The Pope calls for ‘the divine gift of peace,’ but ducks the reason for its absence
Reading Pope Leo XIV’s mournful words about why the Christian populations of Turkey and Lebanon have dropped precipitously, he thinks the reasons are emigration and Turkey’s forced closure of a Greek Orthodox seminary in 1971.
So much for the courage of Pope Leo XIV. He doesn’t call out Turkey and Lebanon for the real reason: intolerance of Christians by Muslims in Turkey and Lebanon.
It’s an intolerance that far surpasses the closure of a theological seminary. Start with the Armenian genocide in which Ottoman Turks slaughtered some 1.5 million Christians during WW I. Follow up with modern Turkey’s conversion of churches into mosques — a blatant expression of intolerance. One need look no further than the Dome of the Rock in East Jerusalem — built on the site of Judaism’s ancient Holy Temple.
But one can look further in modern Turkey. Christians represented an estimated 16% of the population before WW I. Now it is an estimated 1%, according to figures cited in the Wall Street Journal. There is a reason. Emigration is the effect, not the cause. When Christians see their holy places purloined by Muslim authorities, and cannot find good jobs in the Turkish government, the Christians leave. Turkey denies it discriminates against Christians — which, if you scratch the surface, is precisely the point. Formal discrimination is not needed when the culture is against you. That’s why the Christian population dropped from 16 % to 1%.
And that’s why the Christian population in the much vaunted, religiously tolerant Lebanon has also dropped — from over 50% in the 1930s to some 33% today.
The pope might also like to visit the West Bank and Gaza. The Christian population in the West Bank has dropped from 10% to 1% since 1948; and, in Bethlehem, it has dropped from 85% to 10%. The reason is persecution by Islamic extremists. They can’t tolerate Christians. Pro-Israel apologetics, you say? Well, in the Jewish State of Israel, accused of being inherently discriminatory by Muslims like Zohran Mamdani, as of 2024 the Christian population grew by 0.6% over the previous year. The Christian population in Israel stood at the end of 2024 at 180,300 — about four times as large as the Islamic state of Turkey’s Christian population on a per capita basis.
© IJN 2025
