Bishops’ second day in the Holy Land: Our Reporter
Gaza, 14 January 2014: The second day of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land by a delegation
of Catholic Bishops from Europe, North America and South Africa saw them celebrating
Mass in Gaza, talking with Western embassy officials in Tel Aviv and meeting religious
sisters involved in pastoral care of Christian migrants and asylum seekers, reports
Vatican Radio’s Susy Hodges travelling with the delegation. The Bishops tour the Holy
Land every January to show solidarity with Christians living in the land where Jesus
was born, carried out his ministry and met his death. The coordination group of
Episcopal Conferences in Support of the Catholic Church and of Christians in the Holy
Land, often called Holy Land Coordination, started their pilgrimage on Sunday, 12th
January and will conclude on 16th January. The Coordination is composed
of bishops from North America, Canada, South Africa and the European Union.
Our
visit to Gaza gave us a first- hand experience of the lengthy and stringent security
measures set up by Israel to screen all those entering and leaving the territory,
said Susy. Our organisers had calculated just over an hour to cross over from the
Israeli side to Gaza and a slightly longer time on our return but this turned out
to be over-optimistic as more than two hours was spent going through the numerous
and intricate screening processes plus the searching of luggage and personal effects.
After our departure from Gaza, we headed to the bustling modern metropolis
of Tel Aviv with its gleaming high rise buildings and pristine shoreline. It provides
a striking contrast to the ramshackle housing, widespread poverty and unhygienic conditions
that reign in Gaza, where we saw abandoned garbage strewn across almost every available
open space.
But even a modern city like Tel Aviv has its hidden underbelly
of poverty and deprivation and a sizeable proportion of those living in these poorer
neighbourhoods are migrants or asylum seekers. Many of these people come from the
Horn of Africa area, the Philippines, India and Sri Lanka and they include many Christians.
We met a group of Catholic migrants together with a couple of religious sisters who
minister to them and were struck by their strong faith and mutually supportive network.
With the Israel government recently tightening its restrictions on illegal migrants,
these vulnerable people face an increasingly uncertain future. Source: VR Eng