The cardinal stressed that the Israel-Hamas conflict is not just an issue for the local Church but also an issue for the universal Church.
“What I tend to say is that conflict is not a temporary and secondary issue in the life of our Church,” the cardinal continued; rather, he said, it “is now an integral and constitutive part of our identity as a Church.”
Pizzaballa underlined that “talking about peace, therefore, is not talking about an abstract topic but of a deep wound in the life of the Christian that causes suffering and tiredness, a lot of tiredness, and deeply touches the human and spiritual life of all of us.”
Stressing the universality of the conflict, he added it “involves the life of everyone in our diocese and is therefore an integral part of the life of the Church, of its pastoral care.”
The day before the lecture, Pizzaballa took possession of his titular church in Rome, St. Onuphrius, where he spoke on the historic, symbolic, and theological links between the Church in the Holy Land and Rome, again expressing the importance of the Holy Land for the universal Church.
“The Church of Jerusalem is the mother Church of the Church, where the roots of the entire universal Church lie, and it is a place that still retains a local and universal character today,” he said during his May 1 homily.