We of Where Peter Is mulled over writing something about what’s going on in Gaza for a long time before I offered to do so. The stakes could hardly be any higher for getting an intervention on this right or wrong, especially for a site that elicits strong reactions in the world of religious cultural journalism. With something like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’re already hard-pressed to balance the straightforward yearning for peace with the recognition that there are matters of justice and injustice involved as well. In fact, some WPI contributors agree much more than others do with Pope Francis, the man whom this website exists to support and defend, on how and where this balance is to be struck.
In the Southern Levant there are more issues still — the usual difficulties of interfaith relations, plus the unique sensitivities involved in Catholicism’s historical relationships with Judaism and with Islam. All of this is to say that we’re aware of the difficulties that come with writing about this, and as such we are going to let Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and ex officio head of the Latin Rite bishops’ conference for much of the Middle East, speak for himself as much as possible.
“It is objectively intolerable.”
That’s how Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, described the situation in Gaza in a recent interview with the Italian television station TV2000.
“We have always had many problems of all kinds,” he continued, “and even the economic-financial situation has always been very fragile, but there has never been hunger before.”
“Everyone—religious, political, and social communities,” said Patriarch Pizzaballa, “must do everything possible to put an end this situation.”
“The weakness of the United States,” emphasised the Patriarch, “creates a great dilemma, because, until now, there has always been someone to put things in order. Now there is no longer anyone to play this role, and we have to do it ourselves. I don’t know if, how, or when this will be possible.”
Note well what Pizzaballa isn’t saying, which arguments he isn’t making. He is not interested in articulating an account of which geopolitical actors are morally right or wrong, and, probably unlike most Palestinians, he sees “the weakness of the United States” as part of the problem. (To run the risk of offering what the Duke of Wellington might have called “too nearly an expression of opinion,” I don’t think this is a shocking take, even though it is a counterintuitive one. Whatever else can be said about the American position, it is markedly less harsh than the current Israeli one, and if the United States is not going to hold the strongest position in this particular geopolitical space, Israel is. Pizzaballa notes that for one of the direct parties to the conflict to be in this position is, as Hamlet would say, the rub. Again: “Now there is no longer anyone to play this role, and we have to do it ourselves.”)
This isn’t to say that Cardinal Pizzaballa is necessarily correct here from a political standpoint; his interests in the situation, as a pastor, are different from those of a politician or a general or even a secular charity or NGO. (In another Vatican News piece in which Pizzaballa calls for a sustained ceasefire, he downplays the Church’s diplomatic role in the region and seems pessimistic about its ability to make that happen.) But it’s worth considering that these perspectives do exist, perspectives that are not just the political and military narratives about this with which we are currently most familiar.
Speaking further of the situation during Holy Week, Pizzaballa says:
“It will be a difficult Easter….I think of the loneliness of Jesus in Gethsemane, which is now shared by all of us.”
Let us all, in this difficult Easter, pray for a lasting and just peace.
Image: Then-Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa at the Easter Vigil in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, April 15, 2017. From Wikimedia Commons.
Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander and now lives in Upstate New York. A lifelong fascination with religious ritual led him into first the Episcopal Church and then the Catholic Church. An alumnus of Boston University School of Theology and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution, he is unmarried and works in the nonprofit sector. He writes at Silicate Siesta.
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