Pope Leo XIV visited Lebanon this week, the third visit by a supreme pontiff to the country since John Paul II in 1997 and Benedict in 2012 (Pope Paul VI stopped very briefly in 1964, on his way to India). The fact that Lebanon is the site of the Pope’s first foreign visit (with Turkey) is significant. The country holds the highest percentage of Christians in the Arab world.
It is reasonable that Pope Leo saw a need to provide support for a Lebanese-Christian community whose numbers are dwindling. In recent years, the country’s economic collapse and the horrific explosion at Beirut port in August 2020, which devastated mainly Christian neighbourhoods, helped cause an exodus from the country, hitting Christians particularly hard because of their smaller numbers.
This came on top of the sharp decline in the Christian populations of other Arab countries in the past two decades, notably Iraq and Syria, mainly because of the US invasion of Iraq and its aftermath and the Arab uprisings. In light of this, Lebanon has added importance for the Catholic Church as a place to stanch the Christian exodus.
Yet beyond how the Pope sees Lebanon, how do Lebanon’s Christians view their own future in their country? What mood might the supreme pontiff have caught while on his visit? If he got a sense of this, it cannot have been reassuring.
Lebanon’s Maronite-Christian community played a central role in the establishment of a Lebanese state in the period immediately following the Firs
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