Irish bishops appeal for prayer and fasting for Gaza

Because June is the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the bishops appealed to Catholics to pray for ‘the compassion of God on a heartless world’.

Ireland’s bishops appealed to the faithful to make the first Friday in June a day of prayer and fasting in solidarity with those suffering in Gaza and the Holy Land.

The bishops met in Maynooth to discuss the “humanitarian catastrophe” in the region as parishioners throughout the country Ireland voiced horror and helplessness to them in the wake of the death and destruction in Gaza.  

Because June is the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the bishops appealed to Catholics to pray for “the compassion of God on a heartless world”.  

Separately, Fr Eamonn Conway, in his homily at the opening Mass of the pilgrimage season in Lough Derg told pilgrims that the “ominous background” to this year is war, conflict and wanton disregard for the dignity of human life “on a scale our planet hasn’t seen for many decades”.

He said that despite all the fasting by pilgrims, Lough Derg would not be the hungriest place on earth. “That will be Gaza.”  

A line, he warned, had been crossed in the “direct and deliberate targeting and executing of the innocent on an unprecedented scale, in some instances state-sponsored, while other states look on.”

Christians, he said, “are obliged to condemn what is happening, but also to engage” by praying and working for peace.  

Writing in the Irish Independent, Bishop Kevin Doran of Elphin said the indiscriminate bombing of innocent civilians, the total blockade on essential aid for families including thousands of children, and the unprovoked attacks by the Israel Defence Forces on civilian communities in the occupied West Bank “constitute an attempt to wipe the Palestinian people off the face of the earth”.

“It is precisely because we understand and abhor the terrible crime of genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime and its fellow travellers against the Jewish people that we must now be very strong not just in our words, but also in our actions, in holding the state of Israel (or any other body, including Hamas) to account for acts of genocide in the twenty-first century.”

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