Loving the Holy Land
For us, loving this land means to love Jesus. And we cannot think of Jesus without loving His land. Because of the Franciscans’ special attachment to the Gospel of Jesus and to his Incarnation, our Catholic Church entrusted to us the mission of preserving the places of our salvation.
There are concrete ways of watching over the holy places: animating the holy places for the pilgrims and the local Churches by means of the Mass, welcoming the pilgrims who come from every part of the world so they may pray and meditate on the life of Christ, and preserving the structures of these places.
Loving its People
Local Christian communities live alongside the holy places. The local communities are made up of parishes of different Catholic rites and traditions (Western and Eastern). We Franciscans have the responsibility of pastoring various parishes whose heart and whose seat are in the holy places.
Loving the stones that preserve the memory of Jesus also pushes us to love the living stones, the Christians who’ve lived here throughout the centuries. The Custody has many formative and communal activities, which aim at supporting the Christian presence in the Holy Land: running schools, constructing housing, and helping people who suffer from various forms of poverty.
