The Archbishop of the Church of England, Stephen Cottrell, on Thursday, December 25, alleged that he was intimidated by the Israeli militia and stopped from meeting Palestinian families during a visit to the occupied West Bank.
While delivering a sermon on Christmas, the Archbishop of York said that he was stopped at checkpoints and told by militias that he could not visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank. Cottrell said that it was sobering for him to see the wall (dividing Israel from the West Bank) for real, adding that the Israeli militia stopped him and his group.
“Israeli militias told us that we couldn’t visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” he said.
“However, this Christmas morning here in York, as well as thinking about the walls that divide and separate the Holy Land, I’m also thinking of all the walls and barriers we erect across the whole of the world and, perhaps, most alarming, the ones we build around ourselves,” he added.
Earlier on Thursday, Pope Leo, in his Christmas sermon, decried the conditions Palestinians in Gaza are living under due to the Israeli war and the blockade on essential supplies.
Pope Leo remembers Gaza in Christmas homily
In his first Christmas Day homily on December 25, Pope Leo XIV remembered that the people of Gaza were “exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold,” and said the world’s many conflicts could only be silenced through dialogue.
Leo led the Christmas Day Mass from the central altar beneath the balustrade of St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, adorned with floral garlands and clusters of red poinsettias. White flowers were set at the feet of a statue of Mary, mother of Jesus, whose birth is celebrated on Christmas Day.
Recalling that God was made flesh through Jesus’s birth in a manger in Bethlehem, Leo likened God’s word to “a fragile tent among us.”
“How then can we not think of the tents in Gaza, exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold; and of those so many other refugees and displaced persons on every continent, or of the makeshift shelters of thousands of homeless people in our own cities,” the Pope said.
The pontiff also recalled the fragility of “defenceless populations, tried by so many wars” and of “young people forced to take up arms, who on the front lines feel the senselessness of what is asked of them, and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths.”
Leo underlined that peace can emerge only through dialogue. “There will be peace when our monologues are interrupted and, enriched by listening, we fall to our knees before the humanity of the other,” he said.
Thousands of people packed the Basilica for the Pope’s first Christmas Day Mass, holding their smartphones aloft to capture images of the opening procession.
(With inputs from PTI)
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