The insidious element underlying the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas is a mentality of Jews and Palestinians denying the existence of each other, said the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
“What we’re seeing now is ‘Me and no other,’ … the language of one refusing the other. It’s become the daily material that you breathe in in the media, in social media, etc.,” Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa said at an annual gathering held in Rimini, Italy.
He said that even when the war ends, there will still be a major challenge to restore lasting peace. To rebuild from an attitude of denying the existence of the other, of hatred and mistrust, will be a “huge effort that everyone will need to commit to,” said the patriarch, who is based in Jerusalem and is responsible for a small Christian community in Gaza City in the midst of the devastating conflict.
Cardinal Pizzaballa was the keynote speaker at an annual high-profile Catholic gathering known colloquially as the “Meeting.” It is sponsored by the Communion and Liberation movement.
In a q-and-a session on the first day of the Meeting, the patriarch discussed his vocation as a Franciscan Friar, which he discovered when he was a child growing up in the Bergamo region of Italy. After joining the Order of Friars Minor, he was sent to study Scripture in Jerusalem, an experience that took him from a place where people were “Catholic from before you were born” to a situation in which he was a minority.
He said that he and other friars studying in a biblical school befriended Orthodox Jewish students, and they read the Gospel together and discussed Christianity. Pizzaballa befriended one who questioned him about the Resurrection. The young Italian friar suddenly found that he could not provide an explanation for someone who was outside the faith. He took it as a sign of the value of interreligious dialogue, helping him to deepen his own faith.
Need for grassroots dialogue
Today in the Holy Land, he lamented, interreligious dialogue is in crisis, as leaders of the three Abrahamic faiths are not able to meet together in public. Cardinal Pizzaballa urged a renewed push for such dialogue, but suggested that it take place more on the grassroots level than among the “elites.”
The current war, which began after Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 and taking 200 hostage, has resulted in the deaths of 40,000 Palestinians, Palestinian authorities claim. Pizzaballa said that “no one is waiting for Christians to solve the problem.”
“Politically, we are more or less irrelevant,” he said. But it’s vital that the Church remains in the midst of the situation, to give people support and to be “capable of saying a word, because when there’s a crisis, the first thing people ask is ‘Where were you?’ And the response is ‘I was there.’”
“Our little community in Gaza is not just sitting there looking at themselves, waiting for the war to end, but seeking to help, with our support,” he said. “Another thing, the word Pope Francis often uses is ‘parousia.’ We can’t resolve the problem, but we can give a word of truth, as a people who can see what’s happening who are not part of the conflict. I think this is the role that the Church can play.”
