Holy Land: uncertain future for migrants and refugees
(Vatican Radio) 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. 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. Susy
Hodges is travelling with the Bishops on this year’s pilgrimage and she filed this
report:
Listen
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. 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.
With the Bishops in the Holy Land, I’m
Susy Hodges