Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, prefect of Vatican Dicastery for the Service of Charity, landed in Israel on 22nd December, starting a “journey of closeness” as papal envoy to the Holy Land during a difficult wartime Christmas season.
“We landed at 2 a.m. and, after a few hours of sleep, I rushed to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, to Our Lord’s tomb to pray,” papal almoner told OSV News in the morning of 22nd December. Cardinal Krajewski planned to spend the first day in the Holy Land visiting Christian communities, accompanied by Father Gabriel Romanelli, an Argentine pastor of the Holy Family Parish in Gaza City, who found himself stuck in Jerusalem on 7th October, when Hamas attacked communities in southern Israel, and unable to return to the Gaza Strip.
“We plan to visit orphanages, facilities for the disabled, refugees and the elderly. This afternoon we also want to visit the local seminary and then I plan to just save the late afternoon for prayer, because this is what I came for, to pray for peace,” the cardinal said. It was Pope Francis’ desire that “this journey be accompanied by prayer to obtain the gift of peace in the territories where the sound of weapons still resounds,” the statement from the Vatican said.
The pope, “saddened by the ‘third world war in pieces’ afflicting the world, prays daily for peace, clamoring for an end to the conflicts that blood the earth: in the battered Ukraine, in Syria, in many countries in Africa and now in Israel and Palestine,” it continued. The Vatican announced that Pope Francis sent Cardinal Krajewski to Israel and Palestine as a “concrete sign of his participation in the suffering of those who experience firsthand the consequences of war.”
Picture: Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the papal almoner, prays during an interreligious prayer service in the Latin-rite cathedral of Lviv, Ukraine, in this 10th March 2022, file photo. (OSV News photo/courtesy Ukrainian Catholic Church)