Cardinal Encourages Generosity in Good Friday Collection for Holy Land

Catholic News Service – Mar. 25, 2009 – By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Catholic Church’s annual Collection for the Holy Land helps maintain Christian sites in the Holy Land, provides care for aged religious who spent their lives ministering in the land of Jesus and supports projects that help native Christians remain and thrive in the region.

Cardinal Luigi Sandri, prefect of the Congregation for Eastern Churches, appealed to bishops around the world to encourage parishes in their dioceses to support the collection, which traditionally is taken up during Good Friday services.

The Catholic communities in the Holy Land face serious problems; “the first is the absence of peace,” the cardinal said in his letter, which was published in Italian in the March 25 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

In the past year, he said, “the joy of Christmas was wounded by the violent resurgence of hostilities in the Gaza Strip. Among the numerous victims were many completely innocent children.”

Pope Benedict XVI is among the first “to constantly comfort the Christians and all inhabitants of the Holy Land with words and gestures of extraordinary care,” the cardinal said, and “his desire to go on pilgrimage in the footsteps of Jesus” is a clear sign of how important the Holy Land is to the church.

“The open wound caused by the violence worsens the problem of emigration, which inexorably deprives the Christian minority of its best resources for the future. The land that was the cradle of Christianity risks ending up without Christians,” the cardinal wrote.

Cardinal Sandri said that, in an October general audience talk about the writings of St. Paul, Pope Benedict spoke about how almost 2,000 years ago the apostle initiated a collection for struggling Christians in Jerusalem.

“The collection expressed the community’s debt to the mother church of Palestine, from which they had received the ineffable gift of the Gospel,” the pope had said during the audience.

Along with his letter, Cardinal Sandri sent the world’s bishops a report on some of the projects funded with help from the annual collection. They included:

• The restoration, maintenance and improvement of visitor facilities at the Shrine of the Visitation in Ain Karem, at the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and at the archaeological site of the ancient town of Magdala.
• Improvements to a home in Jerusalem for aged religious who have dedicated their lives to serving Christians and pilgrims in the Holy Land.
• Providing 300 scholarships for students attending the Catholic-run Bethlehem University in the West Bank or Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israeli universities in Haifa or Bir Zeit, or the university in Amman, Jordan.
• Continuing a program that helps new university graduates enter the job market by teaming up with companies and paying part of the new graduates’ salaries during their first year of employment.
• Retraining workers who have lost their jobs and supporting artisans.
• Supporting the Franciscan Family Center in Bethlehem and its work with poor families, with children experiencing a variety of difficulties and in the field of health care.
• Assisting parishes in the region restore their churches or build classrooms and meeting facilities.
• Helping young Catholic families buy or remodel apartments as an encouragement to stay in the Holy Land.
• Supporting the Franciscan Biblical Institute, the Franciscan Media Center and the Magnificat Institute, a school of sacred music, in Jerusalem.