“A Real Emptiness”: Catholic Christians of Jerusalem Are Deprived of Their Holy Week

This year’s Holy Week in Jerusalem was unlike any other. Usually, Christian holidays are the high season for Jerusalem’s Christian community, whose numbers have dwindled to less than 2 percent of Jerusalem’s population (see Population of Jerusalem as of the End of 2023). Under the pretext of security concerns due to the US-Israel war on Iran, however, Christian worshippers were deprived of performing Holy Week ceremonies at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the most significant religious site for this holiday worldwide.

Like their Muslim neighbors, Christian businesses rely on tourists and pilgrims during holiday seasons to earn most of their living. Without Christian pilgrims from near and far, and with the closure of Old City churches even to local worshippers, merchandise is collecting dust or going bad on store shelves, and the holy sites are quiet and lonely.

In the past, during the Holy Week, several religious events and ceremonies took place in Jerusalem’s Old City, such as the Palm Sunday procession from the Mount of Olives to St. Anne’s Church, Palm Sunday Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Maundy Thursday, the Way of the Cross through the Via Dolorosa, and Orthodox Holy Week including Holy Fire Saturday and Easter about a week after the Latin Easter.

Typically, tens of thousands of people flock to the Old City for these ceremonies, and pilgrims bring vital business, but this year, the city was abandoned. “It is usually very crowded, making it hard to walk, especially near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and all over Jerusalem . . . but now it’s empty. There’s nobody here,” said a Jerusalem resident in an interview with Reuters, while expressing feelings of “sadness and depression.” She added that “people are at home. Nobody is leaving their homes. Jerusalem looks sad, really.”1

For the first time “in centuries,” according to Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, church officials and clergymen—including Cardinal Pizzaballa himself—were denied entry to the Church of Holy Sepulchre as they were on their way to perform the Palm Sunday Mass. In a joint statement from the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, Catholic leaders responded:

After major international backlash and intervention from Christian communities in Israel’s Western ally countries, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later allowed for clergy to hold small religious ceremonies at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during the the remainder of Holy Week, but it remained closed to the public.3

The scenes from the Holy Sepulchre were unprecedented. The Patriarch began his Easter Sunday homily with: “Here, inside this Sepulchre, we are not facing a symbol: we are facing a real emptiness.”4

On an exceptionally lonely Easter Mass, the Latin Patriarch took wisdom from the sad occasion. This Easter, he said, God is saving worshippers from “a misunderstanding—that faith is something to be possessed, a form of control, a piece of evidence in our pocket.”5 Israel’s self-proclaimed sovereignty over religious sites like al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre have been widely criticized as an attempt to change the Status Quo by enforcing power on the ground, while heads of the church and the Islamic Waqf Council, under the auspices of Jordanian King Abdullah II, are meant to have custodianship over these sites (see Hashemite Custodianship of the Holy Sites of Jerusalem: A Century of Dynastic Authority and Protection).6

This year, both Muslim and Christian communities were deprived of long-awaited holiday seasons that shine a light onto the grim reality of war, economic paralysis, and struggling community morale. Due to the Holy Sepulchre closure and restrictions on large gatherings, Christians in Jerusalem held a mass in other churches with limited attendance, practicing their religious rights and standing steadfast alongside their communities.