The lead bishop for the Holy Land of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales has condemned a fresh wave of settler violence directed at Taybeh, a small hill town north-east of Ramallah that is now the last entirely Palestinian Christian village in the West Bank - and called on Catholics in England and Wales to back their prayers with practical solidarity. In a statement issued on 8 May through the Bishops' Conference, Bishop James Curry, auxiliary of Westminster, responded to reports from residents that the previous day Israeli settlers had stormed land belonging to the village, established a new illegal outpost, threatened to kill anyone who returned to their property and later seized a nearby quarry.
Having celebrated Mass at Christ the Redeemer Church in Taybeh in January, during this year's Holy Land Coordination of bishops' conferences, Bishop Curry said that what happened on 7 May fits a long-standing pattern rather than an isolated flare-up. The attack, he said, highlights the continued plight of Christians and their neighbours, who belong to the land and only wish to live in peace with dignity. He warned that such violence "only deepens division and makes the prospect of peace and security unattainable", echoing a recent letter from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, in which the Patriarch insisted that force cannot be the foundation on which to build a peaceful future.
A village under sustained pressure
Taybeh - biblical Ephraim, the place to which the Gospel of John records that Jesus withdrew before his Passion - has around 1,400 inhabitants, all Christian, divided between Latin, Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic parishes. Its position, on an exposed ridge in a strategically sensitive corridor running east of Jerusalem towards the Jordan Valley, has made it a recurring target. The parish priest, Father Bashar Fawadleh, has spoken openly about the situation for months. In an interview in March he described daily life punctuated by military checkpoints, raids on the village's quarry and concrete plant and intrusions onto family land. Speaking to the charity Aid to the Church in Need, he said the 1,400 souls of his parish face "mounting pressure" and a chronic "lack of protection", warning that the long-term aim of the harassment appears to be the appropriation of more land. Premier Christian News has reported that in July last year two separate incidents saw vehicles set ablaze in the village and a fire lit against the wall of Taybeh's fifth-century church, dedicated to St George - one of the oldest in the Holy Land.
Residents say that several illegal outposts have already been established around the village, with settlers seizing hilltops, releasing livestock onto crops, blocking access to olive groves and preventing local Christian businesses from operating. The Bassir family quarry, which had functioned for two decades, has effectively been shut down by settler threats.
"Solidarity through encounter"
What distinguishes Bishop Curry's intervention is less the condemnation - bishops' conferences across Europe have spoken in similar terms - than the call to do something specific about it. Sympathy from a distance, he suggested, is not enough. He told Catholics in England and Wales that it is easy to feel helpless in the face of repeated attacks but that they must not be discouraged. Prayer and words of concern are important, he said, but they need to be accompanied by concrete action - and the form of action he singled out was what he called "solidarity through encounter". In practice that means pilgrimage: travelling to Taybeh and similar communities when it is safe to do so, staying in local guesthouses, eating in local restaurants, buying local products, and standing visibly alongside families and small businesses being squeezed by intimidation and economic pressure. The argument tracks a wider plea made earlier this year by Cardinal Pizzaballa, who urged Catholics not to wait for normality before returning to the Holy Land. With pilgrim numbers still depressed by the war in Gaza and the wider regional instability, hotels, taxi drivers, craft workshops and Christian schools across the West Bank face existential pressure that is itself accelerating Christian emigration from the region.
Bishop Curry, who speaks for the bishops of England and Wales on the Holy Land, also pressed the political dimension of the issue. He noted that the bishops have repeatedly raised these concerns directly with the UK government, and urged all those with influence and responsibility - diplomats, parliamentarians, journalists, Catholic professional networks - to do everything possible to prevent further violence and to uphold the dignity and rights of all people in the Holy Land, Palestinian and Israeli alike.
A widening Catholic response
The intervention sits within a fast-moving sequence of statements from Catholic leaders. The Israeli government has recently refused to renew the residence permit of Father Louis Salman, a Jordanian priest who has led the youth ministry of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem in the Bethlehem area and who was ordered to leave the country by 11 May. Hundreds gathered for a farewell Mass at his parish in Beit Sahour. The Bishops' Conference of England and Wales has also drawn attention in recent weeks to incidents in which Israeli authorities prevented the Latin Patriarch from celebrating Palm Sunday liturgies at the Holy Sepulchre, describing such episodes as a denial of religious freedom. Pope Leo XIV, marking the first anniversary of his election earlier this month, has repeatedly called for a just peace in the Middle East and pressed for what he described in his address at Rome's La Sapienza University on 14 May as an end to a "spiral of annihilation" driven by militarised technology.
For now, Bishop Curry's appeal is addressed less to governments than to ordinary Catholics in English and Welsh parishes. The Lent and Easter collections, the parish pilgrimage that may have been quietly cancelled, the school trip postponed indefinitely, the diocesan twinning that has gone dormant: each, he implies, is a place where the question of Taybeh becomes very concrete indeed. As he put it in a video reflection recorded in January after celebrating Mass with the Taybeh parish, Israel and Palestine are at present in a state of shock and trauma in which communities have been paralysed and conversations have stopped. The witness of a small Christian village that refuses to leave its land, his statement implies, is precisely the kind of conversation Catholics elsewhere are now being asked not to let fall silent.
fr.K.C.
Silere non possum