The Pope, the Bridge and the Left Unnamed
Compassionate rhetoric that avoids naming those who bleed
The Pope’s address in Türkiye is easy enough to applaud on a first reading. The register is humane, conciliatory, impeccably behaved, morally scented but politically harmless. Yet the closer one reads, the clearer it becomes that the eloquence is also a means of evasion: eloquence doing duty for honesty.
Türkiye is cast as a “bridge” and a “crossroads of sensibilities”, joining East and West, Asia and Europe, religions and cultures. But to linger on the bridge while refusing to look at what lies beneath is to participate in a polite fiction in which geography is asked to absolve history.
The Çanakkale bridge is offered as a symbol of connection between East and West, architecture turned into allegory. In the historical record, the metaphor fails at the first touch. For centuries, the traffic through this corridor was not the benign exchange of ideas but imperial advance. Ottoman power pushed deep into Europe not in the service of modernity, civic equality or human rights, but to extend rule, impose religious authority and treat human beings as moveable property. Over the long life of the empire, huge numbers of people were captured and traded; serious estimates speak of one to two million women alone forced into slave markets. When ISIS returned to the buying and selling of Yazidi women, it did not conjure a new form of wickedness out of nothing. To repackage this history as a tranquil emblem of “connection” is to offer a sanitised emblem laid over a very unsanitised past.
One of the gaping absences in the present is the treatment of the Kurds. On this, the address is silent. There is no mention of the internal policies that have smothered the national aspirations of a people often said to number up to fifty million across the region, a people treated as an internal embarrassment to be managed. In a text that hymns the family as the first cell of society and invokes the “human family” of nations, there is no recognition of a Kurdish “family” whose cultural and political claims have been systematically constrained, monitored and punished within the Turkish state. They are among the inconvenient nations inside the nation-state, those permanently written in as supporting characters on their own land. The unresolved question of Kurdish status, language and representation is quietly swept into the wings, treated as a marginal concern rather than one of the defining pressures on the republic.
The silence becomes harder to excuse when one reaches the line: “I willingly assure you that Christians desire to contribute positively to the unity of your country. They are, and feel part of, Turkish identity.” The diplomatic instinct behind the sentence is transparent. A visiting pontiff wishes to reassure his hosts and to encourage Christians to present themselves as loyal citizens. It suggests that the only respectable posture is to “feel part of Turkish identity” and that other ways of thinking about belonging are childish, suspect or subversive.
For Kurds, for Assyrians, for Jews and others whose existence has long been managed through erasure, forced assimilation or carefully curated marginality, the line reads less as pastoral concern and more as a sort of theological benediction placed upon a single, state-approved identity. It treats the cultural and political desire of millions who do not wish to be melted down into the Turkish national alloy as an eccentricity to be ironed out over time. This is not merely clumsy phrasing. It is offensive at its core.
The same pattern appears in the religious listing. Quoting John XXIII, the Pope speaks of “our Orthodox brothers, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, believers and non-believers of other religions”. On the surface, it is expansive, almost brochure-like in its inclusivity. Yet one absence is glaring: there is no mention of Yazidis. In this part of the world, such silence is not a minor editorial slip. Yazidi Kurds were subjected to genocide by the so-called Islamic State barely ten years ago. To leave them out of the roll-call of faiths in and around Türkiye is to leave unacknowledged one of the most savage persecutions of recent history in that exact neighbourhood.
To name the Yazidis explicitly would instantly raise questions about who failed them, who permitted ISIS to organise and spread, who watched while Yazidi women and girls were bought and sold, and which regional powers connived with, armed or tolerated jihadist structures when this suited their purposes. In this speech, terrorism is not mentioned at all. Nor are the states, patrons and networks that armed, sheltered or instrumentalised it. Evil appears as a vague weather system, a generalised darkness, atrocities mysteriously falling from the sky, supported by a jihadist infrastructure everyone somehow failed to notice.
The omissions widen further. The Pope does not address the resurgence of antisemitism or the assaults, threats and boycotts directed at Jewish communities across the world. At a time when Jews are once again being singled out in universities, on streets and online, that remarkably durable obsession with the Jews passes here without a single explicit mention. In a country whose own Jewish community understands from experience how quickly the public weather can turn cold, that silence cannot be written off as a simple oversight. It functions as a choice.
Abstraction is never cost-free. Justice appears here without locations, victims without perpetrators, power without institutions or names. No Kurdish mother, Armenian descendant, Yazidi survivor or anxious Jewish family watching demonstrations outside their synagogue will hear, in this text, any echo of their own experience. The prose has been carefully engineered so that it can be delivered in almost any capital on earth: high moral language on a tight diplomatic leash.
There is no engagement with whether legal protections are sufficient, whether domestic violence is tolerated, how informal controls silence women, or how Kurdish, Assyrian and other minority families live under a constant regime of suspicion and pressure. The language remains at the level of principle: noble, mellifluous and almost entirely weightless, more a preference for harmonious photographs over awkward facts than a confrontation with reality.
The rhetoric of “truth and friendship” pulls a visiting pontiff towards the language of harmony rather than the plain speech of accusation. One can sense the holiness of keeping everyone comfortable. The question is how far such a posture can be stretched before the very moral authority invoked to justify it becomes inaudible to those who might most require it.
To speak only in universal terms is to decide that the preservation of good relations with the state takes precedence over solidarity with those who suffer under it. Those people will not fail to notice that Kurds were unnamed, that Yazidis were invisible, that Armenian memory was left untouched, that the sponsors and facilitators of terror were politely ignored, that the current wave of antisemitism and attacks on Jews passed without a word, while “Turkish identity” received something close to sacramental endorsement.
What is left, in the end, is an address that comforts the powerful and leaves the vulnerable unmentioned: a skilful and superficially compassionate text that speaks at length about the human condition while stepping delicately around anything that might unsettle the host government. Yet a bridge that never looks down, that never measures the depth of the gorge or counts the lives that have disappeared into it, is only half a structure. The missing half is the willingness, in that place and before that audience, to name plainly what lies beneath.
