On 17 July 2025, three people were killed by an Israeli air strike on the Holy Family Church in Gaza City. Many others were injured, including Father Gabriel Romanelli, the parish priest. Since the start of the genocide, the Holy Family Church has been a refuge for Palestinians — even more so after Israel bombed the nearby Church of Saint Porphyrius, a Greek Orthodox parish, where Israeli forces killed and injured dozens of Palestinians. By December 2023, it was reported that up to 650 had taken shelter at the Holy Family Church, which is the only Catholic Church in Gaza.

It was during that same December that two parishioners, Nahida Khalil Anton and Samar Kamal Anton, were killed by an Israeli sniper. Nahida, who was Samar’s mother, walked out into the church’s courtyard when an Israeli sniper took her life. Attempting to save her mother, Samar was instantly killed. Seven other parishioners, including a sixteen-year-old boy, were wounded as they attempted to rescue the mother and daughter. Sister Nabila, a local nun, witnessed the catastrophe but was powerless to help. It was as if the Israelis were using the dead Palestinians to lure others out.

A few weeks later, at midnight mass in Westminster Cathedral in London, I bitterly wept as Cardinal Vincent Nichols delivered his homily in the early hours of Christmas Day. He described Bethlehem as a ‘silent city’, where all public celebrations had been cancelled. I thought of Kelly Latimore’s icon — Christ in the Rubble — depicting the Holy Family buried under broken buildings. 

The parish in Gaza had a powerful advocate in the late Pope Francis. In his Angelus prayer after Nahida and Samar’s killing, Francis condemned the attack as an act of terrorism. Israel was intransigent, with some invoking the antisemitic canard of ‘blood libel’, the medieval myth that Jews deliberately murdered Christians, despite the irrefutable evidence that the Israeli army had, in fact, killed two Christian Palestinians and injured many more.

Throughout the genocide, Francis regularly rang Father Romanelli, even when he was hospitalised with pneumonia, to speak with parishioners. His calls gave them hope, and it sent a message to Israel that the church was under his protection. It is troubling, then, that Pope Francis’s successor, Pope Leo XIV, was said to have jettisoned Francis’s regular contact with the church following his election as pontiff. Even in the wake of the 17 July bombing, Leo XIV was reluctant to name Israel as perpetrators, taking several days to identify them. His timidity only empowered Israeli war criminals, and it now raises questions as to whether Israel saw an opportunity with the latest successor to Saint Peter. 

It also reinforced how extraordinary Francis’s rupture with Israel was. By describing Israel’s actions as terrorism, he helped to dispel the myth that Israel is a liberal democracy, and instead, he revealed the heart of what Israel truly is: a violent, supremacist, and genocidal state. It challenged the nonsensical term of ‘Christian Zionist’, too. Palestine is the home of the oldest Christian community in the world, one that stretches back to the time of the Nazarene Himself. The fact that it’s a community on the brink of extinction should trouble the conscience of every Christian in the world.

And then there are the Christians of the British cabinet, like David Lammy, who once pompously declared that ‘his faith has been with [him] my whole life and has never left.’ Perhaps it left him in October 2023. As Foreign Secretary, he has excused war crime after war crime, deluding the majority of Labour’s obsequious backbench MPs with his honeyed words, all the while selling weapons to Israel in their genocide.

Lammy’s cabinet colleague, Jonathan Reynolds MP, chair of ‘Christians on the Left’, is responsible for the Department for Business and Trade — the ministry that oversees arms export licenses, including the components of F-35 fighter jets that Israel uses to bomb Palestinians. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, and a Roman Catholic, who once said that ‘being Catholic has always been about a wider sense of social justice, social action.’ Like Reynolds, she has no problem with Israel (or, indeed, her own government’s complicity in) destroying the ancestral homeland of her faith and the people who’ve lived there for generations. Tepid education policies must come first.

Bridging church and state, there’s the disgraced Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who refused to meet with the Reverend Doctor Munther Isaac, an outspoken Palestinian pastor in 2024. The reverend’s crime? He had planned to share a platform with Jeremy Corbyn MP. Welby apologised, but his initial reaction revealed something: the principal leader of a major Christian denomination could not stand in solidarity with a fellow Christian, one from the land where the faith emerged two thousand years ago, no less. 

Of course, religious hypocrisy within the British establishment is nothing new, but in light of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, a destruction of which Christians have not been exempt, any politician who speaks of a Christian faith must be ruthlessly scrutinised if their support lays with Israel rather than with Palestine. They’re reminiscent of the hypocrites described in Matthew 6:5, ‘for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others’.

By describing Israel’s actions as terrorism, Francis manifested real solidarity — one that challenged the genocidal state of Israel and stood up for the oppressed people of Palestine. It was an inspiration to people regardless of their faith, because he stood in such contrast with the unctuous cowards of London and Washington DC. The Church’s inability to do that now would not just be its own shame but an extension of the shared failure of all institutions to adequately confront Israel’s crimes. For Christian Palestinians, they felt that Francis never forgot them. We must continue to draw on his example in every way we can.