- A land being emptied, a ceasefire that offers no protection
- The audience of Leo XIV, the third act of a diplomacy of presence
- A pope who has been following the Lebanese issue since his election
- What is really happening in the Pope's office
- Taybeh, Holy Land and the prophetic call of Patriarch Pizzaballa
- A village that has been resisting for over a year
- Cardinal Pizzaballa's pastoral letter: a theology of presence
- A papal diplomacy that coordinates the two fronts
- Lectio divina
- ✝ Biblical references
On Thursday, August 20, 2026, at 9:30 a.m., Lebanese President Joseph Aoun crossed the threshold of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace for the third time. Nothing in the hushed protocol of this private audience hinted at the urgency weighing, at that very hour, on the hills of South Lebanon, where priests continue to bury their parishioners under the rubble of a ceasefire that never truly ceased. For this is the unbearable paradox of this meeting: peace is discussed in a gilded salon, while just a few hundred kilometers away, entire villages—Ain Ebel, Rmeish, Qlayaa, Sarba—live cloistered, defenseless, under the threat of artillery that makes no distinction between a combatant and a church steeple.
A few months ago, Father Pierre el-Raï, priest of the Qlayaa parish, was killed by Israeli artillery fire when he refused, like so many others, to abandon his church and his parishioners. His death is not just another incident in the long litany of victims of this war: it is the clearest sign that the Christian presence in the Levant, already a minority, already weakened by decades of exodus, has now reached a point of no return. And it is precisely this reality—the planned disappearance of a two-thousand-year-old presence—that gives the hearing this Thursday its true weight. Not just another diplomatic exercise, but an act of last-minute restraint, an outstretched hand toward what threatens to vanish.
A land being emptied, a ceasefire that offers no protection
The last Christian villages of South Lebanon
Only four Christian villages remain in what the inhabitants now call the "red zone," the strip of territory bordering Israel where the Lebanese army has withdrawn and where, in human terms, nothing protects civilians anymore. In Ain Ebel, homes have been razed one after another, not by accident, but by the very logic of an offensive that targets, beyond Hezbollah, an entire territory that Israel wants to empty all the way to the Litani River, representing nearly eight percent of Lebanon's land area. The approximately seven thousand inhabitants still living in this occupied zone depend, for movement or supplies, on permits issued by the Israeli army itself—a daily humiliation that transforms ordinary life into a constant plea.
A humanitarian convoy from the Œuvre d'Orient, accompanied by journalists, was recently unable to even reach Ain Ebel due to a lack of authorization. A local official summed up the situation with chilling clarity: the ceasefire has changed nothing; the bombings and shelling continue daily around the village, and Israeli forces do as they please in this territory. This statement, delivered without exaggeration, speaks volumes about the abysmal gap between official pronouncements announcing a truce and the reality experienced by populations abandoned to their fate, caught in the crossfire of which they are neither the perpetrators nor the beneficiaries.
Sarba, a symbol of a border that recedes every day
June 2026 marked a symbolic turning point: for the first time, Sarba, a predominantly Christian village in the Nabatieh Governorate, was among the twenty-nine localities targeted by an Israeli evacuation order. This seemingly administrative event actually signals a worrying shift: the front line is steadily advancing northward, and Christian villages, long considered relatively removed from the most intense fighting, now find themselves directly in the path of the war. Dozens of localities in southern Lebanon have been razed with explosives and bulldozers by the Israeli army, including villages like Khiam, Taybeh—a disturbing namesake of the West Bank village—and Adchit.
According to data compiled by Caritas Lebanon, fifty-six villages were evacuated and two hundred and twenty-one airstrikes hit areas such as Baalbek-Hermel, the Bekaa Valley, Nabatiyeh, Sidon, and Tyre, causing an influx of displaced people into Beirut that overwhelmed existing reception capacities. It is crucial to understand what the loss of a single village represents for a community already a minority in a multi-confessional country: it is never merely a territorial loss, but the erasure of a liturgical heritage, a cemetery, a church steeple that had rung for centuries. The prophet Isaiah, addressing an exiled people, said: «Comfort, comfort my people, says your God» (Isaiah 40:1). This consolation, today, cannot be satisfied with words: it requires a presence, pressure, concrete protection — which the Holy See is trying to obtain through the most discreet diplomatic channels.
The audience of Leo XIV, the third act of a diplomacy of presence
A pope who has been following the Lebanese issue since his election
This audience on August 20, 2026, is not an isolated gesture: it is part of a patient continuity that Leo XIV has built with Lebanon since his ascension to the throne of Peter. Joseph Aoun had already greeted the new pope on May 18, 2025, during the installation Mass in St. Peter's Square, and then obtained a first private audience on June 13 of the same year, in the presence of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State of the Holy See. The Lebanese president then extended an official invitation to the pope to visit Lebanon, describing it as a powerful message of comfort for all Lebanese—an invitation honored in December 2025, when the Land of the Cedars welcomed Leo XIV to its soil.
Between these two meetings, the Apostolic Nuncio to Lebanon, Archbishop Paolo Borgia, undertook two tours in March 2026 of villages in southern Lebanon, particularly those with a Christian majority, some of whose inhabitants remained despite evacuation orders. He affirmed that the Pope was closely monitoring the situation of the displaced persons and intended to provide them with concrete assistance. This statement, made by the Holy See's very representative on the ground, illuminates the profound meaning of Thursday's audience: it is not a mere protocol ritual, but the visible culmination of continuous monitoring, conducted behind the scenes for months, through the most effective diplomatic channels.
What is really happening in the Pope's office
Thursday's audience takes place against the backdrop of particularly difficult negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, as the south of the country continues to suffer deadly strikes despite the ceasefire agreement theoretically in effect. For President Aoun, this meeting has an almost existential dimension: he is seeking, in his own words, the support of the spiritual leader of the Lebanese people at a time when traditional diplomatic channels seem blocked. This highlights the extent to which the papal figure retains, even in a largely Muslim Middle East secularized by geopolitical power dynamics, a moral authority that neither Washington nor European capitals have been able to embody in the same way.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State, is expected, according to now well-established practice, to receive the Lebanese president after the papal audience, to further discuss the country's future prospects and the international support it can expect. This two-tiered structure—the Pope's spiritual audience followed by a more technical meeting with the Secretariat of State—illustrates how the Vatican articulates its prophetic message and its concrete diplomatic action. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians: «We are Christ’s ambassadors» (2 Cor 5:20)—a formula which, applied to the nunciature and the Secretariat of State, takes on particular significance: every audience, every field visit, every public statement by the Pope on Lebanon is part of this ambassadorship in service to a people who feel abandoned.
Taybeh, Holy Land and the prophetic call of Patriarch Pizzaballa
A village that has been resisting for over a year
The case of Taybeh, in the central occupied West Bank, remains the most painful symbol of this Christian fragility in the Levant. This village of approximately 1,500 inhabitants, almost all Christians, has been subjected for over a year to a relentless series of attacks by Israeli settlers: vehicles set ablaze, hateful graffiti painted on walls, and farmland destroyed. On July 7, 2025, a fire was deliberately set near the village cemetery and the Byzantine Church of St. George, one of the oldest religious buildings in Palestine, dating back to the fifth century. The priests of the three Christian denominations present in Taybeh—Greek Orthodox, Latin, and Melkite Greek Catholic—issued an unusually strong joint statement denouncing this violence and calling for an independent investigation, concrete diplomatic pressure, and the dispatch of church delegations to the area.
A resident of Taybeh, quoted in the press, described an existence where one is "terrorized at night, besieged by day"—a phrase that could just as easily apply to the villages of South Lebanon mentioned earlier. This convergence is not accidental: it outlines the contours of a single tragedy that strikes, in two distinct theaters of the Middle East, the same minority communities, caught in the logic of war that is not their own. The Book of Lamentations, composed in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem, finds an unexpected resonance here: "Look, Lord, and consider my affliction" (Lam 1:20)—a cry that is no longer merely that of an ancient city, but the very real cry of the inhabitants of Taybeh as well as Rmeish.
Cardinal Pizzaballa's pastoral letter: a theology of presence
It is in this context that the pastoral letter published on April 25, 2026, by Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, takes on its full theological significance. Titled after a verse from the Gospel of Luke evoking the disciples' joyful return to Jerusalem, this letter categorically refuses to reduce the Christians of the Holy Land to a neutral buffer role between Israelis and Palestinians. Cardinal Pizzaballa writes, with a clarity that contrasts sharply with the Holy See's usual diplomatic caution, that Christians are not an undesirable third party, nor a group separate from their non-Christian brethren, but rather that they are "the salt, the light, and the leaven" within the societies to which they rightfully belong.
This formula directly echoes Christ's teaching in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, where Jesus addresses his disciples with these words: «You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?» (Mt 5:13). Cardinal Pizzaballa does not quote this verse to offer abstract consolation to a minority in peril; he uses it as a program for action, refusing to allow Christians to retreat into a protected enclave or choose flight, but instead calling them to remain at the heart of their society to revitalize it from within, with a vision of humanity rooted in the Gospel. He concludes his letter with a profoundly moving and understated statement: what ultimately sustains the Christians of the Holy Land is not their strength, but the joy of the Gospel.
This theology of presence finds a striking echo in the First Letter of Peter, addressed to the scattered Christian communities of Asia Minor, themselves a minority and vulnerable: «You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house» (1 Peter 2:5). The image of the living stone, embedded in a structure larger than itself, corresponds exactly to what the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem asks: not to withdraw from the world, but to stand firm in it, a stone among stones, salt that must never lose its savor.
A papal diplomacy that coordinates the two fronts
The audience granted to President Aoun this Thursday cannot be interpreted independently of this pastoral letter of April, nor of the Taybeh situation, which the Holy See is following with the same unwavering attention as that of Lebanon. Leo XIV and his Secretary of State are conducting, in these two theaters both close and distinct, a similar diplomacy of presence: maintaining open channels with local authorities, sending representatives to the field—as Archbishop Borgia did in the villages of South Lebanon—and giving international visibility to situations that geopolitics would otherwise tend to leave in the shadows. The fact that the Lebanese president chose to visit the Vatican for a third time in just over a year, at a time of particularly tense negotiations with Israel, testifies to the unique place that papal pronouncements still occupy in the fragile balance of the Levant.
It would be naive to believe that this audience alone will suffice to silence the cannons of South Lebanon or to protect the inhabitants of Taybeh from future settler incursions. But it follows a logic that the prophet Elijah himself experienced on Mount Horeb, when he sought God in the violent wind, the earthquake, and the fire, before finally finding him in the whisper of a gentle breeze (1 Kings 19:11-12). Papal diplomacy has neither chariot nor army: it advances on the gentle breeze of the word, the audience, the pastoral letter—and it is precisely this apparent fragility that, for two thousand years, has allowed it to traverse the empires that preceded it and that, even today, vie for control of the Levant.
Lectio divina
«You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?» Matthew 5:13
You carry within you a flavor the world cannot name, a light that the longest night cannot extinguish. What would you do if your house burned down and staying meant risking your life for the flavor you carry? The Christians of Taybeh, Rmeish, and Ain Ebel remain—and you, in your more peaceful life, where do you lose your flavor without even the threat of fire? This question doesn't seek an immediate answer; it simply asks to settle within you, quietly, like a breeze on Mount Horeb.
Lord, you see the church steeples trembling under the shells and the villages emptying one by one. You know the name of every priest who stayed for his parishioners, the name of every child who now sleeps far from home. Preserve the essence of these lands, may it never lose its savor in fear or exile. Make our prayers living stones, standing against oblivion. Hold firmly in your hand what remains standing in Ain Ebel as in Taybeh. May your light pierce the walls tagged with hatred and the still-warm ruins.
An oil lamp flickers in a half-burned Byzantine church, and it does not go out.
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Access the folder →✝ Biblical references
6 passages · 6 books
Cast all your anxieties on him, for you are precious in his eyes. (1 Peter 5:7)
Encouragement to persecuted Christians: hope, baptism and conduct in society.
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Give your servant an understanding heart to govern your people. (1 Kings 3:9)
From Solomon and the construction of the Temple to the division of the kingdom and Elijah the prophet.
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It is in weakness that my power is made perfect. (2 Corinthians 12:9)
Defending Paul's apostolate: strength in weakness and a ministry of reconciliation.
→ Explore the Codex 2 Corinthians- When the lines of communication resume: what Moscow reveals about reconciliation diplomacy
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He has given us a child, a son has been given to us. (Isaiah 9:5)
The great prophet of salvation: judgment, consolation and announcement of the Suffering Servant.
→ Explore the Isaiah Codex
The grace of the Lord never ceases, his compassions never come to an end. (Lam 3:22)
Five poems of mourning on the ruin of Jerusalem and hope in divine mercy.
→ Explore the Lamentations Codex
Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:20)
The Gospel of the King: Jesus, the new Moses, fulfills the Scriptures for Israel and the nations.
→ Explore the Matthew Codex- I want you to give me the head of John the Baptist on a platter right now (Mark 6:17, 29)
- You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:34-40)
- You are a man and not a god, you who take your thoughts for divine thoughts (Ezekiel 28:1-10)
- If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven (Mt 19:16-22)
- Command me to come to you on the waters (Mt 14:22-33)
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