On the return flight from Equatorial Guinea last Thursday, Pope Leo XIV reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph. He told the journalists gathered around him that it was a picture of a Muslim Lebanese boy, a child who had held a “Welcome Pope Leo” sign during his visit to Lebanon last November and who had since been killed in the war. I carry with me a photo of a Muslim child,” the pontiff said solemnly. “He has been killed in this final phase of the war. There are many human situations, and I think we must be able to think in these terms.”
The problem is, the boy in the photograph is alive.
Grok, the AI platform built by Elon Musk’s xAI, posted the correction bluntly on X: “The specific boy who held the ‘Welcome Pope Leo’ sign during the Pope’s Lebanon visit is alive and well. The Middle East Observer account initially reported his death but quickly corrected it: it was a lookalike scout colleague, Jawad Ali Ahmad, who was killed in the rubble. The Pope appears to have been given mistaken info on the identity.”
The Vatican has offered no correction, no apology, and no retraction.
Pope Leo’s performance on the plane, emotionally wielding a photograph he apparently never verified, was part of a pattern. From his first Sunday address as pope, just three days after his election in May 2025, Leo declared, “I am deeply pained by what is happening in the Gaza strip,” and called for an immediate ceasefire. The hostages being held by Hamas terrorists, Israeli men, women, and children abducted on October 7, received a secondary mention. The moral equation was set from day one.
By August 2025, Pope Leo was demanding that Israel stop what he called “collective punishment” and the “forced displacement” of Palestinians in Gaza, pleading for a permanent ceasefire as Israel prepared a new military offensive. He did not describe what Hamas did to the hostages still held beneath the rubble of Gaza. He did not name the terrorists. He named Israel.
Nick Matau, a non-Jewish social media Israel advocate with over 50,000 TikTok followers, confronted the pattern head-on in a Facebook video responding to the pope’s airplane remarks. “Pope, I wonder how many pictures of Christians do you have in your pockets, pictures of them who have been tortured and slaughtered by Islamist terrorists,” Matau said. “I’m not Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, but I do believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But you’re the Pope, and while you’re doing this humiliation ritual tour of going to mosques and taking your shoes off…I am just curious about when you will make a comment on Christians who are being slaughtered right now.”
Pope Leo’s predecessor, Francis, set the template. In November 2024, Francis declared in a book of published interviews that “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide” and called for a formal international investigation. Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican, Yaron Sideman, responded directly: “There was a genocidal massacre on 7 October 2023 of Israeli citizens, and since then, Israel has exercised its right of self-defense against attempts from seven different fronts to kill its citizens. Any attempt to call it by any other name is singling out the Jewish state.”
The Combat Antisemitism Movement called Francis’s words “a possible opening of an eighth front” against Israel, warning they “can also lead to the spilling of Jewish blood around the world.”
Then came the nativity scene. In December 2024, Pope Francis inaugurated a seasonal display in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall, presented by Palestinian officials, that featured a baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian national scarf. B’nai B’rith International described feeling “disturbed” by the display, stating it “isn’t just politicisation, but revisionism. It presents only Palestinians as innocent victims — and Jesus as a Palestinian, not a Jew.” The Vatican removed the scene quietly after the backlash, without comment. Israeli Minister Amichai Chikli wrote an open letter to the pope, pointing out the historical reality: “It is a well-known fact that Jesus was born of a Jewish mother, lived as a Jew and died as a Jew.”
Chikli’s letter also noted something that cuts deeper than any single incident: “The Vatican’s silence during those dark days of the Shoah is still deafening.”
That silence then, and this noise now, form two sides of the same coin. When Jewish blood was being spilled by the millions across Europe, the Vatican spoke carefully and quietly. Today, when Israel defends itself against Hamas terrorists, the same organization whose founding charter calls for the killing of Jews, the Vatican speaks loudly, emotionally, and, as we have now seen, without verifying its facts.
The Sages of the Talmud (Shabbat 55a) state that “emet”, truth, is the seal of the Holy One. A religious leader who trades in unverified stories to condemn one nation, while staying silent about the atrocities committed against that nation’s people, has chosen something other than emet. He has chosen narrative.
Pope Leo stood on an airplane and told the world that a child was dead. The child is alive. The pope has not corrected himself. But the pattern, stretching from Francis’s keffiyeh-draped manger to genocide accusations to Leo’s unverified photograph, corrects itself with brutal clarity. The Vatican is not a neutral voice crying for peace. It is a megaphone aimed in one direction, and the Jewish state is always in its crosshairs.
