Archbishop Brislin on life in Gaza

(Vatican Radio) One of the bishops currently participating in an annual pilgrimage to the Holy Land led by a delegation of Catholic Bishops from Europe, North America and South Africa, is the Archbishop of Cape Town: Stephen Brislin.

Day two of the pilgrimage saw them celebrating Mass in Gaza. It also gave them the chance to to witness the conditions of difficulty and deprivation suffered by the population in Gaza as it lives in what is described as an “open air prison”.

When Vatican Radio’s Susy Hodges, who is travelling with the bishops, asked Archbishop Brislin for his impressions of life in Gaza, he said that despite the conditions, the people of Gaza continue to live their lives in the best possible way.

Listen to the interview…

Archbishop Brislin points out that life goes on even amidst great hardship. People continue to live their lives and make the best of what they have and what the conditions are.

That – he says - shows the great resilience of the human spirit. “Although they are suffering tremendously, they are able to continue their daily lives, they are able to maintain their families, to maintain a certain unity and harmony within their families”. And remarking on the people the bishops had the chance to interact with, Brislin says “they even maintain a sense of humour”.

The last place the Bishops visited was a centre for people with disabilities. It is called “Hope” – and Archbishop Brislin says that “hope is the last thing that dies” and he expresses his appreciation for the project and the work done there that “shows how amidst what all that has happened in this part of the world, and amidst the enormous pressure people feel they are under, they continue to work and to care for other people, for those with disabilities and to help them integrate”.

He says that what really struck him about that project was to see how they have worked so hard to overcome the stigma that people with disabilities so often experience. He says that this is fundamental because "it is all about human dignity, it’s about people appreciating others as persons and recognizing in them that dignity that comes from God, from the fact that we are made in the image of God".

“I think that one of the greatest tragedies of Gaza is that yes, it is a massive prison with high walls and there is only one entrance that is being used into Israel…(...) people feel themselves closed in and that is bad; people don’t have access to resources but more fundamentally bad is that they are being treated as lesser people; there is an exercise of power, it’s an exercise of dominance and these people are in a way being made less than human, less than what God intended them to be…”