Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Leo XIV
Your Holiness,
You are undoubtedly aware of the work of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which for many years has stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people and, in particular, has sought to challenge the violence inflicted upon the people of the Gaza Strip.
The horrors they have endured have been documented and denounced by United Nations agencies and numerous NGOs: tens of thousands of civilian deaths, the destruction of vast areas of housing, a food crisis that has repeatedly reached the threshold of famine, and the collapse of the healthcare system.
More recently, particularly last year and again this year, other organisations have joined this effort, including Thousand Madleens to Gaza and the Global Sumud Flotilla. In the eyes of people around the world, our boats have become a symbol of a shared human determination to stand against this horror.
Whatever impact our missions may have had on the course of events, Your Holiness knows well that symbols can possess immense power: the power to stir consciences at their deepest level.
On those fragile boats, carried by people of different nations, cultures and faiths, travelled the human hope for a different world — a world we still want to believe is being born, however much the madness of our present time may seem to deny it.
Your Holiness,
We know that the Catholic Church, like other faith communities, is sincerely seeking to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people.
They are a people subjected to profound injustice, whose very existence on the land they have inhabited for generations is increasingly under threat. The gravity of what is happening in Gaza has led United Nations bodies and major human rights organisations to use the term genocide.
To say this is not antisemitism.
Nothing we do is driven by hostility towards Judaism, Jewish culture or Jewish people. On the contrary, we recognise in Jewish history and ethical traditions an indispensable contribution to the universal value of human dignity.
What we oppose is something entirely different: colonial and racist policies that deny the Palestinian people their fundamental rights, dispossess them of their land and increasingly threaten their ability to continue living upon it.
Our opposition is directed at policies, institutions and systems of oppression — never at a people or a faith.
Jewish people are also part of this struggle alongside us, and their presence carries particular meaning. It reminds us that standing against injustice and defending Palestinian freedom cannot and must not be turned into hostility towards Jewish people.
Your Holiness,
We do not know whether, for reasons we can understand, you will be able to reply to us. Among all those who sincerely seek peace, each must act with the means available to them.
As for ours, let there be no doubt: they are the means of principled Gandhian nonviolence. We put our own lives at risk without harming the lives of others. Nor do we nurture hostility even towards those who regard us as enemies.
We believe that liberation from this cycle of oppression and fear is necessary for everyone. No lasting future can be built upon the domination of one people by another, nor upon the conviction that security can be achieved through the denial of another people’s freedom.
This is the hope we wish to keep alive: a peace for everyone, founded on justice and capable, one day, of making reconciliation possible. It will remain at the heart of every future mission, until this knot – suffocating and dangerous for the entire world – is finally untied.
We are human beings, with all our flaws and contradictions, but we ask you, in your heart, to recognise our good will.
And we trust in your blessing.
Freedom Flotilla Italia
23 September 2026