12/10/00

Praying for the Peace of Jerusalem

The Feast of Christ the King, at the end of the Church’s year of grace, and the first Sundays of Advent, at the beginning of the liturgical year, help us live now as if time had already come to an end. In liturgical time, the past is brought into the present, and the present contains the promised future. God’s kingdom is now and is yet to come; always in that kingdom, however, is the peace that is the sign of God’s presence among his people.

God has been uniquely present in the history of the human race in events that took place in the land now ruled by the state of Israel and the Palestinian authority. The Holy Land is paradoxically both a place often visited by violence and yet the symbol of a peace this world cannot give. As we all know, the long peace process designed to establish realistic and defensible borders for the state of Israel and make possible a declaration of Palestinian statehood has broken down. Violence among peoples has increased; violence against sacred places such as Rachel’s tomb reflects the violence that destroys ordinary homes, sacred to the families that inhabit them. Despair over finding a safe haven in a peaceful homeland has contributed especially to the melting away of the Christian community native to the Holy Land. Arabs but not Muslims, Israeli citizens but not Jews, Palestinian and Israeli Christians have been leaving the Middle East to settle where they can find hope for a peaceful future.

In Chicago, the local Jewish community once again, with pain and sorrow, gathers its resources to support a state absolutely necessary not only to the security of its own citizens but also to the identity of Jews around the world. Catholics can and should understand this and do what we can to support them. The growing Palestinian and Muslim community here, growing in part because they cannot inhabit the land and houses that belonged to their parents and grandparents, is outraged by every report of violence between the Israeli army and Arab youths. Concern for family members left behind by immigrants to this country is an emotion every Catholic can recognize.

Unable to approve every action of the Israeli government, yet horrified by terrible threats to Jews that echo even here cries once heard in Nazi Germany; mystified by what seem erratic moves by the Palestinian authorities, yet sympathetic to their desire to play their role as a people in their own state on their own land, many Catholics and others are not sure how to judge the current situation in the Middle East. Between those opposing one another, there is neither equality of force nor similarity of mind-set. How will peace ever come to be?

Yet even an attempt to be evenhanded in judging is itself a trap, because the situation does not lend itself to dispassion. Passionately, therefore, all people who believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob should turn to God and ask for the peace that is his sovereign gift and his desire for his people. At their annual meeting three weeks ago, the United States bishops spoke of peace in the Holy Land in a statement that would have been improved had it been checked with both Jews and Arabs. Inadequate though the statement might be, its plea to pray for the peace of Jerusalem speaks of the bishops’ deep desire for a solution in the Middle East which will respect all peoples and respect, as well, the sacred sites where God has moved among his people.

In his address to his fellow bishops, the president of the conference, Bishop Joseph Fiorenza of Houston quoted Cardinal Martini of Milan who has written that “the beauty that will save the world is the love that shares pain. It is the beauty before which the soul experiences a certain noble elevation of the spirit above and beyond the simple predisposition to the pleasure of the senses.” The creation from the ugly violence in the Holy Land today of a true peace in the future would be a work of beauty that would give witness to God’s salvific action. Only in God’s action can past tragedy and present violence issue into a future peace. Therefore, we pray that God’s kingdom may come, in Israel and everywhere God’s people are in pain.

I join the other U.S. Catholic bishops in asking all Catholics to pray during this Advent season for peace in the Holy Land. To prayer, we ask Catholics to add fasting and abstinence from meat on the Fridays of Advent until the feast of the Epiphany of the Lord on January 7, 2001. This feast is also the day which marks the end of the Great Jubilee. A great gift from the Lord at the end of the Jubilee celebration commemorating his birth would be the coming of peace in the land of his birth. In solidarity with all those who live and suffer in that land, let us pray fervently for the peace of Jerusalem. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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