A Good Day to Pray for Peace in the Holy Land

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In the Latin Church’s calendar in Jerusalem, Oct. 25 is the feast of Our Lady, Queen of Palestine and the Holy Land. The devotion dates back to 1095 and the First Crusade. The feast was officially liturgically celebrated in the 1920s.

Latin Catholics are a minority reminiscent of Poland in 1939, caught between the warring ambitions of Russia and Germany. No matter who comes out on top, Latin Christians will still have to struggle to survive in this cradle of Christianity.

Mother Teresa’s nuns in Gaza have already survived a bombing of their convent and the local Catholic parish in which two lay women were killed by sniper fire, according to the Latin Patriarch. This is a reminder that the innocent and guilty will be swept away as this avalanche of violence continues.

Now that the war has expanded to Christian communities in Lebanon, the further displacement of the Catholic minority has entered a new phase. There will be a special Mass tomorrow in Israel at the Shrine of Our Lady Queen of Palestine and of the Holy Land at Deir Rafat in central Israel. There, they will beseech Mary, who walked these very lands, to exert her motherly intercession for the peace mankind has been unable to find.

After one year of fighting in Gaza and a push in Lebanon in the second year of this war, there is little objective hope for peace in the near future. Last week, a security breach (or was it a security plant?) revealed a United States intelligence document outlining new Israeli war plans. It states that its espionage on Israel reveals that it has nuclear weapons (something the United States government had implausibly denied knowing about for years) and that Israel has a specific plan ready to launch a military attack on Iran.

There are two hundred or so American service men and women manning key military equipment that recently arrived in Israel to reinforce the Iron Dome defense system. They will be in the immediate line of fire if the bombers and missiles begin to fly between Israel and Iran. There will also be hundreds of Russian troops on the Iranian side of the shooting. They are there to assist missile operations as the BRICS economic alliance moves to a deeper unofficial military coalition. Another mini world war could be in the offing.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a big advocate of regime change. He believes his decapitation campaign against Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Gaza and Lebanon will lead to an end to the war. He also wants regime change in Iran. This is not a new strategy.

Here is Netanyahu testifying in Congress for regime change in Iraq in 2002. His rosy scenario about the peace and prosperity dovetailed neatly into the Bush administration regime change policy.

When you get down to it, none of us have any say in the policy of the Likud Party in Israel and the Mullahs in Iran. But we can pray for peace to Our Lady Queen of Palestine and the Holy Land. Prayer can offer a way out of a conflict mere mortals seem incapable of finding.

There is much historical precedence for the event-altering power of intercessory prayer. One need only recall Mother Teresa’s role in praying to Our Lady in Beirut in 1982 to rescue 37 severely mentally ill and crippled children in a bombed-out hospital. They were stranded and alone in no man’s land between military lines.

Government officials said a pause for peace was impossible – but the impossible happened, and the children were rescued. Unfortunately, the BBC footage documenting this event from start to finish does not seem to be online, but here is a straightforward retelling of the story based on eyewitness testimony. It is in the first six minutes of the homily. Here is a UPI news report at the time of the rescue.

Prayer works. And for those who don’t pray, consider Georges Bernanos’s words: “The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.” So let’s all at least wish to pray for peace. So far, the human means to achieve that end don’t seem to be working.