The Patriarch and the Palestinians
By Cole S. Aronson, First Things. Image credit: Wikimedia commons (Editor’s note: an interesting and informative insight into the lives of Arab Catholic Christians in the Middle East)
If I drink coffee at every meeting, I’ll kill someone,” His Beatitude Pierbattista Pizzaballa says when I ask him to join me for an espresso while we talk. Who first? I want to ask. But I suspect the patriarch of the 150,000 Latin-rite Catholics in Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, and Cyprus wouldn’t know where to start.
When we met one afternoon in April in the patriarchal seat in Jerusalem’s Old City, Pizzaballa’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction had been at war with itself for six months. The October 2023 massacre in southern Israel had converted two million Gazans into wartime human shields for Hamas. Among them were several hundred Gazan Catholics. Wealthier Gazans escaped to the Sinai desert through Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, and the patriarch tells me some Christians were among them. The rest sheltered in the Holy Family Church compound in Gaza City with Greek Orthodox compatriots.
With some awful exceptions (such as Naheda and Samar Anton, a mother and daughter who were killed last December), the Catholic flock in Gaza has been remarkably safe. They are assisted by the shrewdness of their patriarch, a big, quick-witted, businesslike Italian, fluent in English and Hebrew, with a doctorate from Hebrew University. Of course, Mideast Christians are killed all the time in spite of the efforts of their prelates. The patriarch is more successful for conducting his diplomacy inside (and with) the Jewish state, where Christians generally have found a prosperous haven from the Islamists terrorizing their brethren in the region.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem was founded in 1099, under the protection of the crusader kingdom in the Holy Land. The patriarchate declined and eventually was expelled with the armies of Western Christendom. In 1291, Patriarch Nicholas drowned while trying to escape the Muslim siege of Acre. For hundreds of years, institutional Christianity was represented in the Holy Land by Eastern-rite churches, which maintained better relations than Rome with the Holy Land’s Muslim overlords. Only the Franciscans remained, and in 1342 they were appointed by Pope Clement VI as custodians of the local holy sites: They had full control over the tomb of Mary and later gained access to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and other churches.