A Very Eventful Day in Bethlehem and Jerusalem

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis wrapped up the second leg of his three-day visit to the Holy Land on Sunday with a highly significant ecumenical prayer service in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

This incredibly eventful day saw him inviting the leaders of Israel and Palestine to join him soon in the Vatican to pray for peace; it saw him making an unscheduled stop at the separation barrier on his way to celebrate Mass in Bethlehem's Manger Square; it saw him deploring a bomb attack in Brussels and spending time with refugee children in Palestine.

During his busy schedule Pope Francis has given himself time to pray and to reflect as well as to talk and to listen... 

Vatican Radio's Philippa Hitchen is in Jerusalem with the Pope. She sent us this report wrapping up Pope Francis' Sunday in the Holy Land.   

The evening encounter between Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew was always billed as the centre piece of this visit to the Holy Land. In the small square outside the Church of Holy Sepulchre TV crews and reporters were crammed in with cameras at the ready to capture the historic embrace between the two men, who’d already met in private in the Nuncio’s house in Jerusalem where their predecessors met half a century ago. As bells rang out, Francis and Bartholomew entered from opposite sides of the square and greeted each other as a sign of the very warm friendship that has developed between them – don’t forget Bartholomew was the first Orthodox leader to ever attend the inauguration of a pontificate.  After smiling for the cameras, the two went inside the Church where leaders of all the different Christian churches were seated for an the ecumenical prayer service.  Orthodox bishops with their black cylindrical hats, Armenians  with their long, flowing hoods, Oriental Orthodox with their embroidered black caps, but I also spotted the head of the Anglican church in the Holy land and the leader of the World Lutheran Federation. Plus of course the local Catholic bishops who’d joined the papal delegation and a couple of visiting cardinals, like Theodore McCarrick who’s been a pioneer of interfaith and ecumenical dialogue in the region. It was an extraordinary snapshot of the whole Christian world, gathered right at the very spot where the Church began.

But that event came at the end of what can only be described as a day of electrifying events. Ahead of the Pope’s arrival in Bethlehem in the morning, the expectations of the people there seemed to me to be just a little unrealistic. They talked  to me about their hopes of the Pope coming to build bridges and bring hope into what is a seemingly intractable conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Lots of world leaders visit that awful, menacing separation barrier that makes Palestinians’ lives so difficult in so very many ways. Lots of dignitaries go to the refugee camps and see the dreadful, cramped conditions in which Palestinian families have been living for decades since their houses and villages were occupied by the Israeli army. All those people make promises that things will change for the better, yet the conflict drags on, negotiations break down and it’s very hard to keep hope alive, especially among the younger generation.
Yet in the space of a morning I really believe that Pope Francis galvanised political leaders here or at the very least challenged Palestinian President Abbas and Israeli President Peres to make peace possible here. After making an unscheduled stop to pray for a moment at the wall, the Pope then departed from his prepared text at the end of the Mass to invite the two leaders to ‘my home in the Vatican’ as he put it, to pray and talk about a way out of this untenable situation. He then repeated the invitation to Peres and Prime Minister Netanyah and shortly afterwards Fr Lombardi confirmed that both men are planning to take up that invitation and travel to the Vatican in the very near future. There may still be walls and guns and suspicion in the hearts of many people here, but suddenly there’s also  tiny glimmer of hope that change and a brighter future is possible for all those living in this ‘City of Peace’