His Holiness Pope Francis is the leader of the world’s Roman Catholic Christian denomination. He occupies a powerful and influential position and each Pontiff sets the direction and tone of the Catholic Church during their reign. Some Popes have been good and some have been truly awful but of the post Vatican II Popes, Pope Francis must surely count as one of the worst. His record is especially bad when compared to one of his predecessors, Pope John Paul II, who was a great inspiration to those who wanted to free themselves from the shackles of Communism which was a brave and magnificent thing to do. The Papacy of Pope Francis on the other hand is one that is the complete opposite of brave, his papacy has been characterised by the promotion of left leaning ideologies and in particular the promotion of a culture of appeasement of Islam.

At a time when Christians are being targetted for death by Muslims across the world, the duty of this Pope should have been to speak up against the ongoing series of atrocities committed by Muslims against Christians. Unfortunately he has not done this. He has continued on a path of appeasement of the ideology of Islam and has shown this in actions such as his enthusiasm for interfaith work with Islamic clerics. When he should have been speaking up for Christians under threat from Islam, Pope Francis instead has gone rather too far down the road of treating the violent ideology of Islam as a ‘religion of peace’.

Even after Christians were massacred in their hundreds in the recent Sri Lanka attacks he could not bring himself to name the problem. It became quite plain very early on following the attacks in Sri Lanka that it was Islam behind the massacre yet the leader of a large portion of the world’s Christians could not name the evil that murdered Christians indiscriminately. I suspect that the motivation for the Pope to not name the perpetrators of the Sri Lanka attacks lies in his desire to ‘build bridges’ with Muslims. It may even be the case that he considers this bridge building more important than denouncing and naming the killer ideology behind the Sri Lanka atrocities. If that is the case then it is a weak position for a man in Pope Francis’s position to take. It would have been better and more comforting for the Christians who live under the vicious yoke of Islam to have Pope Francis name the evil that kills Christians.

No amount of interfaith goodness is worth this dopey approach by the Pope to the murders in Sri Lanka. Whilst he quite rightly condemned the attacks themselves, his message was much weakened by his failure to explicitly name the ideology that murdered over 300 people, most of them Christians. The Pope’s behaviour in this respect is not the behaviour of a leader but is that of a man who is acting like a vassal towards Islam and going out of his way to not offend this ideology and its followers even whilst the bodies of those murdered by Islamic savagery have not yet cooled. This is a weak Pope at a time when more stronger leadership is needed and it is to be hoped that this Pope abdicates soon like his predecessor Benedict and a man more suited to the challenges of the present day takes his place.