While Christians represent barely 2% of the total population of the Holy Land, Benedictine Abbot Nikodemus Schnabel said he is hopeful that the situation can be reversed despite the downward trend, which is worsening over time.
The abbot said the Christian faithful in the region, particularly in the heart of Jerusalem, have been severely affected by war, economic crisis, and all manner of hardships.
“If you think this is an Eldorado [utopia] of Christianity, the reality is different,” he said. “All Christians together are less than 2%. For us, dreaming of reaching 5% or 6% would already be a lot,” Schnabel noted in an interview with the pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).
“If you think of the most secularized regions in Europe like the Czech Republic or the former East Germany, even there Christians are many times more numerous than here,” he remarked.
“My fear is that the Holy Land could become a kind of ‘Christian Disneyland,’” he warned. “The holy places will remain, with monks and priests. But there may be no Christian families, no young Christians, no ordinary Christian life,” Schnabel warned.
In 1948, the year the state of Israel was created, Christians constituted 20% of the local population of the Holy Land.
The reality of the Latin Church
The abbot addressed the reality of the Latin-rite Church, which is composed of Arabic-speaking Palestinian Catholics, Hebrew-speaking Catholics, and migrants and asylum-seekers.
The first group includes those Catholics “who live in Israel with citizenship” as well as those without political rights in addition to Christians in the West Bank and the small community of believers in Gaza. This group of Catholics lives under oppression, subjected to the violence of war and the Hamas regime, a situation that Schnabel characterizes as a “double occupation.”
The second group is “a small but growing community, composed of mixed (for example Catholic-Orthodox or Catholic-Jewish) families and integrated into Israeli society.” This reality — being both Israeli and Catholic — is “a new phenomenon,” the monk noted.
Schnabel explained that the migrant group is the largest, comprising “more than 100,000 Catholics” hailing from countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Americas. “They are, in many ways, the most vulnerable,” he noted, due to the precarious working conditions to which they are subjected. “They often have the feeling that it doesn’t matter whether they are there or not.”
The economic survival of Christians
He noted that improving housing and employment opportunities would be an important step toward helping these Christian families remain in the region.
“Around 60% of Arabic-speaking Christians depend on tourism. And the last good year was 2019. This is the biggest challenge,“ he explained. ”People leave because they don’t see a future.”
“Pray that there is a future for Christians here,” he urged.
The abbot emphasized that the Church is “neither pro-Israel nor pro-Palestine, but pro-human.” The Church is present “on all sides,” he said.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.