Church of theGAZA HOMILY – July 2025
As Christians we have a duty to speak out against injustice and poverty in the world.
No right-minded person would seek to defend or justify the barbarous attack by Hamas on Israeli citizens on October 7th, 2023.
However, two wrongs do not make a right and what has been inflicted on Gaza for the past two years almost, and what is happening there now with an entire population at risk of mass starvation is truly shocking beyond belief and, as our Taoiseach said recently, an affront to humanity.
Pope Leo has appealed many times for an immediate stop to the barbarity of war. The death of even one person diminishes the whole of humanity. Yet in Gaza, death comes not only from bombs or bullets, but from hunger.
In a world that is informed and connected, where every event is documented and broadcast in images and sound, people are dying of deprivation. Technology records suffering but does not cure it. Faced with such inhumanity, indifference is not an option. We cannot become numb or turn away after seeing such suffering.
We are called by the Gospel to be builders of peace, welcome, fraternity and hope. Each person has a voice that can defend life, uphold dignity, and promote the common good.
In the face of what is happening in Gaza, thousands of miles away, we can feel so helpless but it beholds us all, whether by prayer, by speaking or writing to our politicians, especially at the European level, or in other peaceful ways to do what we can to create mounting
international pressure to put an end to this obscenity. As Christians, we cannot be silent.
Fr Andrew