Last Thursday I was invited to a fund-raising event at a suburban parish. "Cradling Christianity" seeks to raise awareness and funds to support Christians living the Holy Land. Thousands of Christians travel to the Holy land every year, pumping millions of dollars into the local economies. At the same time, the countries that receive tourist dollars from Christians are making it very difficult for Christians to live there. Here is an excerpt from one story about this problem:Lamenting the effects of Israel’s security wall upon the Palestinian Christian communion, Patriarch Fouad Twal, Archbishop of Jerusalem, predicted that the number of Christians would dwindle from 10,000 today to 5,000 in 2016 because of emigration fostered by Israel’s security wall.
The wall has “enclosed many Palestinians in ghetto-like areas where access to work, medical care, schooling and other basic services have been badly affected,” he said. “We have a new generation of Christians who cannot visit the holy places of their faith that are only a few kilometers from their place of residence.”
At the event, Father Peter Vasko, President of the Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land, exhorted us to support our fellow Christians especially through enabling higher education.
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