The 88-year-old pontiff, on the last day of his Middle East tour—which took him from Turkey to the heart of Lebanon—arrived at the dock under a gray sky, escorted by local authorities. There were no prepared speeches or bombastic pronouncements; only the silence of clasped hands and a gaze fixed on the horizon, where the scars of that apocalypse are still visible. “The issue remains explosive for Lebanese society,” Vatican sources explained, alluding to the sensitivity of an event that has left a collective trauma and whose investigation has been repeatedly sabotaged by the political elite.

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam—a moderate Sunni and former president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague—welcomed the Pope to the site of the attack. Salam, a figure of hope in a fragmented government, has recently spearheaded symbolic progress: he declared August 4 a National Day of Mourning, and for the first time, President Joseph Aoun met with victims and their families. “These gestures mark a turning point,” analysts say, although demands for a fair trial of those responsible remain unanswered.

Before the papal visit, a young Lebanese woman named Maria shared her testimony at a meeting with the Pope in Bkerké, the Maronite patriarchal seat. “We rushed there right after the explosion, along with other young people from all over the country,” she recounted, her voice breaking. “The suffering was indescribable: people in excruciating pain, families losing their homes in an instant, people paralyzed by terror, unable to understand what had happened. We cleaned streets, repaired apartments, comforted the wounded, and consoled the traumatized.” What Maria omitted, but which resonates throughout, is the almost total absence of state aid: in the midst of the chaos, it was the volunteers—Christians, Muslims, Druze—who wove the web of solidarity. “No one asked, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘What community do you belong to?’ We were all simply human beings helping other human beings.” “Lebanese shoulder to shoulder,” he emphasized, evoking a rare moment of unity in a country divided by age-old sectarianism.

After his prayer, Leo XIV laid a wreath of white flowers at a memorial erected in honor of the fallen. The visit, limited to just 20 minutes for security and protocol reasons, allowed for brief exchanges with survivors. Many of them carried crumpled photographs of their loved ones, faces frozen in time, forever erased by the blast. This detonation, the most powerful non-nuclear explosion in modern history, not only pulverized buildings but also shattered hopes in a Lebanon already besieged by corruption, hyperinflation, and the aftermath of civil war.

So far, the Pope has not spoken publicly about the catastrophe, but in a dialogue with young people the day before, he alluded to “deep wounds that only heal slowly.” On the fifth anniversary, commemorated in August, his apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Paolo Borgia, read a deeply moving message from the Vatican: “To all those whose hearts have been wounded by the catastrophe or who have lost everything, I send my compassion. The tears of Christ mingle with ours at the loss and suffering from our loved ones. Death does not have the last word and never will.”

From the port, the papal convoy traveled just 2.5 kilometers north to the Beirut Waterfront, where Leo XIV will celebrate a Mass for a large crowd before returning to Rome this afternoon. His visit, the first by a pontiff to Lebanon in such a fragile time, not only honors the victims but also rekindles the call for reconciliation in a nation that, like a wounded phoenix, seeks to rise from its ashes. In a polarized world, the gesture of a Pope in silent prayer reminds us that, faced with the abyss, faith and empathy are the only anchors that hold.