When Shepherds Enter the Storm: What Cardinal Pizzaballa's Gaza Visit Reveals About Presence as Healing

On June 22, two of Christianity's most senior leaders in the Holy Land crossed into one of the world's most acute humanitarian crises. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Theophilus III, Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, entered the Gaza Strip together, accompanied by Josef D. Blotz, Grand Hospitaller of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and representatives of Malteser International.

They came without political mandates or press conferences engineered for optics. They came, as the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem announced, in an expression of "pastoral responsibility" — not only toward Gaza's Christian communities, but toward "the whole population" of a territory where "families continue to endure grave humanitarian suffering, fear, loss and uncertainty."

The applause that greeted them inside the Holy Family parish, the joyful cheers from children in the pews, was not merely a warm welcome. It was the sound of what researchers in trauma-informed care recognize as the restoration of relational safety.

The neuroscience behind a pastoral visit

The Catholic Christian Meta Model of the Person holds that the human being is a unity — body, soul, and spirit — and that healing rarely proceeds through the intellect alone. The tradition has always known what modern neuroscience is only beginning to articulate: presence is a therapeutic act.

Polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, describes how the nervous system continuously scans the environment for cues of safety or danger through a process called neuroception. In populations living under sustained conflict, the nervous system defaults toward chronic threat activation. What Porges and subsequent researchers have documented is that the presence of a trusted, calm, attuned figure can literally downregulate a dysregulated nervous system through co-regulation — the calm of the shepherd, transmitted through voice, gaze, and physical proximity, becomes a biological resource for the frightened person before a single word of theological content is spoken.[^1]

When Cardinal Pizzaballa said he was joyful to look into the eyes of the parishioners — and into the eyes of all the inhabitants of that suffering city — he was describing precisely this mechanism. Eye contact between a trusted other and a traumatized person is not sentiment. It is medicine.

Ecumenism as amplified witness

The decision of both patriarchs to enter Gaza together carries significance that exceeds the sum of its parts. The Latin Patriarchate described their presence as carrying "the prayer of Jerusalem to Gaza's wounded faithful and to all who suffer, in a ministry of consolation, mercy and steadfast Christian witness rooted in the Gospel."

That language to what the psychological literature identifies as core components of effective pastoral accompaniment in trauma contexts: validation of suffering, non-abandonment, and meaning-making within a coherent narrative framework. One of the more robust findings in resilience research concerns the protective function of a meaning system under extreme stress. Viktor Frankl's foundational observations in logotherapy, later supported by decades of empirical work in trauma studies, consistently show that individuals embedded in a community of shared meaning demonstrate greater psychological resilience than those who face suffering in isolation.[^2] The joint pastoral visit of June 22 enacted that claim in real time, inside a city under siege.

Presence as a category of mission

Father Gabriel Romanelli, parish priest of the Holy Family Church, led the opening prayer during the visit. He has remained in Gaza throughout the conflict — a sustained testimony to the logic of accompaniment. The patriarchs' visit was, in part, a visible confirmation of the choice he and the community have made to remain present to each other and to their neighbors.

The therapeutic alliance literature makes an analogous point: the quality of the relationship between helper and helped accounts for more variance in outcomes than any particular technique or intervention. Trust, attunement, and sustained presence are not auxiliary features of healing. They are central to it.[^3]

Cardinal Pizzaballa acknowledged this plainly. The situation, he said, is difficult, but the presence of Church representatives demonstrates concern for Gaza, which remains a priority. That framing — presence as demonstration of priority — is both theologically precise and psychologically accurate.

What this moment asks of the broader Church

The visit of June 22 is not simply a news event. It is a data point in an ongoing argument about the Church's mission in places of human suffering — and for those outside Gaza who want to do more than observe, the argument has a practical edge.

The needs inside Gaza remain severe. Since October 2023, the Catholic community at the Holy Family parish has sheltered hundreds of displaced civilians, Catholics and Muslims alike, in its courtyards and halls. Food, medicine, clean water, and basic medical supplies have been in chronic short supply. Malteser International, the Order of Malta's relief arm — whose leadership accompanied the patriarchs on June 22 — has maintained humanitarian operations in Gaza throughout the conflict, coordinating medical care and emergency aid through local partners. Catholic Relief Services and the pontifical foundation Caritas Internationalis are among the agencies with active programs in the territory. These organizations represent the most direct channel through which financial support from the broader Church reaches families who are, in the Latin Patriarchate's own words, enduring "grave humanitarian suffering" day after day.

The Second Vatican Council's decree Ad Gentes called every local community of the Church to extend "the range of its charity to the ends of the earth" and to devote the same care to those far off as it does to its own members — and it named direct contact between communities, including financial support for missionary and humanitarian work, as one concrete form that solidarity takes.[^4] The parish in Gaza and the patriarchs who visited it are not a distant abstraction. They are members of the same Body.

For Catholics who want to respond, three steps are within reach: give directly to Malteser International, Catholic Relief Services, or Caritas, designating funds for Gaza; ask their own parishes to pray explicitly for Gaza's Christian community and for the broader civilian population; and follow the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem's communications, whose regular updates name specific needs and translate geopolitical distance into pastoral proximity.

Resilience is not primarily a cognitive achievement. It is a relational one, sustained by the presence of trusted others who refuse abandonment, carry their community's story forward, and locate present suffering within a larger frame of meaning and hope.[^5] For the children who cheered in the Holy Family Church that afternoon, the appearance of two patriarchs was a concrete, embodied signal that they have not been forgotten.

The tradition has been practicing this form of witness for two thousand years. The forward question is whether the structures, the formation, and the institutional will exist to sustain it — not only through the pastoral visit that makes the news, but through the quieter, material solidarity that keeps a community alive until the next one.

References

[^1]: Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

[^2]: Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 1959).

[^3]: Bruce E. Wampold, "How important are the common factors in psychotherapy? An update," World Psychiatry 14, no. 3 (2015): 270–277. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20238

[^4]: Vatican II, Ad Gentes (1965), no. 37: "it is also up to these [communities] to witness Christ before the nations... the whole community prays, works together, and exercises its activity among the nations through those of its sons whom God has chosen for this most excellent task."

[^5]: Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Pastoral visit of the patriarchs to Gaza (June 22, 2026). https://www.lpj.org