Source: CBCEW

Having touched down in the Holy Land to the news that a ceasefire had been brokered between Hamas and Israel in Gaza to come into effect from Sunday, 19 January, Bishop Nicholas Hudson greeted the news with cautious optimism.

On his first day in the Holy Land, Bishop Hudson, moderator of the annual Holy Land Co-ordination meeting, brought his prayers for a lasting and sustained peace to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

“It was a sad privilege, in a way, to go down into the grotto where Christ came into the world over 2,000 years ago, but it offered the consolation that we were able to pray deeply.

“I prayed there for peace, and as I knelt before the star – the star of hope that marks the place of Jesus’s birth – I prayed so deeply to the Prince of Peace that He might help this ceasefire to hold… I prayed as well for the families on either side that they might be reunited. I prayed that aid might now be allowed to flow into Gaza – poor, beleaguered Gaza – and that people on both sides of the conflict might now be able to rebuild their lives.”

The Holy Land Coordination, organised by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales through its Department for International Affairs, is an annual meeting of bishops from around the world that is defined by four Ps – presence, prayer, pilgrimage, and pressure. Bishop James Curry, an auxiliary Bishop of Westminster, is joining the group for the first time. The Co-ordination runs from 18-23 January.

On Thursday, Bishop Hudson and Bishop Curry alongside staff from the Bishops’ Conference, visited two projects in Bethlehem. The first stop was St Martha’s House, a day-care centre for elderly Christian ladies, mostly widows, who enjoy companionship and therapies provided by specialist staff and volunteers, including healthcare checks, haircare, podiatry, arts and crafts, and more. The group were the first visitors since October 2023 and there were smiles, tears and even dancing – almost a distraction from the suffering and difficulties that had come before.

Bishop Hudson led a small group to visit the Bethlehem Care and Hospice Trust, a Catholic charity registered in England and Wales, and Scotland, set up to bring compassionate care to those with life-limiting illness in the West Bank.

“The Bethlehem Care and Hospice Trust is a wonderful Christian initiative, with a number of Muslim volunteers and staff coming alongside them in their care for those who have terminal illnesses. It’s a model of palliative care, which I describe a bit like ‘hospice at home’, because it’s our hospice model from Western Europe adapted to a Middle East conviction that people who have terminal illnesses should be able to be looked after at home right until they die.

“We met the palliative team and went out with them to two different families to visit two elderly people who were dying, and I was able to bless them.”

Bishop Hudson’s final observation focussed on the obvious lack of pilgrims on the streets of both Jerusalem and Bethlehem:

“It brought home to me how hard it has been for places like Bethlehem these last 15 months, to not have pilgrims come to be with them, to not be able to support them economically – whether in cafés or shops – or to support St Martha’s House, or the hospice team. They were all saying the same thing, ‘You’re the first people who have come for such a long time. Thank you for coming. We need you to come more often.’ In a sense, it touched on one of our other Ps, the ‘P’ of pilgrimage, which we’ll be talking about more often during this Holy Land Co-ordination. We need to find ways of coming to be ‘present’ on pilgrimage now in the Holy Land – especially now that the ceasefire has been signed.”

The Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land, the local Church leaders, issued a declaration on the ceasefire in Gaza on 16 January 2025.