Open this photo in gallery: A portrait of Pope Francis is displayed during a Mass at the Holy Family Church, in Gaza City, on April 21.Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters If there was one constant feature in the last year and a half of Pope Francis’s life, it was Gaza. Virtually every night since the Israel-Hamas war started on Oct. 7, 2023, Francis would call the Holy Family Church, the only Catholic parish in the besieged strip. His last call came two days before his death on April 21.
It was short, no more than a minute long, at about 8 p.m. local time. His voice was weak. “He said he was praying for us, blessed us and thanked us for our prayers for him,” said Gabriel Romanelli, 55, the parish priest.
The video calls were especially popular with Father Romanelli and the 500 Christian refugees and 50 or so Muslim children crammed into the Holy Family grounds, which include a school and a convent. “He talked to the young people too,” said Father Romanelli. “He got to know some of the children by name.
He would encourage us to be strong and tell us that we were not alone.” Francis made his last public appearance during Easter Sunday mass at St. Peter’s Basilica, and Gaza once again was on his mind. “I think of the people of Gaza and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation,” he said in his address. “I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!” He died the next morning.
His funeral was held Saturday at the Vatican, and he was buried that afternoon in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore basilica. In an interview with The Globe and Mail late last week, Father Romanelli said he hoped Francis’s death would not remove the global spotlight from Gaza, where food is running short and more than 51,000 Palestinians have died, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry (a January report in The Lancet, a British peer-reviewed medical journal, stated that in the first nine months of the war, 64,260 Palestinians died). “Pope Francis had a unique relationship with us, and we pray the he will continue to help us from heaven,” he said.
Francis was one of the few world leaders – maybe the only one – who made regular calls to Gaza in the 18 months of fighting. Video from January 22 shows Pope Francis on a video call with the Holy Family Catholic Parish in Gaza. Pope Francis talks to the parish priest, Father Gabriele Romanelli and his assistant Father Youssef Asaad.
Reuters His successor is to be elected in a secret conclave of cardinal electors in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel that will start May 7, the Vatican announced Monday. “I don’t think the cardinals will put on the agenda that His Holiness [the next pope] will have to call our parish in Gaza,” Father Romanelli said. Francis paid special attention to Gaza in general and its tiny Christian population in particular.
Only about 1,000 of the strip’s residents are Orthodox Christians or Catholics. According to The New Arab news site, there were 35,000 Christians in the West Bank and Gaza before the Nakba, the Arab word for “catastrophe,” referring to the mass displacement by Israeli forces of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. His sympathy for the Palestinians predates the Israel-Hamas war.
In 2014, he visited Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he called for a “sovereign homeland” for Palestinians. A year later, the Vatican recognized Palestinian statehood. Pope Francis and his legacy: How he likened (inclusive) capitalism to good Catholicism While he had prayed for the hostages abducted in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 people in Israel and ignited the war, and met with their families, he had been critical of Israel.
“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” he wrote a month after the Hamas attack. He used his calls to the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, which were widely reported, to draw the world’s attention to Gaza as he pleaded for a ceasefire. “He could not phone [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu to say, ‘Stop the war,’ but he could call the parish priest in Gaza to plead for the war to stop,” Canada’s Cardinal Michael Czerny told The Globe.
Father Romanelli, who has worked in the Middle East for 30 years and has been the Holy Family’s parish priest since 2019, had a personal connection with Francis. Both Argentinians, they first met in Buenos Aires several years before Jose Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013. They met several times since then in Rome and Jerusalem.
The church and the grounds are largely intact, though they have come under attack by Israeli forces. A mother and her daughter at the church were shot dead in December, 2023. The Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem said the shots were fired by an Israeli sniper (Israel denied this claim).
Father Romanelli said 49 Christians have died in Gaza, 20 by bombings or gunfire, the others from lack of medical care and other causes. He said the latest crisis is the new Israeli blockade, which has prevented food and medical supplies from entering the strip for almost two months. The UN’s World Food Programme last week said all the WFP-supported bakeries in Gaza closed at the end of March, when flour and cooking fuel ran out.
“The situation inside the Gaza Strip has once again reached a breaking point: people are running out of ways to cope, and the fragile gains made during the short ceasefire have unravelled,” the agency said in a statement. “Francis told us to take care of the children,” Father Romanelli said. “But our food situation is critical.”
