“Welcoming, listening, discerning, and, together, steering the route of the Church for the next few years”. Monsignor Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the new apostolic administrator of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, who yesterday afternoon officially entered Jerusalem, insisted that he is most willing to “build roads and bridges, not walls”. A sort of programmatic speech in which he did not hide the difficulty of the task that awaits him, “I am not naïve”, he said, well aware that, “after the joy of transfiguration, there’s the descent from the Mountain, back to routine, to everyday life, with its load, of joys of course, but also of problems, pains and divisions. And in Jerusalem, and more generally in the Holy Land, divisions are rife”. “And they are hard, they hurt in our everyday life”, pointed out mgr. Pizzaballa, rattling off a list of criticalities that he knows very well, after 12 years (2004-2016) spent as the Custodian of the Holy Land. “We see it all the time: in political and social life, in a political conflict that is wearing out everybody’s lives, in hurt dignity, in disrespect for basic human rights; we also see it in intra-religious relations, between our churches and quite often even in our own Churches. The devil, that is the source of division, seems to have settled in, in Jerusalem. The response to division, according to mgr. Pizzaballa, is just one: “Being a Church, that is, being the witnesses of unity. Here, in this torn and divided scenario, in other words the first announcement that must be given is unity, which starts with us, in our homes”. To involve the Orthodox Church too, replying to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of the Holy City, “the will to work for communion and mutual harmony”. Because, the apostolic administrator concluded, “we cannot afford to give lessons of dialogue to the world if divisions and mistrust reign among us! We must, we want, then, become experts in a life that comes from the Cross, that does not give up to death, but wins it through love”.

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