Last week, the Vatican was overtaken by a controversy about the Israel-Hamas war—one that turned on two words. On February 13th, the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, trailed by reporters as he left an event in Rome, spoke about Israel’s military strikes on Gaza. “Israel’s right of self-defense, which has been invoked to justify this operation, must be proportional, and with thirty thousand dead it certainly isn’t,” he said. Israel’s Embassy to the Holy See soon issued a statement, in Italian, calling Parolin’s remark about a “proportional” response “deplorevole,” or “deplorable.” The use of that word, as the theologian Massimo Faggioli noted on X, evoked the Vatican’s landmark 1965 declaration that the Church “deplores” antisemitism in any form. Implicitly, Israel was faulting a church leader for antisemitism, and doing so in the Church’s own terms.
It was the latest episode in a running drama over the Vatican’s position on the war. The day after the October 7th attack on Israel, in which Hamas and allied militants killed more than twelve hundred people and took two hundred and forty hostages, Pope Francis addressed the horror in general terms, saying, “Let the attacks and weapons cease, please, because it must be understood that terrorism and war do not lead to any resolutions, but only to the death and suffering of many innocent people.” The next Wednesday, at his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square, he affirmed “the right of those who are attacked to defend themselves,” and asked “that the hostages be released immediately.” Cardinal Parolin then called on Hamas to release the hostages, but cautioned that “in Israel’s legitimate defense, the lives of Palestinian civilians living in Gaza should not be endangered.” During the Sunday prayer service called the Angelus, on October 29th, Francis called for a ceasefire, saying, “Stop, brothers and sisters: war is always a defeat—always, always!”
On November 12th, more than four hundred rabbis and scholars involved in interreligious dialogue signed an open letter urging Francis to “extend a hand in solidarity to the Jewish community”—for example, by distinguishing “Hamas’ terrorist massacre aimed at killing as many civilians as possible” from “the civilian casualties of Israel’s war of self-defense.” The next week, Francis met with a dozen relatives of the hostages, and then met with ten relatives of Palestinians killed or jailed by Israel since October 7th. Emerging from their meeting, the Palestinians told reporters that Francis had spoken of Israel’s campaign as “genocide.” The Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, later denied that he had. The Washington Post then reported that, during a phone call in October, Francis had told Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, that it is “forbidden to respond to terror with terror.” In a letter to his “Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel,” dated February 2nd, Francis reiterated that “the relationship that binds us to you is particular and singular, without ever obscuring, naturally, the relationship that the Church has with others and the commitment towards them too.” Response to his letter was scant and muted. “Many Israeli and Jewish leaders do not appear inclined to go out of their way to praise the pope’s letter,” John L. Allen, Jr., the editor of Crux, observed, “despite whatever appreciation they may feel for its contents—which suggests that post-Oct. 7 tensions in the relationship with Catholicism won’t be so easily assuaged.”
These rhetorical tempests echoed those that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, when Francis was accused of equivocation for his initial refusal to name Russia as the aggressor in the war. At the time, Vatican officials defended Francis’s opacity by explaining that he hoped to act as a mediator in some future peace process—even though both countries are steeped in Orthodox Christian traditions that are leery of Roman Catholicism and of the papacy, in particular. This time, Francis is speaking more pointedly, and he is on firmer ground: for sixty years, the Vatican has sought a fresh start with Judaism, mindful of the deep roots of antisemitism in the Church’s past and Pope Pius XII’s silence during the Holocaust; Pope John Paul II spoke of Palestinians’ “natural right to a homeland” during a visit to the West Bank in 2000, and the Vatican has since supported a two-state solution, recognizing the State of Palestine in 2015. (In response, an Israeli official insisted that the recognition would “not advance the peace process”.) And yet it seems that, even in this war—fought in the place seen as the cradle of monotheism and known to Christians as the Holy Land—there is no clear role for a Pope.
Francis visited Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Jordan in 2014, and he has taken a keen interest in the Church’s activities in the area. In 2020, he named Pierbattista Pizzaballa the Latin Patriarch—the top Catholic official for Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Cyprus. Born in 1965 in northern Italy, and a Franciscan friar since his late teens, Pizzaballa has spent most of his career in Jerusalem; he is fluent in Hebrew and English, but not in Arabic (a sticking point for some; his two predecessors were Arab Christians, one from Palestine and the other from Jordan). When Francis, during his 2014 visit, invited Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, and Shimon Peres, then the President of Israel, to come to Rome and pray with him at the Vatican Gardens, Pizzaballa made the arrangements. In Rome last September, Pizzaballa was made a cardinal—the first to be based in Jerusalem—and was soon added to prognosticators’ lists of the papabili, the prospective successors to Francis. In any case, the elevation of a cleric who has worked directly with the Pope emphasized the Vatican’s commitment to the Church’s presence in the region.
That presence is complex and paradoxical. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in the West Bank; soon after, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus passed through Gaza on the “flight into Egypt,” as King Herod ordered the slaughter of male youth “under two” in Bethlehem. The sites of the Last Supper, the Agony in the Garden, and the Crucifixion, all in or near present-day Jerusalem, are cherished destinations for Christian pilgrims. In the Middle Ages, European Catholic monarchs launched the Crusades to claim Jerusalem from the Muslim “infidels.” Friars from Italy went to Jerusalem in 1219—at the urging of Francis of Assisi himself—and Franciscans have been at the heart of the Catholic community there ever since. In 1964, Paul VI became the first Pope to visit Jerusalem; in 2000, John Paul II, at the Western Wall, asked God’s forgiveness for the offenses of Christians against Jews.
In this region dense with proto-Catholic history, however, Catholics themselves are few. William Dalrymple, in his 1997 book, “From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East,” observed that “fewer Palestinian Christians now remain in Palestine than live outside it.” He added that the remaining Christians “in Jerusalem could be flown out in just nine jumbo jets.” There has been further attrition since. In 2023, prior to the Israel-Hamas war, Christians made up two per cent of the population of Israel and one per cent of the population of the West Bank. The population of Gaza—more than two million people—included only a thousand or so Christians, down from seven thousand in 2007, when Hamas took control of the area and Israel instituted a blockade. Most were Greek Orthodox; the Catholic community (known as “the Latin Christians”), numbered fewer than a hundred and fifty people, centered on the lone Catholic church: Holy Family, in Gaza City.
Cardinal Pizzaballa was still in Rome when Hamas carried out its attack on civilians in southern Israel. But that same day, the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, an ecumenical group of more than a dozen prelates to which he belongs, issued a statement. “We unequivocally condemn any acts that target civilians, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, or faith,” the group declared, without naming Hamas. The Israeli Embassy to the Holy See, on X, responded sharply, accusing the clerics of creating a “false symmetry” between Hamas’s “hideous war crime” and Israel’s “right to self defence.” Speaking to reporters nine days later, Pizzaballa offered to trade places with the children held hostage by Hamas, and he has since sought to strike a balance in public. Along with other Christian leaders, he joined a holiday meeting with Isaac Herzog at the President’s residence, in Jerusalem; entering a Christmas Eve vespers service in Bethlehem three days later, he wore a kaffiyeh over his cardinal’s garb. And from the Latin Patriarchate’s headquarters in Jerusalem, he has coördinated relief efforts with Gabriel Romanelli, the pastor of Holy Family church.
