Pope Leo IV built the original Vatican Walls after a devastating Muslim raid. Pope Leo XIV, living in security behind those walls, is lecturing the rest of the world about not being afraid of Islam.
Obviously, there are many Muslims who are peaceful, but the undeniable reality is that Islamic sacred texts explicitly endorse many evils, including Jihad, rape, and domestic abuse, and that those Muslims who are peaceful and friendly to non-Muslims ignore injunctions in their own religion to the contrary. Therefore, to make such a sweeping statement as Pope Leo XIV did that Christians must “be a little less fearful and look for ways of promoting authentic dialogue and respect” with Muslims is silly.
In fact, his comments overall were absolutely disgusting, given that he made the outrageous and utterly false claim that Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully in Lebanon, where, within the last few decades, Muslims have eradicated a huge percentage of the Christian population. Lebanese Christians, now a minority in the country they recently dominated, still face repression and displacement.
But let’s move on to the main point of this article, which is the hypocrisy of the current pope in continuing to live behind huge walls while he lectures the rest of the world about accepting illegal aliens, especially Muslims, in unchecked numbers. Fortunately, not everything the pope says is doctrinal, as pronouncements that are binding on the faithful have to meet multiple requirements carefully outlined in canon law. That said, it is of course frustrating when the pope makes foolish comments, particularly if those comments also just happen to be opposed both to actual Catholic doctrine and to historical reality.
The Catholic Church officially teaches that Christ ordained that every man’s ability to reach heaven would always directly or indirectly involve the church, Christ’s body on earth. So from that perspective alone, the pope is being somewhat deceptive with his comments, because that is supposed to be the framing for any official Catholic "dialogue" with other religions. But whether you are Catholic or not, I think you would agree that this Pope Leo needs a history lesson on his predecessor, the 9th-century Pope Leo, who built the start of the powerful Vatican Walls — later expanded and modified into the 17th century — as a response to the Muslim sack of Rome’s most famous basilica, which houses the bones of St. Peter.
Medievalists.net explains that the Liber Pontificalis' life of Pope Sergius II provides some information on the shocking event that spurred the start of the construction of the Vatican Walls. In August 846, a band of Muslim pirates, among the many who ravaged Italy from Africa and Moorish Spain, landed at Rome's port of Ostia. Perhaps "a band" is not the right word, as the invaders were 11,000 strong with 500 horses and 73 ships. The raiders defeated the Ostia garrison and drove the relief militia all the way back to Rome, where the latter barricaded themselves in the pagan-era Aurelian Walls. The problem was that it left certain key basilicas and Christian monuments undefended.
The Muslim pirates decided not to besiege the city, turning instead to a revenge sack of the ancient St. Peter's Basilica. The old manuscript states:
… and there the horseman swarmed from the ships, and made a surprise attack on St. Peter the prince of apostles’ church with unspeakable iniquities. Then all the companies of Romans, left leaderless, came out to Campus Neronis to face the armed men…
Unfortunately, the extant manuscript breaks off abruptly in the middle of the sentence, but it is enough information to understand roughly what happened. Other documents of the time period also refer to the sack of St. Peter's and how much treasure and sacred ornaments the Muslims carried off, even to the altar over Peter's tomb. Centuries' worth of historical objects and magnificent art were lost at one blow. Besides that, there was the psychological impact of such a desecration of one of Christianity's holiest sites.
This was not the only Muslim raiding party to cause the Romans trouble, but it was the main reason the papacy and the Frankish imperial power decided new walls were in order. The Romans even made some Muslim prisoners-of-war work on the walls. In 852, Pope Leo IV and many other clergy consecrated the walls' Porta San Pellegrino, which would be the main entry for pilgrims to the Vatican from northern Italy for the next six centuries, according to Medievalists.net.
As I noted, the Vatican later expanded and modified the Leonine Walls, but the structures that were a response to the 9th-century Muslim sack of St. Peter's remain parts of the powerful encircling bastions of the Vatican to this day. Nor has Islam altered its injunctions to rape and murder non-Muslims. And that is precisely why Pope Leo XIV should refrain from making historically and religiously ignorant statements.
