Open Letter to Leo XIV: Rekindling the Torch of Francis

Holy Father, at the moment when you are about to set foot on the soil of Lebanon and Turkey, on the threshold of this wounded Levant that was once one of the cradles of believing humanity, we dare to write to you. The aim is not to add one more voice to the concert of protocol speeches. That would be of absolutely no interest. Empty formulas, glittering but soulless, you will hear in abundance during your visit.

This letter asks of you something at once simple and vertiginous: to take up the torch. The torch of Francis. That of an integral humanism which strove, against all odds, to grasp the Gospel in its most naked form: the dignity of every human being, fraternity as the only possible horizon of politics, religion freed from identitarian idols.

Beyond words, your predecessor performed acts that, seen from here, carry the weight of historical turning points:

– the al-Azhar congress on citizenship and living together;

– the Abu Dhabi Declaration, a true “preamble to the preamble” of human rights, where God and human dignity cease to be set in opposition;

– the visit to Najaf, to Ayatollah Sistani, a gesture of immense significance within a Shia world that Iran had sought to confiscate in the service of an imperial project;

– the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, which sets against the globalisation of hatred a civilisation of fraternity.

All of this, Most Holy Father, already composes a new “Holy Alliance,” as the immense scholar Antoine Courban noted. Not the one of thrones and cannons, certainly, but that of the consciences which refuse holy wars, whether waged in the name of God or in the name of those “political religions” that deify the nation, the race, the tribe, the party. Your journey to Lebanon and Turkey is inscribed within this heritage. Yet it comes at a moment when the world, and our region in particular, seems to be toppling toward the exact opposite: the age of walls, of borders and identitarian fractures, of populisms feeding on fear of the other. Of Putins, Orbáns, Le Pens, J.D. Vances and their more or less avowed imitators, who manipulate the cross as a banner of separation, who mock the culture of mediation and of bridges built to reach toward the other. And unfortunately, they are currently winning audiences.

Hatred has always been a powerful engine of History. It is here that Lebanon enters the scene. John Paul II said it in a formula that has become almost a cliché, therefore almost inaudible: “Lebanon is not merely a country, it is a message.” Yet this message is not mystical; it is political in the noblest sense. It says that it is possible to organise a polity where one does not first ask the other who he is, from which rite, which confession, which tribe, but how he can participate, with all the others, in a shared public space. Like the spirit of convivencia of Andalusia in former times. In the last century, this wager took flesh in what was called “Greater Lebanon.” It was an act of audacity. Certainly not a “historical error,” as today’s opportunistic advocates of partition claim. A fragile promise, and certainly not an anomaly to be corrected.

Far from being the cause of our dramas, Lebanese pluralism has been their victim, when the culture of connection was replaced by the culture of exclusion, when citizenship was betrayed by warlords, their militias, their foreign patrons. We must re-read, now more than ever, Samir Frangieh — the only genuine visionary of the past two decades, who loved Lebanon in full knowledge of what made it unique in this world: its living together, its deep desire for radiance and peace. This was not a political choice. Samir saw in Lebanon a human model of civilisation against barbarism.

Today, some, within the Christian community itself, wish to settle accounts with that wager. Exhausted, wounded, terrorised by wars, occupations, economic crisis, they no longer see in Lebanon anything but a “historical error,” and in Christianity anything but an identity to be fortified. They dream of sectarian federalisms, of homogeneous cantons, of alliances of minorities under the protection of new tsars who “defend Christian values.”

At the very hour when the alliance of minorities is itself in full agony, drained of substance, reduced to what it has always been: the ruins of a hegemonic project and a collective enslavement to tyranny in the name of an illusory and fallacious protection. They have forgotten that every time the Christians of Lebanon retreated behind walls, they lost; and that every time they engaged in a project larger than themselves, they weighed far beyond their numbers.

Youakim Moubarak, Nasrallah Sfeir, Youssef Bechara, Michel Hayek, Samir Frangieh, and so many others, have carried another vision: that of a “Church of the Arabs” in dialogue with Islam to renew the Orient together; that of a Lebanon-message in which the role of Christians is not to be protected as a frightened minority, but to guarantee the common space, to “weave and reweave the bonds” between the components of the country and the region.

Most Holy Father, if we write to you, it is not for you to come and flatter our nostalgias or bless our fears. It is so that you may help us, through your word, to disarm them.

We need you, from Beirut as from Istanbul, to state clearly that the future of the Christians of the East lies neither in the arms of new Caesars, nor in the fantasies of the fortress, nor in the dreams of autonomous ghettos, but in the struggle for a unitary, civil state founded on citizenship, guarantor of the freedoms of all — of a Middle East at last united in the peace of brothers, the kind capable of moving mountains.

We need you to recall, with the quiet force of Francis, that:

– to speak of “minorities” rather than citizens is already to accept the fragmentation of the political community;

– to sacralise identity against equality in rights is to betray both the Gospel and the inheritance of human rights;

– to invoke Christ in order to feed hostility toward the foreigner, the refugee, the different, is to desecrate the cross, not to defend it.

We need you to show, through gestures and words, that Bucharest, Budapest or Moscow — and indeed Washington in its current state, and Tel Aviv — cannot become, for the Christians of the Levant, substitutes for Rome; that identitarian, closed, xenophobic Christianity is not an acceptable variant of Christianity, but its mortiferous caricature.

Your passage through Lebanon can be, for us, an examination of conscience. You will find a country drained of its blood, a dismembered state in quest of a reconstruction that remains at this hour improbable, if not impossible, in the shadow of the militia and of political appetites; a society tempted by cynicism or despair. You will find Christians divided, some fascinated by the sirens of sectarian protectionism, others so weary as to wish to leave. But you will also find, often in the shadows, a multitude of women and men who continue, day after day, to embody the culture of connection: teachers, physicians, activists, priests, imams, journalists, ordinary citizens who, without grand speeches, live together as one breathes. These are the ones who must be confirmed.

Most Holy Father, we ask you to take up the ideas laid down through al-Azhar and Abu Dhabi, extended by Fratelli Tutti, and to apply them explicitly to Lebanon; to say that this country is not a “Christian reserve” to be saved at the last moment, but a fragile laboratory of citizenship to be saved for everyone; that one cannot defend the Christians of the Levant by sacrificing precisely that which justifies their presence: a certain art of living with the other. We do not ask you to take sides with this camp or that faction. We ask you to take sides with the only cleavage that matters: the culture of connection against the culture of exclusion; integral humanism against identitarian nihilisms; Lebanon-message against Lebanon-ghetto.

If, from the height of your ministry, you were to confirm this choice, you would give to the Christians of Lebanon — and, with them, to their Muslim fellow citizens — beyond simple comfort, a renewed responsibility. That of becoming once again, not the frightened guardians of an enclosure, but the artisans of a common space where, at last, “all peoples form a single community,” not through the erasure of differences, but because each one accepts that the dignity of the other limits his own fear. Then perhaps, in this ravaged Levant, your visit could be one of those rare moments when history hesitates, when one chooses between the temptation of the citadel and the risk of the bridge. It is that risk that we beseech you to encourage.

From Lebanon, in the heavy night of our time, we write to you with this single certainty: either we shall be brothers, or we shall be, for one another, the permanent temptation of the enemy, and the artisans of our own disappearance.