In wartime Jerusalem, Dominican friar reflects on ‘the heart of peace’
JERUSALEM – As new violence erupted in the Middle East, a Dominican friar in Jerusalem was releasing a book on the Holy City as a place of peace.
The book, Gerusalemme: Un cuore di pace, by fr. Olivier Catel, OP, has just appeared in Italian. A member of the Dominican community at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem, Catel describes the work as born from personal experience during a time of war.
“This book began actually when two years ago I spent one year in Oxford in England and it was the time when the war broke out, you know, after October 7. So first the massacre in southern Israel and then the war in Gaza. And all the people I was with in England told me, it’s so terrible, Jerusalem. It’s so terrible. It must be a terrible place.
“And actually, it was not my experience. Of course, we’ve got difficulties here, but it’s a wonderful, fantastic, fascinating, also exhausting city. And I decided to write a book about my experience of Jerusalem. I’ve been guiding pilgrims between epidemics, and everything for 10 years. And it’s really a city. It’s not only to see the holy places, to see, you know, churches. It’s also to have a real intimate experience.”
For Catel, Jerusalem is not simply a destination but a mirror of the human heart.
“To realize that Jerusalem, actually we are part of Jerusalem and Jerusalem is part of us. It’s like the city inside our hearts. And so it’s a deep spiritual journey also in our own inner city. And so there’s a kind of mirroring, you know, between when you actually stroll in the streets of Jerusalem, when you discover like a dead end, when you find a beautiful place, you get lost, you find your way again.”
A divided city, a divided eart
Living in Jerusalem shaped Catel’s understanding of both conflict and grace.
“When you go to, when you visit Jerusalem, the experience is that you get these four quarters of Jerusalem, the Armenian, the Christian, the Muslim and the Jewish quarter. And actually you see the differences of quarter when you go from one quarter to another, for example, between the Muslim quarter and the Jewish quarter. It’s very clear in two or three meters, you just turn your head and you say, wow, it’s a different place, different world. And so there is always tensions in this place.”
Rather than diminishing his love for the city, that tension deepened it.
“Not that I don’t love it for conflict, but I love it because it’s the image of our heart. know, if you really look at your heart, you will see that your heart is quite divided. And the whole thing about a deep Christian life is to find some unity. So we can only find unity by grace, by the love of God, but still our heart is always a bit divided between what we want, what we think is best, what we don’t want.
“the good things we would like to do and that we don’t do. And so this kind of division of inner conflict, you can see it in the city.”
Jerusalem’s walls, he said, resemble the human heart: “You are in a place where there is peace, there is contemplation, and suddenly there is anger and violence. And so all this tension of Jerusalem in this, you know, walled city that is not closed like a heart. So everything that happens inside is really an image of what happens in our hearts.”
An oasis in a crossroads
The Dominican community at the École Biblique occupies a unique location.
“We are in a very special place because we are in this priory, an echo, a school, a biblical school that was founded at the end of the 19th century. We are Christians, of course, priests with students. We are in an mainly Arab Muslim neighborhood. We are, I would say.
“20, let us say, 100 meters away from the ultra-orthodox Jewish quarter, Mea Sherim. We are five minutes from the old city and 10 minutes from the new city, the Jewish modern city. And so it’s really like a crossroads.”
In times of escalation, the effects are immediate.
“Of course, everything that happens in the country, we feel it, you know, when we get the alarm in the night and we get to wake up and we hear the missiles intercepting other missiles, the Iron Dome and everything. So it’s a difficult situation.”
Yet he described the community as “kind of oasis, know, of peace, of prayer. And that’s our role here.”
“Our vocation, our community is a sign of unity in a world where unity is usually a big challenge, especially here in the Middle East. So by our prayer, by our common prayer, by our life together, we try to be a symbol, at least to a sign that something else is different. Here in the community, we are eight different nationalities. So it’s like you…
“the UN, you know, but it’s working fine here because we all have the same vocation.”
He added that the friars seek to “keep the cultures of all the peoples who have been living here for three thousand, four thousand years without any political agenda. And just to study scripture, we are a kind of lab, know, laboratory of the Word of God.”
Lent under fire
The current conflict has shaped the community’s Lenten observance.
“We’re not celebrating anymore in the church, we’re celebrating in the corridor, like a catacomb to get protected, more or less, we’re celebrating in the shelter where we take refuge when there is an alert. And there is something very basic, know, maybe not many decorum, that’s yeah, Christ is here, is here with us.”
Reading the Gospel in that context carries new weight.
“You know, there was a reading about the love of the enemies, you know, and we are reading the Gospel of Matthew now: Can I really love my enemies? Can I pray for the ones sending missiles on my head?”
Idolatry and the gift
In researching the book, Catel said one unexpected theme stood out: idolatry.
“Maybe it’s bizarre, it’s the place of idolatry, you know? How idolatry was always present at the Bible and how it can be really present in our own lives.”
Reflecting on the Valley of Gehenna, once associated with child sacrifice, he said: “At first you think, yeah, it’s all stories, you know, like we don’t burn children anymore for false gods. But when you go deeper, you realize that idolatry is always there. And then the most pernicious idolatry, and you see that in the Bible, it’s when you prefer a gift from God, like the land of the people, to God himself.”
“When there is something really important in my life, is it really God or a gift from God? And that’s a very pernicious form of idolatry.”
Peace as reconciliation
For Catel, peace is not merely the absence of war but reconciliation rooted in Christ.
“So we’re in Lent and you know we always hear in the scripture reconciliation and it’s also a place of conflict but also a place of reconciliation. Of course because we’ve got the Holy Sepulcher, the tomb of Christ at the center of Jerusalem.”
He described a recent liturgical celebration in a medieval church: “And suddenly I thought about all the people who were in this church throughout the ages, know, the Crusaders, then it was a Quranic school, then now it’s a place where African brothers are oding, and it’s a place where humanity meets together and throughout history.”
Jerusalem, he said, is “like full of the prayer of the people who have been coming for 2000 years. So that’s how it gives a real peace. Peace with our history, peace with other peoples.”
The empty tomb stands at the center of that peace.
“It changes our whole connection with death because we go to a tomb that is empty. So it means that all the tombs in the world can be empty and are empty because of the resurrection of Christ.”
Exporting Jerusalem
Catel concluded with a broader vision.
“Everywhere where we are, there is a Jerusalem as long as we are a praying community building bridges. And that’s the Jerusalem because Jerusalem is everywhere. And so we’ve got to export Jerusalem, Mother Jerusalem of peace that Christ wants us to export.”
He invited readers to follow the work of the École Biblique at www.ebaf.edu and added: “When it’s open, do come. But for the time being, stay safe at home.”
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