On Sky News (22 April), Andrew Bolt credited Anthony Albanese with a brilliant, if devious, election ploy.

The prime minister had paused his election campaign to honour Pope Francis who had just died. Yet his profession of respect was entirely false, Bolt claimed.

In fact, Albanese learnt much from Francis, but failed miserably on the moral shame of our generation: genocide in Palestine.

An internal analysis of Labor’s defeat by Scott Morrison in 2018 claimed that Labor had alienated many Christians through lack of attention to them. Bolt declares Morrison to have been a “true Christian” in contrast to Albanese’s bad-faith pretence at Christianity. Albanese declared he had served the church as an altar boy, and John Warhurst has called him a “cultural Catholic”. Bolt rebukes him for speaking “as a believer” when clearly, he said, Albanese was not one.

The chief evidence for this was that when he was sworn in as prime minister, Albanese had chosen not to take his oath of office on the Bible. Father Michael Tate, an unquestionably devout Catholic, was elected as Labor Senator in 1977. He refused to swear the oath on the Bible because as “a guarantor of truth [it] demeaned both oath and oath-taker”. He cited the words of Jesus directly from Mathew 5. 34-7: “Do not swear at all…” “‘…it comes from evil”. Who can judge Albanese on this?

In addition, Albanese did not honour George Pell, the church’s “persecuted servant”, whose views on climate change were antithetical to those of Pope Francis, and he called Tony Abbott “the mad monk”, scarcely a sign of anti-religion since Abbott’s policies were far from Biblical teaching. As for Pell, he “was always, in matters of church governance, a self-confident bully, a bulldozer and a bruiser. He did not stop to comfort his victims, nor care much who they were” ( Jack Waterford _Pearls &Irritations_ 29 April 2025).

The contrast to the “true Christian” Morrison scarcely resonates either. Morrison’s brand of Christianity had deviated far from the “good news to the poor” that the Gospel contains. He was devoted to what many called the “prosperity gospel”, which meant that God favoured those who worshipped with good health, social recognition and endless material wealth. Morrison’s slogan was “those who have a go, get a go”. Show that you are capable of prospering by furthering your position and the government will help you – at the expense of job-seekers, asylum-seekers and those unable to support themselves through some personal impediment. None of those can be found in the Gospel: “woe to you that are rich”! (Luke 6. 24).

From altar boy to cultural Catholic gives us no evidence that Albanese was not a believer. Faith is a deeply personal matter, and no-one can judge another person on this aspect of his or her life. Albanese declared himself to be a person of faith, and that does not require outward shows of righteousness or advertisement of sincerity. In any case, a “cultural Catholic” may be imbued with religious instruction even if not attending mass every week. As he said, “My Catholicism is a part of me”. For Bolt to assert that Albanese is not a believer is an affront far beyond his brief.

As for the pope, Bolt deliberately underestimates his significance. To call him a “political pope”, implying some kind of scandalous deviation from his true calling, is to show serious ignorance of the Gospel. It is true that theology, at least since the time of the Reformation, has accommodated a separation of church and state doctrine, declaring in Lutheran terms that the spiritual realm has no business using forceful coercion, while the church has no business dealing with force at all. Of course, the spiritual realm may inform the temporal, but the sifting processes of the state must deal with the application of force to contain illegal actions.

There was no arrogance in Pope Francis’s direct appeal to all the people of the earth, as he declared in his encyclical, Laudato Si. In it, he recognised the Earth as humanity’s “common home”, and urged the world to stop its incremental destruction and actively protect the environment. We had reached “the point of no return” and had set ourselves “on a road to death”, he declared in his final days.

Bolt’s soft-spoken diatribe seeks to imply that climate change was all that Albanese derived from the pope’s teaching and example. He slides into the usual Sky News rant that climate change is a hoax, and that calls to action are futile. If they had ever tried to prove the anti-climate action case, they had by now got weary of it. All Bolt could offer was that it was all wrong, and that extraordinarily insightful and courageous young people like Greta Thunberg were “climate hysterics” favoured by the poor misguided pope.

Pope Francis was all his life a passionate advocate for action to save the planet. But that was scarcely all he was, since he was allegedly a political pope. There are other grounds on which Albanese’s attitude to the pope could be seriously criticised. First and foremost, Francis was imbued in the Gospel message of “good news to the poor”. At every turn, he thought of the poor of the land and demonstrated his love for them. Albanese’s Government has worked to improve the lives of those whom, as he says so often, are “doing it tough”, but the exiguous level of assistance for those out of work is a national disgrace.

Francis demonstrated his love for poverty-stricken immigrants and asylum-seekers by embracing them and travelling to points of entry in Italy to greet them. Recent Australian discourse on both sides has tended to reduce displaced people to statistics that threaten the housing of “true” Australians¸ while policies that reduce innocent people seeking refuge to criminals who have to be locked in offshore brutal prisons will forever be a stain on our national identity. The “true Christian” Morrison was particularly savage towards boat people, but Albanese’s side of politics is by no means exempt.

But now, to the defining moral turpitude of our age. Australian politics and its mainstream media seem to know or care nothing for the ongoing annihilation of the Arabs of Palestine. Lobbyists for the state of Israel, who perpetually say that it has a right to defend itself by pursuing the terrorist organisation, Hamas, are actually claiming to defend land that Israel has previously stolen from the Palestinians.  They have reduced the entire Gaza strip to an enormous bomb site, claiming that the death of innocent non-combatants, including children and babies, are collateral damage since Hamas warriors conceal themselves in schools, hospitals and private homes. Some Israeli militants insolently and irrelevantly invoke God’s direction to King Saul to annihilate the Amalekites down to the last baby, presumably because babies may grow up to become Hamas activists.

Around the world, any criticism of Israel’s present conduct is automatically called out as “antisemitism”, whereby the atrocities against Jews in World War II are invoked. Criticising Israel’s policy does not amount to Jew-hating. Our universities have disgraced themselves by submitting to Zionist demands that they explicitly contain campus demonstrations against Israel, and control discourse that would otherwise be claimed to be free speech. Weaponising antisemitism is outrageous.

In a democracy, we expect our public discourse to be open and fair-minded. We have seen precious little of our politicians’ confronting the scourge of our age: anti-Islam acts and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Albanese’s campaign for the present election is surely deficient by not addressing the moral challenge of our age.

Back to Pope Francis. He was committed to peace in Israel, and showed unending sympathy for the Palestinians. As long as 10 years ago he visited Bethlehem and referred to the “state of Palestine”. He called the war in Gaza for what it was: genocide. He continued to contact the persecuted Gazans through regular phone calls and video messages. At his last public appearance, he called for an end to war in Gaza; but this was not war, it was “useless slaughter” of civilians (Seraj Assi Truthout 27 April 2025_)._ He also wrote to US bishops repudiating Donald Trump’s persecution of immigrants.

Genocide may be far from our gates, but it is the shame of the whole world that its billions of voices have not been raised to denounce it. Our politicians and our mainstream media are deeply complicit in this.