BEIRUT — Pope Leo XIV capped his first international trip as pontiff with an open air mass on the waterfront in Beirut, where he met with some of Lebanon’s most vulnerable and implored a crowd of tens of thousands of Christians to stay in the Middle East, despite the decades of hardship and turmoil.
“Have courage!” Leo said after driving through the cheering throng and shuffling to the stage in purple and white robes. “The whole Church looks to you with affection and admiration,” he added.
Earlier in the day, the pope toured the site of the deadly port blast in 2020 that killed over 200 people and injured thousands more. There, he met with the families of the victims, leading a silent prayer near the port’s destroyed grain silos, a visual marker of the tragedy that saw 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate explode in a massive fireball above Beirut.
“I carry with me the pain and the thirst for truth and justice,” he told the victims’ families, hinting at the long, drawn-out government investigation into who was responsible for importing and storing the chemical compound, which is often used to make explosives.
William Noun lost his brother in the blast and said Tuesday that the pope’s visit was comforting. He came to the event with his young son, Joe, who he named after his brother. “The fact that he came and stood with us at the port was enough to send a message to all these officials sitting in the front row that what happened is not forgotten,” Noun said.
Indeed, sitting in a line in front of the pope was a mix of current and former Lebanese officials, some of whom were implicated both in obstructing the inquiry and in the larger corruption and negligence that created the conditions for the blasts.
But even with the country’s elite in attendance, the downtrodden were making their voices heard. Loren Capobres, a 54-year-old migrant worker from the Philippines, was also in the crowd. Just a day earlier at Harissa, a Catholic shrine on a mountaintop north of Beirut, she testified in front of the pope about the poor state of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, where human rights groups say the lack of a legal framework has allowed abusive practices to flourish.
A video of her speech spread like wildfire on social media and at the mass on Tuesday, fellow Filipina workers stopped her to take photos. She said Leo had told her “to be strong.”
His visit “gives us the opportunity to be heard,” she added. “Maybe some people will have this awakening and give us our rights.”
George Bou Antoun, a 30-year-old Maronite youth leader, said he hoped Leo’s trip would inspire the country’s Christians, many of whom have left Lebanon, to stay. The pope, he said, doesn’t have a “magic wand” that would somehow cure the nation’s many ills.
“But we got positive vibes,” Antoun said. “And hope all will be better.”
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