Cardinal Pizzaballa: Jerusalem is called to heal the world’s wounds

How should Christians live in the midst of the conflict currently afflicting the Holy Land?

That is the question at the heart of a new pastoral letter from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa. Released today, Monday 27th April, the letter is entitled “They returned to Jerusalem with great joy: A proposal for living the vocation of the Church in the Holy Land.”

The vocation of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizzaballa observes in the text, is to heal the world’s wounds. The Patriarch’s reflection revolves around the image of the Biblical city of Jerusalem, which “signifies coexistence and relationship, both civil and religious.”

The letter is structured in three parts: the first is an assessment of the current state of the region, the second a vision for the Church of Jerusalem, and the third reflects on the pastoral implications on parishes, families, schools, and institutions.

Pizzaballa emphasizes that the letter does not contain strictly political analysis: it is “political” only in a broader sense, insofar as it concerns our remaining, as Christians, within the polis, or actually existing world, while always oriented toward the true and definitive Polis, the heavenly Jerusalem.

Patriarch Pizzaballa begins with October 7 and the war in Gaza — “watershed events that brought one era to a close and opened another, doing so in the worst possible way.”

“What we are experiencing is not merely a local conflict,” he says. “The local conflict is the symptom of a much deeper crisis, a global paradigm shift. For decades, the international community, and particularly the Western world, believed in an international order based on rules, treaties, and multilateralism … Today, everyone seems to have woken up to the weakness in this system.”

“We are witnessing a renewed reliance on the use of force as a decisive means for resolving disputes,” Pizzaballa writes. “War has become the object of an idolatrous cult”