So often when our eyes turn to the Middle East it is because of tragedy. The events of 7 October and the ongoing crisis in Gaza have grabbed the world’s attention, but they also obscure the reality of everyday life for many people across the Holy Land. In this, its birthplace, the Church is far from a monolith: Christians are numerous in Lebanon and Egypt but form only one per cent of the population of the West Bank and Gaza and just a slightly higher proportion in Israel itself.
Middle-Eastern Christianity is a rich tapestry, but there is one community whose small size makes it all the easier to overlook: the Hebrew-speaking Catholics of Israel. Their pastoral and spiritual care is the concern of the St James Vicariate, whose current head is Fr Piotr Zelazko, a Polish priest in Jerusalem.
“99.9 per cent of the Church here in Israel speaks Arabic,” Fr Zelazko says. “We are just a small, very small group.” The Vicariate of St James is not an evangelical outreach but a response to a pastoral need. “In Japan, the Catholic Church speaks and prays in Japanese, and in Madagascar in French or the local languages.” In Israel, the overwhelming majority of citizens and inhabitants of any background either speak Hebrew fluently or have a proficient working knowledge of it. “And so,” Fr Piotr explains, “the Church speaks Hebrew.”
Hebrew-speaking Catholics come together geographically to form a <em>kehilla</em> (“congregation”) and these <em>kehillot</em> now exist in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba, and Tiberias; there are two more groups for Catholics from Israel’s large Russian-speaking minority. The St James Vicariate also tends to the pastoral needs of the children of migrants and asylum seekers who have grown up in Israel speaking the most common language.
Founded as an association in the 1950s under the patronage of the martyred first bishop of Jerusalem, the Apostle James, the Vicariate was erected under the authority of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in 2013. The current patriarch, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa OFM, has a personal connection going back decades: as a Franciscan friar in 1998 – before the Vicariate was formally erected – he was put in charge of caring for Hebrew-speaking Catholics.
“I’ve been part of it a long time,” the Cardinal says. “It’s not a big community, but they have a special mission to keep alive our relations with the broader Jewish community. Knowing also our history of tensions with Jews, this presence in the midst of this very society, praying, is very positive. They can help Jewish society to understand us better and vice versa – so very, very important.”
Unsurprisingly, most Hebrew-speaking Catholics are from a Jewish background but there are intricacies to dealing with being ethnically Jewish while practicing another religion. “Even the expression ‘Catholic Jews’ or ‘Jewish Catholics’,” Fr Piotr says, “you know, it’s a little bit controversial in this society because there’s still a discussion.”
“We have people who keep the Shabbat and only eat kosher food and we have people who say, OK, I have Jewish roots, but this is not an important part for me.” Outside the precepts of the faith, the Vicariate makes no demands on the way Hebrew-speaking Catholics organise their lives, though these debates obsessed many in the earliest days of the Church.
“It’s not only the language,” Fr Piotr explains. “We live in the middle of Israeli society. This is probably the first time in the history of the world that the Catholic Church is a minority inside a Jewish society. It was always the other way around.” According to Fr Piotr, this situation can vex both sides. “Both the Church and Jewish society need to learn what to do with this situation,” he says. “But we are not a big dominating group: we are just a small minority.”
Many friends and family members of those in the Vicariate are not Catholics, but Fr Piotr says that the reach of the Church is still broad, especially in the cultural sphere.
“If you turn on the Israeli radio, most of the classical music most of the material there is Christian music. It’s weird to hear in Hebrew on the public radio: ‘Now we will hear the Agnus Dei, which is a part of the Catholic Mass where we greet the Messiah as the Lamb of God.’ This cultural richness attracts people.” Archaeology is another sphere where interaction between Jewish or secular and Christian worlds is strong in Israel.
Just as non-Christians in Britain become familiar with feasts of the Christian calendar like Easter and Christmas, so too the everyday life of religious minorities in Israel in some ways revolves around the great holy days of the Jewish calendar.
“We want to be part of this society,” Fr Piotr says. “We celebrate all the Jewish feasts as being a part of this country.”
“Israel is focussed on the Old Testament and maybe two weeks before Christmas when I asked the kids what feast are we approaching they would naturally say Hannukah, because that is what is happening in society, all the commercials on TV, all the school life.”
“Yom Kippur here; that’s probably the biggest Jewish feast. I always preach before it: do an examination of conscience. Prepare yourself for confession. Try to interact with God.” Israeli society shuts down on the Day of Atonement, with workers staying home, television not broadcasting, and the streets generally empty. “You have no excuse to say ‘I didn’t have time’ because there’s nothing else you can do!”
On Sundays and the Christian feasts, these faithful do the same as other Catholics around the world – only they do it in Hebrew. “Sunday Mass is in Hebrew. Absolutely all our Masses are in Hebrew. We pray in Hebrew. We have First Communions in Hebrew. We have a beautiful prayer book: Catholic prayers in Hebrew for the whole family.”
“It’s a big richness to discover how our liturgical language, how much it takes from the Bible itself. And if you hear it and then read it, or the other way round, you feel like: OK, this is it. This is what the Church has been doing for two thousand years.”
Reminding the Church of its Jewish roots is a role that has unsurprisingly fallen onto the lap of the St James Vicariate. “You can’t avoid the fact that Jesus, His mother, and His first disciples were Jews. I think the first fifteen bishops of Jerusalem had Jewish origins. We kind of forgot about this in the Church.”
In the alienation of post-modern societies, Fr Piotr suggests Christians are facing difficulties in transmitting and receiving the faith. “The Church should come back to Jerusalem to understand who we are, in which way, in a modern society. Maybe it’s time to bring back the Jewish roots of the Church.”
The task for Israeli Catholics – particularly those in Jerusalem – is made easier by their very geography. “I sometimes joke we breathe the same air that Jesus was breathing and drink the same water and see the same trees. Maybe not trees, but at least the same sky.”
Judaism “is the mentality in which Christianity started to grow” Fr Piotr says. “What can our youth understand from the Gospel if they don’t know this context of the Middle East?” Living in the Holy Land itself is a great gift. “We have this privilege to be here.”
Fr Piotr’s own journey began in Poland, where he grew up in a Catholic family. After discerning his vocation and serving as a priest, his diocese sent him on to further study, and eventually to Jerusalem to do his PhD.
“I have been here fifteen years. I was already a priest and I studied in Rome. I came here to study.” Formerly incardinated in his home diocese, Fr Piotr is now a priest of the Latin patriarchate. “For me, this was a big decision. Your mother diocese is important – this is part of our spirituality. But somehow God guided me here.”
“All Catholics, wherever they are, should come visit Jerusalem and see it with their own eyes, in order to deepen their spirituality.” But he warns that coming to the Holy City is not just a matter of ticking off the pilgrim sites. “Don’t forget that there is also a living church, people who live here. And, of course, most of them will speak Arabic, but there’s also this little group: Hebrew-speaking Catholics.”
The number of people in the pastoral care of the Vicariate are not many – at the most generous estimate no more than six or seven thousand. The number has been fairly stable in recent years, and has produced vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
“My people sometimes say, ‘Father, we are so little, so few parishes!’ And I always say if a drop of water says ‘I’m small and not necessary to anything’ then we don’t have the ocean.”
“Pope Francis said once the peripheral will change the world, not the mainstream. There’s so many things we do here that don’t happen in many places.”
“I think this little drop inside our Catholic ocean is very significant and important. This is also one of the blessings that God keeps us alive, this fragile little church.”
