Dear Pope Leo, here’s how Madonna’s idea about going to Gaza might work

(RNS) — Your Holiness, Pope Leo XIV,

I hope you’re as well as anyone can be in these horrific times.

You may be tempted to dismiss Madonna’s recent Instagram post begging you to single-handedly break the siege on Gaza by going to Palestine. I dismissed it too — not only as misguided and uninformed, but impossible. Madonna’s claim that you “are the only one of us who can’t be denied entry” and her suggestion that your visit would open the gates for humanitarian aid doesn’t appear grounded in any policy.

And yet, the pop icon might be on to something.

Your Holiness, you are uniquely positioned to intervene against the Israeli state’s onslaught on Gaza — not because of any mystical quality Madonna seemed to believe you possess, but because of how civil resistance works. 

You may have heard of the Freedom Flotilla. Founded in 2010, it is an international, grassroots effort to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza through various direct action campaigns. This year alone, they’ve sent two boats — the Madleen and the Handala — carrying humanitarian aid. 

I suggest you join the Flotilla, the sea being the path of least resistance to Gaza. As a head of state, you can imagine the bureaucratic and diplomatic excuses the authorities would use to keep you from reaching Gaza via Ben Gurion Airport, crossing Jordan’s King Hussein Bridge or convoying through the militarized Sinai Peninsula.

Though Israel Defense Forces illegally intercepted both vessels, confiscated their cargo and, according to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, abused some crew members, who included renowned Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and respected American labor organizer Christian Smalls, you should face no such danger. They know harming you would backfire on them.

Madonna might imagine you waltzing into Israel, wielding papal gravitas like a Jedi uses the Force — waving your hand in front of soldiers’ faces, saying, “You’ll let me through.” But the real power you could wield in attempting to reach Palestine by sea isn’t magical. It comes from leveraging the principles of strategic nonviolence.

The late nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp — often called the Machiavelli of nonviolence — identified three categories of nonviolent action, of which “direct interventions” are the most disruptive. Direct interventions are exactly what they sound like: not protests that plead with the oppressor to stop, but actions that directly impede their ability to continue.

In 2017, Swedish activist Elin Ersson stood up on a plane to prevent the deportation of an Afghan man. As long as she stood, the plane couldn’t take off. She won that standoff. That’s the beauty of direct interventions: Sometimes one person is enough. Not many individuals can apply real pressure on the Israeli government — you can. Like Ersson, you’re in a position to halt a machinery of injustice with your own body, but in a way that can’t be so easily reversed.

Imagine the Israeli military finding that the person with his hands behind his head, squinting in the blinding lights of their searchlights on darkened Mediterranean waters, was the pope. You would create a dilemma for the Israel Defense Forces: the holy grail of nonviolent strategy. They could risk arresting you, triggering global outrage, or they could allow you to walk freely into Gaza, which we know they’d loathe.

If you made it into Gaza, they’d have to keep firing into crowds of innocent civilians, knowing a bullet could strike you; to starve millions, knowing your stomach would ache too; to bomb indiscriminately, knowing your zucchetto might be found in the rubble — or they would have to stop.

Palestinians rush to collect humanitarian aid airdropped by parachutes into Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, Aug. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

For these reasons, the chances are, if you do manage to enter Gaza, you will immediately get a “gentle” military escort out. At that point, you might consider what the late theologian Walter Wink claimed about Jesus’ crucifixion:

“Something went awry with Jesus,” Wink wrote. The Roman soldiers “scourged him with whips, but with each stroke of the lash their own illegitimacy was laid open. … They stripped him naked and crucified him in humiliation, all unaware that this very act had stripped them of the last covering that disguised the towering wrongness of the whole way of living that their violence defended.”

If they try to remove you from Gaza — even gently — sit down and make them carry you. Go limp, creating yet another dilemma: Dragging you out risks harming you. Force them, whatever they do, to shove the remaining legitimacy of the occupation over a cliff.

I’m asking you — a pastor and international political leader — to act like an activist, bypassing official channels to achieve a political objective against the will of the ruling powers. But I’m also asking you to imitate Christ, who, as Christians teach, emptied himself of divinity to enter the world and confront its chaos. Jesus bypassed the official channels of his time, forgiving sins and healing the sick outside the Temple system, sometimes breaking the Sabbath to do so. He may not have been an activist, but his willingness to take direct action is why so many esteem him.

If you can’t go to Gaza as an activist, in other words, go as a Christian.

Your action wouldn’t only be a great act of solidarity with Palestinians or a condemnation of Israel’s illegal occupation. It would be a profound symbolic act of repentance on behalf of the Catholic Church, which once justified the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples by imperial powers. Your presence could signal a decisive break from that history.

So I beseech Your Holiness, like a prayer, do consider Madge’s plea. Join the Flotilla. When the dust settles in Gaza, each of us will look back on this moment and ask whether we did all we could to intervene. For you, Holy Father, that answer could be immortalized in photographs of the IDF carrying you out of Gaza, robes stained with ashes, as the moment Israel’s anti-Palestinian aggression crossed the final red line.

I know you’ve spoken against Gaza’s bombardment, as did your predecessor, Pope Francis. But there is a time to move from words to intervention. As I tell those I train in direct action, you can’t stop a mugging by yelling after the robber that you disagree with them. 

Whatever decision you make, I hope it’s one you stand behind when Palestine is no longer breaking news.

With every good wish to Your Holiness,
Andre