"Remember the Catholics of the Holy Land": Cardinal Filoni, Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, extends the appeal of the Patriarchs

Three weeks after the joint call of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Cardinal Fernando Filoni, Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, takes up the charge with Western Catholics. Doctrinal reminder: without living Christians, no Holy Places.

The fact

Cardinal Fernando Filoni, former substitute of the Secretariat of State and current Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, has made an appeal relayed in the July 23, 2026 edition of The Irish Catholic: Catholics around the world must not forget the Christian presence in the Holy Land, reduced but alive. Cardinal Filoni reminds us that the Order of the Holy Sepulchre receives an explicit papal mandate to support Catholic communities in the Holy Places. The statement comes three weeks after the joint appeal of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem, published on July 3, 2026, which alerted to the demographic collapse of local Christian communities: from about twenty percent of the Palestinian population in 1948 to less than two percent today.

Our reading

We had relayed, at the beginning of July, the appeal of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem. The extension by Cardinal Filoni has a precise scope. First institutional: it is a former high official of the Roman Curia who speaks, doubled by the Grand Master of the Order who receives from the Pope the care of the Holy Places since 1868. Then pastoral: Filoni addresses a Western Church largely indifferent to the fate of the Christians of the East and reminds it that its mission is not only one of compassion, but of anchoring. Benedict XVI, in his post-synodal apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Medio Oriente (2012), reminds us that the vitality of the Christian communities of the region is constitutive of the testimony rendered to the Holy Places. Reducing the Holy Land to a set of archaeological sanctuaries would be to betray it. The question is not patrimonial, it is ecclesiological.

To ponder

Every Catholic can act concretely. Support the Œuvre d'Orient or the Order of the Holy Sepulchre itself. Choose, when he or she goes on pilgrimage, stays that support local parishes rather than closed circuits. Pray regularly for peace in Jerusalem, as Psalm 122 commands. The Christian demographic void of the Holy Land is a doctrinal challenge, not only humanitarian.