JERUSALEM (OSV News) — As Israel’s continued bombardment of Iran entered its fifth day, Catholic clergy in both countries called for peace and an end to further bloodshed in the Holy Land and the Middle East.
“It seems like we have fallen into a new nightmare,” Franciscan Father Francesco Patton, custos of the Holy Land, said in an interview with Vatican News published June 16. “First, we saw the destruction caused by the war in the surrounding territories; now we see it in the heart of the Holy Land.”
On June 17, Israeli tanks fired into a crowd trying to get aid from trucks in Gaza, killing at least 59 people, according to medics, as reported by Reuters. It was “one of the bloodiest incidents yet in mounting violence as desperate residents struggle for food,” the agency said.
Father Gabriel Romanelli, pastor of Holy Family Church, the only Catholic parish in the Gaza Strip, warned that the suffering of the Palestinians in the enclave is being forgotten.
According to another June 16 report by French newspaper Le Monde, the Gaza civil defense agency said Israeli soldiers opened fire and killed 20 people waiting to collect food at an aid distribution site in Rafah. The Israeli military said it was investigating the incident, Le Monde reported.
“Imagine a city like Rome (which has a population slightly larger than that of Gaza), whose inhabitants are forced to collect food in three or four distribution points located in different areas, with all that this entails in terms of hardship and danger. What we see today in Gaza is shameful,” Father Romanelli told SIR, the news agency of the Italian bishops’ conference.
Israel launched a June 13 preemptive strike against Iran and said the country’s nuclear ambitions posed an “existential threat.”
“Iran is only moments away from a nuclear weapon. The threat posed by Iran is imminent and Israel has no choice but remove it before it is too late,” Israel’s Embassy to the Holy See said in a statement sent to OSV News June 13.
Not long after Israel launched its attack, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which is led by Italian Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, tweeted a prayer for peace on its X account.
“We lift our weary hearts to you, Lord, longing for your light amid the shadows of fear and unrest,” the prayer read. “Teach us to be peacemakers.”
Before Iran responded with its own volley of missiles, which struck Tel Aviv and Haifa, Cardinal Pizzaballa said the consequences of Israel’s preemptive strike were “difficult to predict at this time.”
“It is necessary to understand what kind of reaction will come from Iran,” the cardinal said in a June 13 interview with TG2000, the daily news program of the Italian bishops’ conference.
“There will certainly be a response. Its scale and real-world consequences will have to be determined. This is not an act that will aid deescalation.”
“We are all tired, all of us are tired of war, but we are all fused inside this vicious cycle, incapable of looking beyond. The concentration of military force is also a sign of political weakness,” Cardinal Pizzaballa said.
Although it was not specified, the cardinal likely referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political troubles, including surviving a vote that would have dissolved the current parliament.
Outside of the cardinal’s interview with TG2000, the Latin Patriarchate has not issued any official statement regarding the conflict. However, the patriarchate took issue with a text circulating on WhatsApp and “on social media that falsely purports to be a statement” from Cardinal Pizzaballa, which included a prayer to the Virgin Mary.
“Cardinal Pizzaballa has not given any interviews or made any public statements on the matter in recent days, and the content of the text has neither been written nor approved by him,” wrote Faid Jubran, spokesperson for the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in a June 17 statement.
In his June 16 interview with Vatican News, the custos of the Holy Land echoed Cardinal Pizzaballa’s concerns, lamenting the fact that “many here, not only Christians, want to leave a country which, in recent years, seems incapable of guaranteeing peace.”
The Holy Land, Father Patton said, has “become entangled in a spiral of war that continually expands like a fire that can no longer be controlled.”
“Christians, like the rest of the population, are scared,” he said. “I have already seen firsthand the terror of children during the war in Syria, I have heard it told from Gaza, now it is here too: children who tremble when they hear the sirens of the alarm and then the explosions of the missiles. These are traumas that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.”
Despite the uncertainties of the escalating conflict, Father Patton told Vatican News that missionaries in the country have no intention of leaving.
“There is no longer any observance of the ‘rules’ of international law of war, and therefore we are all in the same boat, without distinctions of ethnic or religious affiliation,” he said. “We are not mercenaries who abandon the flock to save themselves. This is the mission that the church has entrusted to us, and here we will remain, trusting in the help of heaven.”
As the world’s attention shifted from the war in Gaza to Iran, Father Romanelli said the situation in the enclave is beyond desperate.
“Eyes that do not see, heart that does not hear,” the priest said of the situation in a June 16 interview with SIR.
“No one talks about (the war in Gaza); international attention seems to have waned, but here, there is fighting every day, and the population is experiencing a never-ending tragedy,” the Argentine priest said.
The pastor of Holy Family said that the dire circumstances have led people in Gaza to “no longer have hope for a future different from this one.” Nevertheless, he added, as Christians, “we try to find a foundation of hope in prayer.”
“The war will end, we don’t know when, but it will end,” he said.
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