“He loved us,” said Romanelli, “and the world must not forget the message he left: stop the war, open the roads to peace.”
(ZENIT News / Rome, 04.23.2025).- In what is now known to be one of his final acts of pastoral care, Pope Francis placed a quiet phone call to the only Catholic parish in Gaza on the evening of April 19. It was Holy Saturday, just hours before the Easter Vigil, and as violence loomed outside, a voice of peace reached across the chaos. “He called us as he always did,” recalled Father Gabriel Romanelli, parish priest of the Church of the Holy Family. “With words of comfort, a blessing, and prayer for peace.” It would be the last time Gaza’s embattled Catholic community heard from him.
For 19 months, Pope Francis remained present in the lives of Gaza’s Christian faithful, through nightly phone calls—even from a hospital bed during his own illness. He asked about the children. He asked if they had enough food. He ended each conversation not with advice, but with prayer.
In a region often consumed by political headlines and shifting military realities, the Pope’s relationship with Gaza stood as something else entirely: a bond forged in shared vulnerability and quiet faith.
Following his death, Father Romanelli spoke to Vatican media through a fog of grief. “This is a deeply painful moment,” he said. “Even the Orthodox and Muslim neighbors came to offer their condolences. They knew he was our father too.”
The grief echoed through Gaza’s damaged churches. At the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, where Catholics and Orthodox had celebrated Easter together, faithful gathered to pray for the man who had insisted that peace was not a dream but a demand. It was fitting, perhaps, that the Pope’s final «Urbi et Orbi» message—read by Archbishop Ravelli from the Vatican balcony—included a plea for Gaza: not just a prayer, but a clear appeal for a ceasefire, the release of hostages, and the immediate delivery of humanitarian aid.
Within the compound of the Holy Family Church, these words are now remembered as his final benediction. “He loved us,” said Romanelli, “and the world must not forget the message he left: stop the war, open the roads to peace.”
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