Pope Leo XIV strongly criticized the massacre of Christians in Nigeria by Muslims.

During his Angelus message in St. Peter's Square, Pope Leo XIVfirmly condemned the massacre perpetrated between June 13 and 14 in Yelwata, Benue State (Nigeria), where about 200 people were brutally killed.

The majority of the victims were internally displaced persons sheltering in a local Catholic mission. The Pontiff expressed his deep sorrow and offered prayers for security, justice, and peace in Nigeria, focusing his concern especially on rural Christian communities that have been relentless victims of violence.

The Pope's intervention comes in a context of prolonged violence against Nigerian Christians at the hands of Islamist terrorist groups, such as Boko Haram and factions of the Islamic State.

Since 2009, more than 52,000 Christians have been killed, 18,000 churches and 2,200 Christian schools destroyed, according to figures reported by the European Parliament on February 8, 2024. However, the approved text avoided labeling these acts as "genocide", despite the fact that they fit the definition of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

This omission has been strongly criticized by religious leaders and Catholic organizations, who consider that it minimizes a systematic and deliberate tragedy against a religious minority.

The Pope, who knows the situation in Nigeria well, a country he visited at least nine times before his election as Supreme Pontiff, condemned not only the brutality of the attacks, but also the institutional and media indifference that surrounds them.

The Catholic Network of Nigeria has described the conflict as Islamist terrorism, harshly criticizing those who insist on describing it as "clashes between herders and farmers" or "communal tensions." According to this organization, such euphemisms not only distort reality, but constitute an offense to the dead and a license for the killings to continue.

In Benue State, the epicenter of many of these atrocities, it is estimated that more than 5,000 Christians have been killed in the past decade and more than 1.5 million people displaced.

Entire villages have been razed, rebuilt, and destroyed again; the farmlands, ruined; the churches, desecrated; and the mass graves, dug with alarming regularity.

However, the government of Nigeria, led by President Bola Tinubu, a Muslim and member of the leftist All Progressives Congress party, has refused to officially recognize the perpetrators of these massacres as terrorists. This has caused suspicions of complicity or, at the very least, deliberate passivity.

The Pope did not mention President Tinubu directly, but his message was unequivocal: the violence suffered by the Christian community in Nigeria is systematic and targeted, and deserves a clear response from the international community.

His call for justice and truth seeks to break the silence surrounding this tragedy and force political and media actors, especially in the West, to recognize the gravity of the crime being committed.

In addition to Nigeria, the Pope devoted part of his speech to the crisis in Sudan, lamenting the death of Father Luke Jumu, parish priest of El Fasher, victim of a recent bombing. He again called for an end to violence, the protection of civilians, and the start of a peace dialogue in both regions.