By Devin Watkins
Each year, on Good Friday, a collection is taken up in Catholic churches across the world and the funds raised are sent to the Custody of the Holy Land, which runs and oversees the Church’s work around the Holy Places.
On Monday, Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, Prefect of the Dicastery for Eastern Churches, sent a letter to Bishops around the globe to encourage their appeal for the Good Friday Collection for the Holy Land.
“How we had hoped that peace would finally restore life and hope to the Holy Land!” he said. “Dialogues and agreements multiplied, yet the weapons did not fall silent.”
Cardinal Gugerotti lamented that people have continued to die despite declarations of peace, forcing Christians to emigrate and children to go without schooling.
He thanked the Bishops for their efforts to “bandage and disinfect” the wounds of a world torn apart by violence.
“Yet we Christians cannot cease to hope, because God is our hope, and God does not betray us,” he said.
The act of donating money to support the life of Christians in the Holy Land, he added, may seem small in appearance but in reality is “decisive in its meaning.”
“This gesture is vital for them and essential for the Custody of the Holy Land, which has long safeguarded the places that witnessed the life of the Lord Jesus,” he said. “It is also vital for us, because 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.”
As collections are taken up on the day in which Christ died for our sins, he said, Christians will be doing their part to reflect “the plan God intended for humanity at creation.”
“I ask you, therefore, to use words attuned to the sensibilities of your people to communicate our shared responsibility for the Holy Land, as well as for so many other devastated regions,” he told the Bishops. “Show images, raise awareness, and make use of the many available means that reveal the daily struggles of the small Christian communities who manage to remain on their land.”
Cardinal Gugerotti expressed his hope that Catholics will not remain indifferent to the Holy Land Collection, as they respond also to Pope Leo XIV’s invitation to support peace.
He recalled his many encounters with Christians who are a minority in their homeland, noting that they awaken each day and wonder if they may soon no longer have a place to exist.
“Help us to offer them concrete hope, not merely words of consolation—for we who visit them will leave, while they remain with their fears, even with the terror that, precisely because they are Christians, they may be eliminated,” he said.
In conclusion, Cardinal Gugerotti thanked Catholics for their contribution to sustaining the work of the Franciscans of the Holy Land.
“The Collection for the Holy Land, sustained daily by the invaluable work of the Franciscans and those who serve in local communities, may seem like a drop in the ocean,” he said. “Yet the ocean, deprived of its drops, becomes a desert.” – Vatican News
