Where Is Pope Leo While Iran Kills Its Protesters?

On the morning of April 21, Iranian authorities hanged Amir Ali Mirjafari from the rafters of a Tehran prison. He was 24 years old, a student, a computer technician, someone’s son. Arrested during the December to January uprisings, the charges against him were based on confessions obtained under pressure and torture. His sentence was carried out without access to a lawyer of his choice, in a process his family and rights advocates say bypassed basic legal protections. The regime’s judiciary labeled him a “leader of anti-security actions.”Yet Mr. Mirjafari’s name has not crossed the lips of Pope Leo XIV.He was not alone. On April 2, teenage protester Amirhossein Hatami was executed at Ghezel Hesar prison. On March 19, three protesters were hanged in Qom — constituting the first executions of those detained during the 2025-2026 uprising. Among them was Saleh Mohammadi, a champion teenage wrestler.On April 6, 23-year-old Ali Fahim was hanged at dawn, the tenth political execution in a single week. A prosecution official warned that four additional protesters sentenced in the same case — Mohammad Amin Biglari, Abolfazl Salehi Siavashani, and Shahin Vahedparast Kolo — would be executed soon, one each day.The pace has not slowed. On April 20, two more political prisoners, Hamed Validi and Mohammad Masoom Shahi, were executed. At least 1,639 people were put to death in Iran throughout 2025 alone, a figure rights groups call an absolute minimum, averaging roughly four to five state killings every single day.Since the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising, Iranian authorities have embarked on an execution spree at a scale not seen in over four decades, with the pace accelerating sharply following last year’s conflict.Meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV was in Cameroon, delivering headline-grabbing speeches about tyrants ravaging the world. The men and women on Iran’s gallows have been waiting for him to say their names.A selective outrage?In a speech at St. Joseph’s Cathedral at the Cameroonian city of Bamenda on April 16, the American pontiff condemned global leaders who, he said, are “ravaging the world” by spending billions on war, calling instead for those resources to go toward healthcare and education.Aboard the papal plane from Cameroon to Angola, His Holiness told reporters that “the things I say are not meant as attacks on anyone.” Still, he added, “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel.” “I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among states to find just solutions to problems,” he said.What the Pope has not done is say the name of a single Iranian protester facing the rope.Vatican-watcher Franca Giansoldati warned early on that Pope Leo had “completely ignored” Iran’s repression “as if it does not exist,” noting there was “not a word about Iran, not even an indirect mention hidden between the lines.” Catholic commentator John Zmirak went further, arguing that the Vatican was “speaking like a Kantian globalist NGO, carefully aligned with the European left, applying only to Western countries the most exquisitely scrupulous moral standards — which it fails to apply to non-Western countries.”The silence is particularly stark given who has been asking for a response. The exiled Iranian crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, wrote the Pope a personal letter on Christmas Eve, detailing the plight of Muslim converts to Christianity, baptized believers facing prison, flogging, and internal exile for practicing their faith.In 2024 alone, Iranian Christian converts received a combined 263 years in prison and 37 years of internal exile for activities directly related to their faith, a near-sixfold increase in sentencing compared to 2023.Political theorist Professor Steven Millies of The Catholic University of America pushes back on what he calls a distorted framing of the Pope’s choices.“No serious person thinks Pope Leo would or could excuse what the Iranian government is doing. However, what Leo is speaking to here is something that has changed, something that is different, something current,” he tells The New York Sun.“The United States has been the standard-bearer for the rules-based international order for eight decades. The United States is in a process of abandoning that — it will have global consequences, and it imperils the possibility of international cooperation to prevent conflict as well as to lift up the poor and the vulnerable.”Mr. Millies also cautions against judging Vatican diplomacy by public statements alone.“The Vatican is both a Church with a theological message and a national state with a vast and sophisticated diplomatic corps that certainly is working on issues like the death penalty in Iran or the persecution of Christians there,” he continues. “Diplomacy doesn’t happen in the headlines.”The gallows don’t waitThe scale of what the Islamic Republic is doing to its own people is not a matter of competing narratives. Over 7,000 people — including at least 6,488 protesters — were killed during the uprisings ignited by the country’s economic collapse in late December 2025. Security forces arrested more than 50,000 people.Death sentences have been issued against at least 26 people arrested over the January protests, with “several hundred more” facing charges that could see them executed, according to Iran Human Rights director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam.At least 48 women were put to death throughout 2025, the highest number in more than two decades, a 55 percent increase from the year before. Inside Iran’s prisons, resistance has not broken. On April 14, inmates marked the 116th consecutive week of the “No to Executions Tuesdays” campaign, holding hunger strikes in at least 56 facilities under a seven-week internet blackout.Pope Leo’s Africa tour also included a meeting with Cameroon’s 93-year-old president, Paul Biya, who won a controversial eighth term in October 2025 amid widespread allegations of fraud. Before the visit, prominent Cameroonian Jesuit priest Father Ludovic Lado publicly urged the Pope not to come, warning the visit could be seen as an endorsement of a government he said had orchestrated “massive fraud” to extend Mr. Biya’s rule.Pope Leo went anyway, and sitting across from one of Africa’s longest-serving authoritarian leaders, told him directly that “the chains of corruption, which disfigure authority and strip it of its credibility — must be broken.”His defenders, however, point out that this is precisely the point: that a pope who refuses to come also forfeits any ability to speak truth to power in the room.Yet, President Trump is not letting the issue slip idly by. In a late-night Truth Social post this month, he wrote that “Iran has killed at least 42,000 innocent, completely unarmed, protesters in the last two months, and that for Iran to have a Nuclear Bomb is absolutely unacceptable.” The Pope answered by reiterating his condemnation of the war. He did not name a protester.What is visible and verifiable is the asymmetry: a pope who has called Mr. Trump’s positions “truly unacceptable” and declared himself unafraid of Washington, but who has yet to publicly demand a halt to executions in Tehran by name.Senior Fellow Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute, who directs its Center for Religious Freedom, is less charitable about what drives that gap.“Pope Leo’s troubling double standard of criticizing Trump administration policies but maintaining a strict vow of silence about those of Iran’s mullahs or of the Chinese Communist Party may be explained by his comment that he is not afraid of President Trump,” she tells the Sun.“I conclude from this that fear keeps him from speaking out against Iran and China. Each of those is a ruthless persecutor of Christians and other disfavored religious and ethnic groups, as well as of critics at home and abroad. Each is capable of arresting its country’s bishops, shutting churches and targeting reprisals against the Vatican, in Rome.”The rope in Tehran, however, does not wait for a pastoral letter.

Where Is Pope Leo While Iran Kills Its Protesters?

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