Ian Linden: The Missing Popemobile: A Vehicle of Hope

Vehicle of Hope still stranded in Bethlehem

News photographs last week of the Vatican's exhibition of a selection of vehicles used by former Popes rather resembled a car dealer's show room. Come to that the Pope could sell them when the exhibition closes. 'Good condition, Low Mileage, Experienced Driver'. I can see the advertisement now in Osservatore Romano.

Most anything used by famous people can raise huge sums. That would, without doubt, include second hand cars when the owner is a Pope. John Lennon's guitar went for nearly $2.9 million recently. A Holy relic for a secular age. The Mercedes Benz dating from Pius IX in the 1930s, for example, would net a lot more. Leo could send some of the proceeds to the beleaguered Palestinian Taybeh community in Ramallah

There is one - Mitsubishi - Popemobile that is set to have historic value for an additional reason. It isn't in the exhibition. It was the one used by Pope Francis during his visit to the Holy Land in May 2014. He went to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem. He said Mass in Manger Square close to the Church of Nativity, his sermon focusing on children and met with refugee children from the West Bank. Probably because of the isolation enforced by the Israeli authorities on the town, it was easiest to leave his Popemobile there in Bethlehem.

Fast forward to 2025. CARITAS Jerusalem is supported by CARITAS Sweden, small but innovative, as a major donor. Some 130 CARITAS Jerusalem staff members were seeking to continue working inside Gaza based on five former medical centres and ten mobile units which provided primary health care, treatment for trauma and psychosocial counselling focussed on children. Most of the health system had been destroyed by Israel.

A few months before Francis died, he was presented with the first all electric Popemobile. He also approved a CARITAS Sweden proposal from Cardinal Anders Aurelius of Stockholm to convert his Bethlehem Popemobile into a flagship mobile clinic for the medical programme in Gaza. Dubbed the Vehicle of Hope, it was rebuilt to withstand travel amidst the destruction of Gaza, delivering medical care to children, homes gone, injured by the war, hospitals bombed. In Pope Leo's words: "It is my hope that this vehicle will continue to bring healing and compassion to children in conflict zones, particularly in Gaza. Its new mission reflects the love and solidarity embodied in Pope Francis' legacy".

But with Netanyahu in charge implementing a policy of collective punishment, permission to enter Gaza was refused. The repeated Israeli denial of entry was based on a principle of dual use: not dual use transporting a Pope to being used to carry refrigerated vaccines and antibiotics, bandages and stethoscopes, to save children's lives, but dual use transporting a Pope to installing a machine-gun emplacement, a refusal based either on paranoid fantasy, or relentless cruelty.

CARITAS Sweden organised a weighty international delegation to Bethlehem and Jerusalem in late November 2025 to put the case for access to Gaza and to publicise the plight of children there. They got considerable coverage. CAFOD's Middle East desk published an excellent account of the problem. Both ends of the CARITAS relationship, Jerusalem and Stockholm, worked together effectively in putting the case. Tony Blair, eight years Quartet (UN, US, EU and Russia) Representative in Jerusalem, an experienced negotiator with the Israeli authorities, was approached and briefed. In the context of growing pressure on the Palestinian Christian community by extremists from all sides, it was and remains a clearly sensitive issue. But as Anton Asfar, secretary general of CARITAS Jerusalem says, "it is our moral responsibility in the face of an unfolding catastrophe".

So there is a Bethlehem Popemobile that should perhaps be remembered and feature, at least telling the story, in the Vatican exhibition 'A Century of the Popemobile'. And there is a sentence in Francis' sermon in Manger square that is as true today, even more so than in 2014. "Wherever children are accepted, loved, cared for and protected, the family is healthy, society is more healthy and the world is more human". The inhuman conditions in Gaza and the West Bank should be pre-occupying Jews in Israel, just as around the world, as much as it does Christians and Muslims.

Professor Ian Linden is Visiting Professor at St Mary's University, Strawberry Hill, London. A past director of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, he was awarded a CMG for his work for human rights in 2000. He has also been an adviser on Europe and Justice and Peace issues to the Department of International Affairs of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales. Ian chairs a new charity for After-school schooling in Beirut for Syrian refugees and Lebanese kids in danger of dropping out partnering with CARITAS Lebanon and work on board of Las Casas Institute in Oxford with Richard Finn OP. His latest book was Global Catholicism published by Hurst in 2009.

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To read Dr Linden's blog see: www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/