There is a well-loved quote attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi that runs like this: “Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” These are fitting words from the founder of the priestly Franciscan Order, which has, since the 1300s, been the Catholic Church’s official custodians of the Holy Land, a cultural crucible that consistently asks the impossible of its small but gritty Christian population.
Recent news of renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has led to fighting in the Gaza Strip throughout May, is again bringing into focus the superhuman resilience of Gaza’s Christians. These Palestinians are quite literally doing the impossible – continuing to pursue a life of charity in the midst of chaos. Penned in a densely populated 140 square miles of fiercely contested land overwhelmed by high COVID-19 rates, all while facing discrimination from the Muslim majority, the 1000-odd Christians of Gaza represent a miniscule percentage of the population (less than 1% as of 2015). The Catholic community is even smaller – a mere 133 people as of May 12, 2021.
The host of difficulties conspiring against this tiny community are nearly unimaginable in scale, as outlined in this article, which features the struggles of a local Catholic school and parish. Reopening from COVID lockdowns just in time for an onslaught of Israeli air attacks, the school of the Rosary Sisters has sustained damage from shrapnel. The effect of bombing and the constant fear of conflict is taking a real toll on the children, the article reports. Pointing out the inherent fragility and impressionability of the young, local parish priest Father Gabriel Romanelli remarked that behavioral problems have arisen in the Gazan children struggling to cope with such a volatile environment. In 2015, Father Jorge Hernandez, also of Holy Family Catholic Parish in Gaza, reported similarly distressing signs in the local youth a year after 2014’s infamous Gaza War. From disciplinary problems at home to physical implications like speech problems, bed-wetting, and hair loss, children have suffered immensely from the high tensions of daily life in Gaza.
Although the toll on children and their families has been great, the Gazan Catholic community is living out Saint Francis’s words in an incredible show of faith-filled determination. When one parish family’s apartment was damaged by bombing, their fellow parishioners started with the “necessary,” organizing to meet the spiritual and material needs of the affected couple and child, even offering them the option of sleeping at the parish. True to Saint Francis’s beloved quote, however, the family promptly responded by doing the “possible,” deciding to stay in their home and cover their windows with plastic until repairs were feasible. This combination of extending fraternal charity during a time of extreme stress and heroically pushing through incredible odds is what has Gazans somehow doing the impossible.
Sami El-Yousef, regional director for Palestine and Israel of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, told the Catholic News Service in 2015 that the people of Gaza are “resilient” and “proud to be both Christian and Palestinian, no matter the difficult conditions,” claiming the embroiled strip of land as “their home.” These sentiments, coming a year after one of the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian conflicts in decades, seem to be as true today. With a global pandemic at their heels and the prospect of a war-torn existence stretching to the horizon, Gaza’s Christians are a timely example of moral and physical courage that should give us all strength to keep the faith.
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