Voices March 29, 2018
The Good Friday collection: still needed after 400 years
By Catholic Register Staff
From The Catholic Register
Pope Paul V was a controversial leader in turbulent times. His biography cites a fondness for luxury, penchant for nepotism and persecution of Galileo, but also lauds his completion of St. Peter’s Basilica, contributions to education and the arts, encouragement of New World missionaries and the canonization St. Charles Borromeo.
Much of his legacy endures to this day, including an initiative
launched in 1618 that will be re-enacted around the world on Good Friday. As
Europe fought the Thirty Years War, the Pope, moved by suffering in the
Middle East, instructed the Church to observe Good Friday as a day of prayer
and charity in support of persecuted Catholics and Catholic institutions in the
Holy Land. That collection has endured for four centuries.
Paul V expressed his wishes in an apostolic letter. In 1974, Pope Paul VI
echoed his Renaissance-era namesake with his own apostolic letter that urged
compassion for Middle East Christians. Forty-four years later, however, it is
disheartening to read those words as the situation in the Holy Land has, if
anything, worsened.
Paul VI, soon to be canonized, highlighted the serious religious, political and
social problems of Christians in a region that had been scarred for centuries
by violence and continued to experience “unique and daily sufferings.” He
lamented high emigration and feared that, without a living Christian presence,
Jerusalem and the Holy Land would “become like museums” or what others call “a
spiritual Disneyland.” He implored all Christians to express solidarity with
the suffering people of the region through charity and prayers “so that we keep
alive the testimony of the Gospel” in the Holy Land.
From Paul V to Paul VI and now to Pope Francis, the struggle has been constant
to preserve a dynamic Christian presence in lands where Jesus and His apostles
walked. At the start of the 20th century, Christians represented 10 per cent of
the total Middle East population. That number was just five per cent at the end
of the century. And that was before the past decade’s mass exoduses from
war-torn Syria and Iraq.
On the 400th anniversary of the first Holy Land collection, the appeal for
prayers and almsgiving remains urgent. Indigenous Christian communities, some
that were founded 2,000 years ago, continue to face persecution and are
disappearing due to ongoing conflicts, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and a
lack of optimism for a peaceful future. Centuries-old churches, schools,
hospitals and other institutions are falling into disrepair.
There is an ongoing “outcry of thousands of persons who are deprived of
everything,” said Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, the Vatican’s prefect of the
Congregation of Eastern Churches.
The Good Friday collection, after all these years, is still a way for Catholics
around the world to embrace these suffering people and give them hope.