When Pope Leo XIV stood before the faithful in St Peter’s Basilica to deliver his first Christmas homily, he chose a theme that was both familiar and arresting: the vulnerability of the Christ child, born amid cold and hardship, and the modern world’s failure to protect its most defenceless.
Few listeners could have doubted the immediacy of his concern. Fewer still could have missed his pointed reference to Gaza, where, he said, families endure winter rains and biting winds under canvas and tarpaulin.
“How can we not think of the tents in Gaza?” the Pope asked, drawing an explicit comparison between the manger of Bethlehem and the makeshift shelters of today’s displaced Palestinians. It was a line destined to travel far beyond the Vatican walls, carried eagerly by those who see in the conflict a simple morality play of victims and villains.
Yet for all its emotional power, the sermon left a conspicuous silence — one that will trouble not only Israel’s supporters, but anyone concerned with moral clarity.
The Pope spoke movingly of suffering, homelessness and despair. He spoke of war’s brutality and the indifference of the powerful. What he did not speak of was Hamas.
This omission matters. Gaza’s misery did not materialise from nowhere, nor is it the product of impersonal forces or abstract cruelty. It flows, in no small part, from the actions of an Islamist movement that governs Gaza, embeds itself among civilians, and launched a murderous assault that set the current phase of the conflict in motion. To lament the consequences without acknowledging the cause risks turning compassion into distortion.
Pope Leo framed his homily around the idea of God “pitching his fragile tent” among humanity — a poetic theological image that lent itself naturally to Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe. But theology, like diplomacy, demands precision. By invoking the suffering of one people while declining to name the armed group that rules them with coercion and terror, the Pope appeared to adopt the language of humanitarian advocacy rather than moral arbitration.
The Vatican will no doubt insist that the sermon was not intended as a political intervention. Yet that claim becomes harder to sustain when a specific conflict is singled out by name. The Pope also mentioned Ukraine, Sudan and other war-torn regions, but Gaza occupied a central emotional place in his address — and with it came expectations of balance.
To be clear, there is nothing illegitimate about condemning civilian suffering. The Church has long championed the sanctity of life and the dignity of the vulnerable. But Christmas homilies delivered from the world’s most prominent pulpit carry an authority that extends beyond pastoral comfort. They shape narratives, reinforce assumptions and, intentionally or not, apportion moral weight.
By omitting Hamas entirely, Pope Leo’s sermon risked reinforcing a view of the Gaza conflict that treats violence as a natural disaster rather than the result of deliberate strategy. Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure, its repression of dissent within Gaza, and its explicit rejection of peaceful coexistence were absent from the picture. So too was the uncomfortable truth that suffering is often compounded by leaders who benefit politically from perpetual grievance.
This is not a criticism unique to the Vatican. Much of the international discourse on Gaza struggles with the same imbalance: a readiness to catalogue suffering alongside a reluctance to confront those who entrench it. Yet the Pope is not merely another voice in the debate. As a moral leader, his words carry a different weight — and therefore a different responsibility.
There is also a broader question about agency. Palestinians were described, implicitly, as passive victims of circumstance, battered by forces beyond their control. That portrayal may stir sympathy, but it also denies complexity. It leaves no room for internal accountability, nor for the difficult reality that liberation movements can become instruments of oppression themselves.
Supporters of the Pope will argue that Christmas is not the moment for political nuance; that compassion, not condemnation, should define the season. Perhaps. But compassion that avoids uncomfortable truths risks becoming selective, even sentimental. A peace built on sentiment rarely endures.
Pope Leo’s wider message — a plea for empathy towards refugees, migrants and civilians trapped by war — was entirely in keeping with the Church’s social teaching. His warnings against indifference were timely in a world increasingly numbed by crisis. Yet by failing to name Hamas, he left the impression of a moral asymmetry that undermines his appeal to universal conscience.
The danger is not that the Pope criticised Israel — criticism is neither new nor illegitimate — but that he did so indirectly, through emphasis and omission, rather than through explicit moral reasoning. Silence, in such contexts, is rarely neutral.
As Pope Leo’s papacy takes shape, this Christmas sermon will be remembered as an early signal of his priorities: humanitarian urgency, emotional resonance, and a willingness to speak into contested spaces. Whether he will also demonstrate the moral courage to confront all sources of violence, including those that cloak themselves in the language of resistance, remains to be seen.
Christmas, after all, is not merely a story of vulnerability. It is also a story of truth — uncomfortable, demanding, and transformative. A message that speaks only half of it risks leaving the faithful warmed, but not fully illuminated.
This opinion was first published in EU Today.