Pope Francis has been calling Palestinian Christians sheltering in Gaza City churches every night for over a year, offering comfort and reassurance during the ongoing conflict.
Every night without fail, a mobile phone rings in the Holy Family church in Gaza , and a parish priest answers. The voice at the end of the line is that of Pope Francis , head of the Catholic Church and spiritual leader to a global flock of 1.4bn people. For more than a year, the pontiff has made nightly calls to the church to comfort the hundreds of Palestinian Christians sheltering there as fighting rages on the streets outside and Israeli warplanes pound much of the city around them to rubble.
For those living in harsh conditions in the church complex and now preparing for their second Christmas surrounded by war, the regular contact with the pontiff reassures them that they have not been forgotten. “It calms our fears and makes us feel cared for,” said Attallah Tarazi, a retired surgeon. “The Pope gives us his blessings, and he prays with us if the connection is good.” The entire Christian community in Gaza — up to 1,000 people — sought sanctuary in October 2023 in the Catholic Holy Family Church complex and in the nearby Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, the only two Christian houses of worship in the territory. The pontiff said of the Gaza conflict in his annual Christmas greetings on Saturday: “Yesterday children have been bombed. This is cruelty; this is not war.” He told CBS’s Sixty Minutes programme in May: “I speak every night at seven to the Gaza parish . . . They tell me about what happens there. It’s very tough, very tough . . . Sometimes they go hungry and they tell me things. There is a lot of suffering.” On December 22, the leader of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, led a Christmas mass in the Holy Family church on a rare outside visit allowed by Israeli authorities into the besieged strip. Despite the war outside, priests in cassocks regularly conduct mass in the two Gaza churches under domes painted with biblical scene
Pope Francis Gaza Palestinian Christians War Christmas
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