When Pope Leo XIV attacks US President Donald Trump a few days after having met his political opponents, he has become a political actor and is no longer a pastor of souls, believes Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
It is in an opinion piece in the Daily Mail on Wednesday that the now American writer and commentator – originally from Somalia, but who came to the United States from the Netherlands after the murder of Theo van Gogh – launches a very sharp attack on the head of the Catholic Church.
The examples of political entanglement to which she points speak for themselves:
On 9 April, Pope Leo XIV met David Axelrod, one of the most experienced figures in the Democratic Party and the architect behind Barack Obama’s path to power. Four days later, Leo delivered the first in a series of sharp public criticisms of President Donald Trump and his Republican administration.
Hal Lambert, founder of Point Bridge Capital and one of the most perceptive observers of the intersection between American politics and institutional power, saw coordination where others saw coincidence.
“This is 100 per cent political, OK? This is solely about trying to weaken President Trump’s Catholic voter base and the Republicans in the midterm elections,” Lambert said on CNN on Monday.
The 56-year-old, whom the propaganda organ Norwegian Wikipedia calls a member of the “intellectual dark web”, is generally little impressed with what Robert Francis Prevost has undertaken thus far in his pontificate:
Pope Leo has been conspicuously silent on the systematic persecution of Christians by Muslims in Muslim-majority countries. This includes the burning of churches and the massacre of Christian communities across Northern Nigeria – along with forced conversions in Pakistan and disappearances in Egypt.
Each of these is a direct expression of a civilisational clash that Pope Leo refuses to name.
And if one does not acknowledge who the enemy is, that clash will go straight down the drain, she believes:
I have said this for more than twenty years. I have paid dearly for saying it. And I will say it again: The West is losing this war. Not on the battlefield, but in the cathedrals, in government offices and at press conferences held by men who were chosen to be shepherds and instead have chosen to be diplomats.
As I write this, Pope Leo is in Algeria and is bowing in the Great Mosque of Algiers, without shoes, with a pen in his hand by the Golden Book.
Hirsi Ali suspects the Pope of syncretism:
I protest against the theology that unfolds in such gestures – the implicit suggestion, which is becoming increasingly explicit in Vatican discourse, that the differences between Islam and Christianity are merely cultural, and that harmony between the faiths can be achieved by erasing doctrinal distinctions.
Paven: – Libanon viser at islam og kristendom kan leve sammen som venner
The Pope’s task is to proclaim Christ and the Gospel, she states – she herself publicly announced in November 2023 that she had become a Christian – and otherwise he should keep to his own path:
The principle “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is one of Christianity’s great gifts to civilisation. Yet it is here that the Pope has gone most astray.
Pope Leo’s first major conflict with the Trump administration concerned the enforcement of immigration legislation, where he condemned policies on which the administration had explicitly and democratically been elected.
In this way the Pope makes himself a useful idiot:
Ironically, immigration is also the most powerful strategic weapon in the arsenal of those who seek to advance Islamic civilisation at the expense of the West. This is not merely my analysis. It is the explicit teaching of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential Islamist theologian of modern times, a man who enjoyed the attention of millions.
He urged his followers not to waste their time on bombs. Conquer Europe through immigration, he said. Through settlement. Through the wombs of Muslim women.
People in the West are beginning to smell a rat, and react accordingly:
This is a doctrine of demographic conquest, openly formulated, and it works. In response, Western populations have now, election after election across Europe and America, voted for restrictive immigration policies.
Instead, Leo XIV proceeds to take the side of the Islamists:
Now, while the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime that recently massacred tens of thousands of its own citizens, seeks to acquire nuclear weapons, Leo’s response is to lend his moral authority to those who resist it. He has effectively provided cover for a theocratic regime in which one of the world’s largest underground Christian churches has emerged. This is, after all, a regime that murders people who convert.
These Iranian Christians, who worship in secret at risk to their lives, deserve a Pope who will point out their oppressor. Instead, they have been given a Pope who shows solidarity with the civilisation that persecutes them.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali strikes precisely in her criticism of a Pope who follows in the footsteps of his predecessor Francis.
The Pope is an adherent both of climate activism and of liberal immigration policy – the two phenomena that threaten the West in a potentially deadly combination.