Closed doors and defended borders are metaphors for fear that breed violence, the top Roman Catholic cleric in Jerusalem said in his midnight Christmas homily in Bethlehem.
“I am well aware that we are all victims of a growing sense of insecurity and mistrust,” Pierbattista Pizzaballa said during midnight mass at St. Catherine Church in Bethlehem.
“Hopes of peace too often disappointed, violence in recurrent attacks, so much rhetorical and ineffective speech push us to withdraw, to lock the doors, to set up surveillance systems, to run far away rather than to remain resisting in trust and hope,” said Pizzaballa, who was named by Pope Francis in June as Apostolic Administrator of the Latin Church in Jerusalem replacing retired patriarch Fouad Twal.
“We fear the stranger who knocks at the door of our home and at the borders of our countries. Closed doors, defended borders, before personal and political choices, are a metaphor for the fear that inevitably breed the violent dynamics of the present time,” Pizzaballa added.
“We are frightened by what happens in the world, with our hopes that, here, as in many countries around the world, drown in the midst of corruption, in the power of money, in sectarian violence, in fear: in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan. But also in our Holy Land, the thirst for justice, dignity, truth and true love continues to grow,”S he asserted.
“But we continue to reject and deny each other, living and thinking as if we only were there and there was no place there for the other,” he said.
Thousands of Christian pilgrims flocked to Bethlehem’s Church of Nativity on Christmas Eve to celebrate at the site where Christians believe Christ was born.
Hundreds, including Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister Rami Hamdallah along with a number of Palestinian officials and guests gathered at St Catherine Church in the Nativity to worship the midnight mas.
At midnight (2200 GMT) church bells rang as Catholic priests sang hymns in Latin. Crowds unable to enter the church watched the midnight mas on large screens hung in Manger Square.
“Our fears determine our choices and our orientations. We are tired and disoriented by what is happening around us and we cannot find the direction for our journey. We do not find a star that guides us,” said Pizzaballa.
“It is not just a sociological fact, it is rather an existential phenomenon, a ‘psychology of the enemy’ that fatally turns into ideology, begetting an aggressive lifestyle, a conflicting way of placing oneself before others, with no hope for the future. From house doors to states’ borders, all is closed, in fear and mistrust, in exclusion and war. We all feel excluded, blocked, separated,” he said.
The Apostolic Administrator invited his audience to cross the threshold and to come out their enclosures and have the courage to set aside special interests, “and to look at the other as a brother, in the full liberty of the children of God, stripping ourselves of all violence, oppression and arrogance.” (dpa/NAN)
