principle of humble compassion to the humanity to one’s detractors and even outright enemies could seem like a fairy tale.
Nevertheless, even though the principle was so utterly eclipsed in
practice on the world’s stage at the time, a person can have faith that even enunciating
the alternative has value. At the very least, making it explicit shows powerful
people such as Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu in an especially dark
light. Ironically, were either of those men to come to terms with themselves
and change their ways, the principle would call the rest of us to forgive them.
Even absent such a change-of-heart, or a dawning of heart in those two
men, the principle mandates that the rest of us respond in humane compassion
even to those two men on an interpersonal level should either of them need
help. Such is the depth of power of the principle that it can be reckoned as
inculcating what can be called divine nature even if the principle is not anthropomorphized
in human form; the principle has validity, and thus value, in itself. So even
if it seems utterly unrealistic for it to become the default in international
relations (and even interpersonal relations), there is value in the pope’s inclusion
of the principle in his first Christmas message.
In his Christmas Day homily,
Pope Leo “remembered the people of Gaza, ‘exposed for weeks to rain, wind and
cold’ and the fragility of ‘defenseless populations, tried by so many wars,’
and of ‘young people forced to take up arms, who on the front lines feel the
senselessness of what is asked of them, and the falsehoods that fill the
pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths.’”[1]
The infliction of genocide, and even such suffering as to qualify as a
holocaust, on a defenseless civilian population that had been subjugated for many
decades, render Israel’s Netanyahu government and its supports equivalent to
the Nazis in Europe almost a century earlier. The very language used by the pope,
as in “the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths” could
definitely be applied to Hitler and Netanyahu.
The sheer depravity of such powerful men who have allowed their respective hatreds to manifest in atrocities without any internal restraint is antipodal to a person who “would truly enter into the suffering of others and stand in solidarity with the weak and the oppressed.”[2] It is paradoxical that such outwardly powerful, militaristic government officials are actually so weak internally, whereas people who are willing to defer “before the humanity of others”—even and especially detractors and even enemies—may have no worldly force yet are very strong internally.[3]
Therefore, it is of value for anyone, especially a pope with a microphone, to set the stubborn
savagery of men like Putin and Netanyahu relative to a principle that, if internalized
and acted on by enough people, would change the world even though the
likelihood of such a drastic, fundamental change is only possible rather than
probable. Being possible is itself astonishing, given the fixity of human
nature. Worldwide, peoples and their respective government officials in 2023 failed
to retain the lesson that had presumably been learned when the Nazi holocaust
was exposed in 1945. Standing by rather than going in to rid Gaza of the
Israelis and even Ukraine of the Russian army can be reckoned as instantiating
the banality of evil, which is two degrees of separation from the principle of humble
compassion for the humanity of others, especially one’s enemies. The world, and
humanity itself—our species—can thus be condemned for standing by instead of
stopping at least the holocaustic genocide that had been going on for years as
of Christmas, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
