Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem tells Detroit Catholics Gaza remains in ruins after ceasefire; just 541 Christians left. Urges prayers, aid.
Newsroom (11/12/2025 Gaudium Press ) The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem painted a harrowing picture of life in Gaza two months after the October ceasefire, telling a gathering of Metro Detroit Catholics that the absence of daily bombs has done little to ease a humanitarian catastrophe that has left the enclave’s tiny Christian community on the brink.
“People are living in tents without anything,” Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa said Dec. 5 at a news conference at St. John’s Resort in this western Detroit suburb. “No water, no electricity, no schools, no hospitals. The vast majority of the infrastructure is destroyed.”
Speaking on the second day of a four-day pastoral visit to southeast Michigan, the cardinal said only 541 Catholics remain in Gaza — all of them now sheltering inside the compound of Holy Family Parish, the Strip’s lone Catholic church.
“They are all still there,” he said. “Their houses are destroyed, they have nothing, but they are living in the church like a monastery.”
Cardinal Pizzaballa was the featured guest at “United in Faith: Bridging Hearts from the Motor City to the Holy Land,” a fundraising dinner hosted by the Archdiocese of Detroit that drew roughly 500 people. Together with an earlier event hosted by the Chaldean Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle, the gatherings raised more than $500,000 for pastoral care, education, and humanitarian relief in the Holy Land. The total does not include $533,000 collected in Metro Detroit parishes in August for Gaza relief.
Detroit Archbishop Edward J. Weisenburger, who invited the cardinal and joined him at the news conference alongside Chaldean Bishop Francis Y. Kalabat, called the evening a response to Christ’s foundational mission “in the land where he was born, lived, died and resurrected.”
Even with the ceasefire, Cardinal Pizzaballa said, living conditions “have not changed much.” Every person in Gaza has been displaced, 80 percent of homes are destroyed, and more than one million people — including the entire Christian population — are living in tents on bare sand.
“When there is rain, it’s a disaster for them,” he said. Children have not attended school in three years. Medical care is almost nonexistent; chemotherapy and dialysis are “impossible.” During his July visit, the cardinal said, parishioners saw meat for the first time in nine months when his delegation brought chicken.
Although aid trucks have begun entering Gaza, most food reaches marketplaces rather than the neediest, and destroyed banks make cash inaccessible.
“You cannot access money; it is not a physical possibility,” he said.
Beyond physical deprivation, the cardinal described a rising wave of emotional and spiritual trauma now that immediate survival is no longer the only concern.
“All these questions that couldn’t find emotional space during the war are now coming out, and this has created a lot of frustration,” he said.
Yet amid the devastation, Cardinal Pizzaballa said he has never heard a word of hatred from Gaza’s Catholics. Recalling a conversation with a former hospital director as bombs fell nearby, he quoted the man: “We Christians have a problem. Amidst all the violence, we are not able to hate them.”
Three priests and five nuns — from the Missionaries of Charity and the Family of the Incarnate Word — live with the community, maintaining a rigorous schedule of Mass, rosary, adoration, and vespers. In the past two years the parish has celebrated three baptisms, three births, and one marriage — the honeymoon spent in an abandoned house on church grounds.
“Life continues,” the cardinal said.
Cardinal Pizzaballa stressed that hope “cannot remain alone” but must be rooted in faith and concrete action. While political institutions have failed, he placed trust in grassroots efforts by Christians, Muslims, and Jews to defend “the rights of the poor.”
“At least it says to the people that not all is lost,” he said.
Archbishop Weisenburger, who visited Gaza’s Holy Family Parish in 2014 with a delegation of U.S. bishops, called the current poverty “beyond comprehension” and said U.S. Catholics have a moral duty to stand with the voiceless.
The cardinal concluded his visit Dec. 7 with Mass at the National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica in Royal Oak and encouraged American pilgrims to resume visits to the Holy Land, insisting the sites are safe despite lingering fears.
“The pilgrimages are safe,” he said. “This is an occasion for me to say that.”
- Raju Hasmukh with files from OSV News
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