Gaza: roads without signs, a parish rebuilding the way

In Gaza, the parish priest of the Holy Family describes each day a people surviving amid the rubble, in a humanitarian crisis that does not relent. The roads are for the most part destroyed or gravely damaged, “roads without signs and signs without roads,” and the Christian community sets itself to raise again what can be raised.

To remake a road is not only a matter of civil engineering. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” says the Lord: every road that joins a starting point to its end is the image of the one that leads man to God. The Church has always held that the care of bodies and the care of souls go together, and that to feed, to shelter and to console are works of mercy by which one serves Christ in the poor. She teaches also to await peace not from arms but from God, whom we implore by prayer: each day, in the Lord’s Prayer, the Christian asks to be delivered from evil and to forgive as he is forgiven, never leaving to evil the last word.

The community rebuilds with what it finds. Cement is scarce and dear; it has happened that it was sold to them adulterated, mixed with flour. The wood of goods-pallets serves to remake the children’s benches; old boards and materials drawn from the gutted buildings are salvaged for the school, which is cleaned and partly repaired, like the parish. On Sunday, after the morning prayer, families spend a few hours beside a sea that the war has fouled, “a little picnic.” The priest says it plainly: there are as yet no concrete signs of improvement, and he asks that we keep praying for peace.

Sources. Saint John, XIV, 6 (Douay-Rheims, from the Vulgate); Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the Lord’s Prayer and on the works of mercy.