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CatholicVote is calling on the faithful to stand in solidarity with the suffering Christian community in Gaza, urging renewed attention to the plight of civilians caught in the crossfire of war.
“Unfortunately, in the fog of war and the age of social media, there is a dangerous tendency to conflate legitimate concerns about human suffering with support for Hamas,” CatholicVote President Kelsey Reinhardt said in a July 23 message. “It’s time to recover the moral high ground on this issue, with all its appropriate nuance.”
Reinhardt, who has worked directly to support persecuted Christians in the Middle East and helped found a Catholic news agency in Arabic, emphasized that “[s]upport for the Christian presence in Gaza should not be a political liability.”
She urged Catholics to respond with compassion rather than ideological division.
“People should be able to disagree with indiscriminate bombing that results in a suffering civilian population and damage to places of worship – without being smeared as supporters of Hamas,” she said.
The message comes after an Israeli tank struck Gaza’s only Catholic church, Holy Family Parish, July 17, killing three people and injuring others, including a priest.
“Pope Leo was right to call the continuing situation ‘barbaric,’” Reinhardt said.
Israel has since said that a probe determined the incident was an error, a statement which Reinhardt acknowledged. However, she continued, “violence against Christians in the area isn’t limited to the realities of war in Gaza. The last few weeks have brought unsettling reports of worsening settler attacks on Christian farms and families in the West Bank as well.”
She reminded readers that Christians in the Holy Land are not newcomers — they are the descendants of the earliest followers of Christ.
“There have been Christians in the Middle East for twenty centuries,” she said. “Concern for their safety has been a top priority for the Church… and always will be.”
In response to the ongoing crisis, CatholicVote sponsored over 20,000 hot meals for Christians in Gaza in June. Now, Reinhardt is calling on supporters to replenish those resources.
“Our Christian brothers and sisters are suffering in Gaza through no fault of their own,” she said.
“They deserve our prayer and anything else we can do to alleviate their pain.”
More information about CatholicVote’s Gaza relief fund is available here.
>> Names and faces of the Catholic dead and wounded from the Gaza parish struck by Israel <<
