To His Holiness Pope Robert Francis, I write to you not from a palace, nor from the comforts of foreign embassies, but from the soil of my homeland, the land of Burkina Faso, where dust mingles with the blood of our martyrs, and the echoes of revolution are louder than the hum of foreign drones overhead.
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Letter to the Pope 2025. English Translation...
To His Holiness Pope Robert Francis, I write to you not from a palace, nor from the comforts of foreign embassies, but from the soil of my homeland, the land of Burkina Faso, where dust mingles with the blood of our martyrs, and the echoes of revolution are louder than the hum of foreign drones overhead.
l am not writing as a man seeking approval, nor as one entangled in diplomatic pleasantries. I write to you as a son of Africa, bold, bruised, unbowed.
You are now the spiritual father to more than a billion souls, including millions here in Africa, You inherit not just a church, but a legacy. And in this moment of transition, while white smoke still lingers above Vatican rooftops.
I must send this letter across seas and sands beyond guards and gates directly to your heart, because history demands it, because truth compels it, because Africa the wounded and the rising, is watching.
Your Holiness, we Africans know the power of the cross. We know the hymns, the prayers, the litanies. We have built churches with calloused hands and defended our faith with our blood.
But we also know another truth, one that too many preferred to bury, that the church at times walked beside colonizers, that while missionaries prayed for our souls, soldiers looted our lands, that while your predecessors spoke of heaven, our ancestors were chained on earth.
And even now, in this so-called modern age, we feel the chain still, not of iron, but of silence. Of indifference to geopolitical games played in holy shadows.
So I ask in the name of the mothers who pray on dirt floors and the children who were in catechism with empty stomachs. Will your papacy be different?
Will you be the Pope who sees Africa not as a periphery, but as the prophetic center? Will you be the Pope who does not only visit slums for photo opportunities, but who dares to speak with rage against the forces that make those slums permanent?
You see, Your Holiness, I am a man shaped by war, not wealth. I was not ruined for politics by Western institutions. I was not taught diplomacy in Paris. I learned leadership in trenches among the people where pain is teacher and hope is resistance.
I lead a nation that was tossed aside by the world until we refused to be silent. We were told we were too poor to be independent, too weak to be sovereign, too unstable to resist. But I tell you this with the thunder of ancestors in my voice. We are done asking for permission to exist.
We are done pleading for validation from powers who exploit our minerals while preaching morality. And we are done, absolutely done, watching global spiritual leaders turn their eyes from Africa’s cries because the politics are inconvenient.
Your Holiness, I speak now only for Burkina Faso, but for a continent too long patronized. Africa is not a continent of pity, we are a continent of prophets. Prophets who were jailed, exiled and murdered for daring to challenge the empire.
And you, now that you wear the ring of St. Peter as a sign, will you walk the path of the prophets? Or will you too be a prisoner of politics?
We need no more platitudes. We do not need more thoughts and prayers while Western firms extract uranium from Niger and gold from Congo under armed guard.
We do not need diplomatic neutrality while African youth drown in the Mediterranean fleeing wars. They did not start war with weapons they did not make.
We do not need saccharine statements while African sovereignty is auctioned off behind closed doors in Brussels, Washington and Geneva.
What we need is a Pope who will name the modern-day Herod who will thunder against economic empires just as boldly as the Church once thundered against communism.
Who will say without apology that it is a sin for nations to profit from the destruction of Africa.
You know the teachings of Christ. You know he flipped the tables of money changers. You know he said blessed are the peacemakers, but he never said blessed are the appeasers.
So I ask you personally, will you speak against the silence of France and its shadow Operations in the Sahel?
Will you condemn the arms deals that fuel proxy wars in our deserts and forests? Will you name the greed that dresses itself in charity?
The diplomacy that cloaks imperialism in peace talks, because we see it, we live it. Your holiness, I do not ask you to be African.
I ask you to be human, to be moral, to be brave, because courage, real courage, is not blessing the powerful. It is defending the powerless when it costs something.
Let me speak plainly. The Vatican has wealth beyond imagination, art beyond price access beyond borders.
But true power is not measured in treasures behind marble walls,true power is measured in the courage to confront injustice.Even when it comes dressed in a tailored suit, carrying diplomatic credentials and smiling through its sins.
Your Holiness the world stands at a precipice and Africa, this battered and beautiful continent, is not merely watching from below, we are climbing. We are bleeding, we are rising, and we are daring to ask questions that echo louder than canon law.
Where was the church when our presidents were overthrown by foreign-backed mercenaries?
Where was the church when our youth were abducted and indoctrinated into wars funded by nations that pretend to be peacekeepers.
Where was the church when our currencies collapsed? When the IMF choked our economies?
When our leaders were punished for choosing sovereignty over submission?
Do not tell us to forgive while the whip is still in the hand of the abuser.
Do not tell us to pray while our prayers are met with drone strikes. Do not speak of peace without naming the profiteers of war.
Because silence Your Holiness is no longer holy, and neutrality is no longer noble.
If you are to be the shepherd of this global flock, then hear this cry from the dust of Ogadugu.
We are your sheep too. But we do not graze quietly in the fields, we march in the streets, we die on the front lines. We rise from the ashes with fire in our bones and scripture in our mouths.
We are not asking for charity, we are demanding justice, and justice must begin with truth.
The truth of Christianity in Africa has been both a balm and a blade. The truth that the Church has fed our spirits while failing to protect our bodies.
The truth that redemption without reckoning is a half-truth and half-truths have never healed nations.
Your Holiness, you now sit upon the chair of St. Peter.
But remember, Peter denied Christ three times before the rooster crowed.
Do not let history say the Church denied Africa once again.
Let the rooster crow in the Vatican loud and clear. Let's not wait for the conscience of cardinals and kings.
Let it echo through the corridors of power, where men in robes and uniforms trade silence for influence.
Let it announce a new dawn, not just for the church, but for the world, because here in Africa we do not fear dawns, we create them.
We are the sons and daughters of Sankara, Lumumba, Nkrumah and Biko.
We carry scriptures in one hand and the memory of revolutionaries in the other. We have learned to pray and protest with the same breath.
And we ask, will your papacy walk with us? Will you meet us in our pain, not just in our pews?
Will you recognize God in our hunger? the Christ in our chaos, the Holy Spirit in our struggles? If not now when? If not Yehuda.
if the Church continues to preach peace while ignoring the machinery of oppression, what gospel is left to believe in?
I say this not with anger, but with sacred urgency.
We are a people at the crossroads of prophecy and politics and Africa’s time is no longer coming, it is here.
We are rewriting the narrative, reshaping the future, reclaiming the dignity denied to us for centuries by foreign domination and spiritual manipulation.
The church must decide where it stands, with the powers that be or with the people who bleed.
I do not write this letter to condemn. I write it to invite you, Your Holiness, into a deeper solidarity, to a solidarity that walks barefoot with the poor, that dares to speak truth in Rome as boldly as it does in Rwanda.
That names the Saints not just by miracles, but by their commitment to justice.
We await your voice, not from balconies, but from trenches, from favelas, from refugee camps, from behind the bars of political prisons where truth is incarcerated.
Because only that voice, your voice can redeem the silence and if you dare to speak it, not only will Africa hear you, the world will.
Signed: Captain Ibrahim Traore, President of the transition of
Burkina Faso, son of Africa, servant of sovereignty.
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