Good Friday Collection offers hope in war-torn Holy Land

Even as the media speak of it far less today, arms continue to fire, people continue to die, lands remain contested, and Christians continue to emigrate in order to survive. Even schools often go without teachers, because they are not permitted to cross borders." ~ Cardinal Gugerotti

Peace was declared. Dialogues multiplied. Yet, as Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti of the Dicastery for Eastern Churches wrote to bishops worldwide this February, the weapons did not fall silent. 
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This is the world into which the Good Friday Collection is placed every year, not as a token gesture, but as an act of faith.

The collection itself is ancient. Since the 14th century, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land has cared for the sacred sites and the Christian communities living among them. Pope Paul VI gave the collection its modern form in his 1974 apostolic exhortation Nobis in Animo, recalling that St. Paul himself organized collections across Macedonia and Achaia for the struggling faithful in Jerusalem, recognizing in that act of giving "a bond of unity between the new communities of believers and the mother Church in Jerusalem." The pattern has never changed. The universal Church sustains the local Church in the land where faith was born. 

The stakes are high. Paul VI warned that if Christian presence in the Holy Land were ever to disappear, the holy sites would become mere museums, "living stones" gone, leaving only empty walls. That warning feels urgent now. Christians make up less than two percent of the population in the region today, down from roughly twenty percent a century ago. Many who remain have lost their livelihoods entirely, because the pilgrims who sustained local economies are, as the Cardinal writes, "almost without exception, afraid to return."

And yet they stay. Cardinal Gugerotti asks us to see their staying as a gift, and our giving as a response to it: "The Collection for the Holy Land may seem like a drop in the ocean. Yet the ocean, deprived of its drops, becomes a desert."

In the Diocese of Calgary, the Good Friday Collection serves a dual purpose. Half of the contributions are sent directly to the Church in the Holy Land, supporting parishes, schools, hospitals, and the ongoing witness of Christian communities in one of the world’s most contested regions. The remaining half is used locally and globally: funding international initiatives through the Diocese’s Mission Council and providing essential support to the four First Nations parish communities within our own diocese.

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Cardinal Gugerotti ends his letter not with statistics but with a challenge to all of us: 

Without sacrifice, without a real change in our way of living, we risk remaining inert before a world in flames — and thus complicit in its destruction." ~Cardinal Gugerotti, Dicastery for Eastern Churches

When you contribute to the Pontifical Good Friday Collection, you join with Catholics around the world in solidarity with the Church in the Holy Land.​ This Good Friday, please give generously at your parish, or online at catholicyyc.ca/goodfridaycollection.

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RESOURCES

• Letter from Cardinal Gugerotti
• A summary of the works of the Custody of the Holy Land
• Watch video "Good Friday collection for the Holy Land is a concrete sign of communion and hope"