Given that the Vatican “gay lobby” story was back in the air this week, it may be hard for some to fathom that anything else is cooking on the church beat. Yet there is real news out there, including this: A new threat has emerged to the Christian community in the Gaza Strip, estimated at just 3,000 souls out of a population of 1.7 million.
The Hamas government has issued a ban on coeducational schools, which means that the five Christian schools on the strip, two Catholic and three Protestant, may have to close. Officials insist the decision was not directed at Christians, but they happen to run the only coeducational institutions in the territory.
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, plans to meet Gaza’s prime minister to appeal the move. Among other things, presumably he’ll point out that these Christian schools serve a largely Muslim population.
For purposes of this column, the way I learned about the situation is almost as revealing as the order itself. As it happens, I received an email from the Israeli embassy to the Holy See, passing along a brief article from the Catholic Herald in the U.K.
Israeli officials clearly felt the story merited attention, and for fairly obvious reasons: It makes Hamas look bad.
It was a small reminder of a larger point: It’s often difficult to tell the full story of anti-Christian persecution around the world and a main reason why is the distorting effect of politics, which tends to bring only part of the picture into view. Nowhere is that more clear than the Holy Land.
Many Arab Christians, in tandem with their liberal sympathizers in the West, emphasize the negative impact of Israeli security policies while downplaying Islamic radicalism. On the other side, Israelis and their conservative allies insist that Israel’s Christian population is actually growing while pouncing on every perceived Palestinian outrage.
The truth is that Christians face hardships on both sides of the divide, and often for similar reasons. Continue reading
Sources
- John L. Allen Jr in National Catholic Reporter
- Image: The Counter Jihad Report
John L. Allen Jr is a senior columnist for National Catholic Reporter
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