By Auguste Meyrat
In the interest of diplomacy and personal relations, it's normally a good idea to follow the adage, "If you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all." But when it comes to assessing challenging and complex situations, this advice should be flipped: "If you can't say anything critical or incisive or even just useful, don't say anything at all." All too often, good-hearted people will smother a truthful analysis with platitudes that obscure issues and prevent potential solutions.
Such, alas, is the case with the well-meaning but ultimately counterproductive book, The Priest Who Stayed in Gaza: A Witness to Hope in the Ruins by Fr. Gabriel Romanelli, an Argentinian priest who has ministered to the dwindling Christian community in Gaza for the past few years. Already run down and desperately poor, the Gaza Strip became an active war zone after the Israeli military responded to the horrific terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, looking to recover hostages and remove Hamas from power.
True to the book's title, Romanelli refused to leave the area. Amidst the bombs and fighting, he continued to run the Holy Family Church, directing instruction for the children; managing the living conditions for homeless families; overseeing medical care for the sick and wounded; and celebrating the Mass for the few Christians still coming to church.
Unfortunately, the qualities that would make Romanelli an ideal observer prove to be his undoing. He is too close to the action to offer an objective perspective that would do the hard work of identifying causes and evaluating paths forward. He is too busy mediating conflicts between refugees, rationing food and water supplies, and entertaining the children to take a larger view of what is happening.
Another problem is Romanelli's commitment to "avoid judgements, condemnations, denunciations, and other expressions belonging to the legal domain." He thinks doing this will help him "clarify [his] point, reflect the atmosphere of the moment, or explain a particular situation," as well as heal the many wounds inflicted by this conflict.
But this approach usually leads to precisely the opposite. Everything he describes happens with hardly any explanation: bombs fall, refugees arrive, the IDF imposes blockades, humanitarian convoys are looted, hostages are taken and tortured, ceasefires are made and broken, reconstruction is prohibited – all for apparently unknown reasons.
Although Romanelli thinks that this kind of indiscriminate reporting from an insider will encourage his audience to rise above blaming one side or the other, it mostly causes the reader to blame everyone for the seemingly senseless chaos. Despite their misery and the suffering it brings, the Gazans largely support Hamas and do little to create a workable society. Despite the heavy casualties and violent reprisals, the Israelis keep up their siege of Gaza and turn the area into an open-air prison.
Perhaps worst of all is Romanelli himself, who, despite his endless trials in Gaza, never really explains why he is there or what he wants. In broad terms, he is a Catholic missionary preaching the Christian Gospel and overseeing a local parish. But in his book, he primarily preaches a generic secular humanism (summed up in a repeated line, "Primum vivere: one must live above all") and leads a refugee camp that primarily serves Muslims.
Ironically, he becomes indignant when journalists portray him as a "man who works for a humanitarian NGO." He insists that he is "here for Christ – that is the truth." Meanwhile, the number of Christians under his care declined rapidly, and his pastoral duties mainly pertained to housing refugees and providing them free childcare and healthcare. In his defense, this is all he can do because of the radical Islamist rule in Gaza: "speaking was not possible: but giving a sign of charity, yes."
Yet surely if speaking in Gaza was impossible, his writing to the rest of the world...
