Pope Leo critiques global systemic violence amid Easter rites, urging Catholic solidarity with marginalised communities
Original framing: “Pope Leo condemns ‘brutality’ of world in first Easter services” — Al Jazeera
The original framing omits the Catholic Church’s historical entanglement with colonial violence, its role in suppressing indigenous spiritual traditions, and the economic systems that perpetuate global brutality. Marginalised voices—such as queer Catholics, Indigenous communities, and Global South theologians—are erased, as are non-Western religious critiques of the Pope’s authority. The structural causes of systemic violence, including neoliberal austerity, militarised borders, and extractive capitalism, are reduced to abstract 'brutality.'
Medium structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by Al Jazeera, a Qatar-based outlet with a focus on Global South perspectives, but its framing still centres Western religious and journalistic conventions. The story serves the Catholic Church’s soft power by positioning the Pope as a moral arbiter while obscuring critiques of institutional complicity in systemic violence. Framing the Pope’s actions as universally condemnatory masks the Church’s historical and contemporary roles in perpetuating oppression, from colonial-era conversions to modern-day LGBTQ+ exclusion.
The Catholic Church’s entanglement with colonial violence spans centuries, from the 1493 papal bull *Inter caetera* (dividing the Americas between Spain and Portugal) to modern-day support for authoritarian regimes in Latin America. The Church’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and its later opposition to civil rights movements in the U.S. reveal a pattern of moral inconsistency. Even liberation theology, which emerged in the 1960s as a critique of structural sin, was suppressed by the Vatican under John Paul II, illustrating the institution’s resistance to systemic change.
The Pope’s Easter condemnation of 'brutality' is a moral performance that obscures the Catholic Church’s deep complicity in systemic violence, from colonial dispossession to modern-day economic exploitation.