The pope vs. the president melodrama has proved irresistible to global media; how could it not? It also produced a fair amount of backlash and whataboutism directed at Pope Leo XIV.

How could he speak about the just war failures of the Trump administration when he failed to defend Christians against Muslim persecution in Nigeria, Syria or name-your-favorite-Muslim-majority-nation-here? Why hasn’t Leo condemned Iran for the slaughter of its own citizens during the January protests?

That rhetorical framing makes it just about impossible to criticize anyone about anything. Does the pope really have to sound off on every form and act of persecution or interreligious or other assorted violence before he is allowed to comment on a global conflagration exploding before his eyes?

Not that it is likely to matter to such critics, but, of course, the pope has already done as they had demanded, if perhaps not as vociferously as they might like, expressing distress and dismay at various specific incidents of Christian persecution and political oppression and speaking out frequently on the church’s broader demands for dialogue, understanding and tolerance.

He is joined in such statements by various leading Vatican officials, particularly Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, who said of the repression of demonstrators across Iran in January, “how it is possible to rage against one’s own people, that there have been so many deaths—it is an endless tragedy.” No one should feel that the church has remained silent on oppression or religious violence. (Indeed, the pope responded to questions about Iran today during his journey home from Africa.)

The pope is in an acutely challenging position when it comes to criticism of the Islamic world. His words are measured across the West, of course, but also in nations that host hotspots of Islamic extremism and where Christian communities are supremely vulnerable. A wrong word can and has propelled terrible violence against these outposts of Christianity.

But many of Leo’s critics, particularly within U.S. evangelical circles, are not really interested in finding out the truth of the pope’s position or appreciating the nuances of Vatican diplomacy as much as they are interested in using whatever combustibles they can lay their hands on in a crusade against Islam. Cynical manipulators on social media have tried to score views by calling out the pope for taking his shoes off in a mosque (the horror). Others seek to raise their political profiles by issuing commitments to outlaw Sharia law, looking at you Sharia Free America Caucus, as if that were an actual threat.

Worse are the outright dispensationalists among us, apparently more entrenched than I realized in our ruling class, who seek to provoke an end-time confrontation with the Islamic world that will propel the second coming. All I can say is: Be careful what you wish for, boys.

But like his predecessor, when it comes to the Muslim world, the pope prefers to speak softly and…that’s it; he prefers to speak softly. Sometimes it is not words we should seek for guidance, but the things that are unsaid, and the small acts of outreach and courage that can say a lot.

While some commentators raged and mocked Leo for following tradition and common courtesy by taking off his shoes at the Great Mosque of Algiers, they missed the bigger story in that moment. Leo became the first pope ever to set foot in Algeria, a nation with a history of terrible colonial and internecine conflict with a tiny Catholic population of just around 8,000 people. It also has its own history of persecution of this tiny Christian community, which Algerians are trying to put behind them and one the pope acknowledged during his visit to the Basilica of Notre Dame D’Afrique on April 13.

He described Algeria’s Christian community as “the heirs of a host of witnesses who gave their lives, motivated by love for God and neighbor,” noting in particular “the 19 men and women religious who were martyred in Algeria, choosing to stand alongside this people in its joys and sorrows.”

“Their blood,” Leo said, “is a living seed that never ceases to bear fruit.”

In Cameroon, where a separatist movement and the central government have clashed for years, he led a “peace encounter” in the city of Bamenda, featuring testimony from a traditional chief, a Presbyterian moderator, an imam and a Catholic sister. At this interreligious encounter, he deplored the exploitation of Cameroon’s resources and its people.

“It is a world turned upside down, an exploitation of God’s creation that must be denounced and rejected by every honest conscience,” the pope said. “The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”

“This is the moment to change, to transform the story of this country,” Leo said later during his homily. “The time has come—today and not tomorrow, now and not in the future.”

This theme of temporal urgency is one Leo has frequently returned to. The threat to peace and the crisis of fraternity are real; the time to address it is now.

In an address in October 2025 celebrating the 60th anniversary of “Nostra Aetate,” the church’s seminal commentary on interreligious relations and mutual tolerance and respect, Leo said, “My dear brothers and sisters, at this crucial moment in history, we are entrusted with a great mission—to reawaken in all men and women their sense of humanity and of the sacred.” He noted that 2025 had been a Jubilee year of hope. “Both hope and pilgrimage are realities common to all our religious traditions,” he said, adding:

This is the journey that “Nostra Aetate” invites us to continue—to walk together in hope. Then, when we do so, something beautiful happens: hearts open, bridges are built and new paths appear where none seemed possible. This is not the work of one religion, one nation, or even one generation. It is a sacred task for all humanity—to keep hope alive, to keep dialogue alive and to keep love alive in the heart of the world.

Like Pope Francis, who was tireless in his outreach to the Muslim world, Leo is not eager for confrontation but for rapprochement and brotherhood with Islamic believers. He pursues the human fraternity espoused by Francis and the frequent demand of Pope Benedict XVI for reciprocity, that Christian people and people of other non-Muslim faiths in majority Muslim states be allowed the same freedom to live according to the guidance of their own conscience that Muslims have been allowed to experience in the Christian majority states of the West. It is ironic now that, surveying the laws and restrictions on Islamic expression proposed by politicians across Europe and the United States, an appeal for reciprocity may be worth making to all sides.

It is true that Christians around the world suffer persecution at the hands of Muslim extremists and mob violence. That violence could be responded to, as it has in the past, with retributive violence. Maybe, Francis and Leo suggest, a new thing is called for?

Francis visited many Muslim nations, including hot spots of Christian-Muslim tension like the Central African Republic. His first visit outside of Rome took him to the island of Lampedusa off Sicily, the first indication that the protection and care of migrating people would be a central concern of his papacy. At the time, most migrants to the island were arriving from Muslim-majority nations of North Africa.

While some prattled (and still do) about a Muslim wave overwhelming the Christian West, Francis understood that care of creation and the global common good are in our hands, that all people suffer the same sorrows, maintain the same hopes, under the same God. He called us to remember our shared humanity and divine fraternity, to not allow violence to be associated with faith. Leo is following in his footsteps and indeed following the lead of other popes before him.

The “clash of civilizations” hypothesized by Samuel Huntington and often nurtured by realpolitikans around the world was a projection of a possible outcome in world history, not the confirmation of an inevitable one. In pretending it is inevitable, our global policymakers are indeed hurtling toward it.

We have been down this gloomy, bloody path before. The “falling domino theory” proposed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 was only a worrisome idea until U.S. policy in South East Asia transformed it through inhuman violence, intrigues and misadventures into a ruinous self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now surveying a vast world of Islamic belief, interpretation and expression and perceiving only the worst extremists who rampaged against Christians and people of other faiths, are U.S. policymakers repeating that error? Leo is interceding to prevent that.

In his introduction to The Power of the Gospel: Christian Faith in 10 Words, a collection of the pope’s interventions and speeches, Leo writes: “Saints have witnessed that love defeats war, that only goodness disarms treachery and that non-violence can destroy the abuse of power.”

He urges a structural analysis of the modern world we have created, its inequities and contradictions, which he believes are at the root of contemporary social and political violence that can have the veneer of religious conflict. He asks us to seek out “injustices in which those who have more always have more, and, conversely, those who have less become increasingly poor.”

“There is the risk that hatred and violence will overflow,” he writes, “spreading misery among people: the desire for communion, recognizing that we are brothers and sisters, is the antidote to all extremism.”

Leo is seeking to administer that antidote, calling for a modern crusade of mercy, peace and tolerance worth joining.

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).