Pope Francis condemns Israel’s bombing in Gaza—again
December 24, 2024
Pope Francis condemned the Israeli bombing in Gaza on Saturday in his annual Christmas address to the Cardinals and other senior leaders in the Vatican. “Yesterday, children were bombed,” he said, referring to last Friday’s deadly Israeli strikes. “This is cruelty, not war. I want to say this because it touches the heart.”
Frustrated, the Pope also called attention to an incident last Friday when Israeli authorities refused to allow the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem to enter Gaza to lead worship—“as they had promised,” Francis said. The following day, having reversed their decision, Cardinal Pizzaballa, entered Gaza and led Mass, telling the congregation, “The whole world is with you.”
Earlier this month, Patriarch Pizzaballa had shared that Pope Francis is known by the children of Holy Family as “the grandfather.” Pizzaballa said that the Pope calls the parish every day at 7:00 p.m. “Maybe half a minute, 30 seconds, maybe more, maybe less… He became the grandfather of the children, the Pope, because… they know that he is calling.” Francis is said to be briefed every day about the situation in Gaza by members of the parish.
One may wonder if it’s the suffering children in Gaza who have stirred the Pope’s increasingly vocal criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza, in spite of his usual care in taking sides in a conflict.
The Pope first used the word genocide in his book published in November, Hope Never Disappoints: Pilgrims Toward a Better World, suggesting that it “should be carefully studied to determine whether [the situation] meets the technical definition outlined by legal experts and international organizations.”
Then in December, the Pope welcomed to the Vatican a Palestinian-themed creche—a physical depiction of the birth of Jesus. In the creche, the baby Jesus is blanketed with a keffiyeh, a traditional Arabic headdress which, for some time now, has been associated with Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation. “Enough war, enough violence,” Francis said at the ceremony. “Do you know that one of the most profitable investments here is in arms production? Profit for killing. But why? Enough wars! May there be peace in all the world and for all people, whom God loves.”
In an interview with an Argentine television station on December 20, Pope Francis referred to “criminal acts” in Gaza, which he said fail to respect the laws of war. “When you see a mother with her two children walking in the street because she went to retrieve something from her home and is gunned down on her way back to the parish where she lives, that’s not war under normal rules. It’s terrible,” he said.
Still again, in Sunday’s prayer at the Vatican, Pope Francis condemned Israel’s assault on Gaza and called for a ceasefire on war fronts around the world. “And with pain I think of Gaza,” he said, “of so much cruelty, of the children who are machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals—how much cruelty.”
The Pope’s growing criticism of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing in Gaza and his call for an investigation into the charge of Israeli genocide will be heard by close watchers of the Vatican. One hopes that the church’s bishops and priests will share his views with the people in the pews.