Middle East, Cardinal Zuppi calls for peace by reading the names of dead children

The first to read was Cardinal Matteo Zuppi and then many, dozens of people, young and old, took turns to scan the more than 12,000 names of the children who died in the Holy Land until evening.

The memory of the abomination of the present comes from the place where in the autumn of 1944 the Nazi-Fascists were responsible for the worst massacre of civilians in the Second World War, the ruins of the church of Casaglia, in Monte Sole di Marzabotto. On the eve of Ferragosto, because the church set on fire by the SS was dedicated to the Assumption.

In the silence, in the shade of the park's oak trees, the full names and ages of the children who died from 7 October 2023 until 15 July were pronounced from a pulpit: 469 pages, 16 Israelis, 12,211 Palestinians. A symbolic gesture, a prayer marathon, with moments of emotion.

"To remember, to pay attention, from this place that is a place of suffering and that has always, intentionally, been a place of remembrance of all the victims," Zuppi said. With the hope that 'by stopping at the suffering of innocent children, something new and different can be started again'.

"We call out their names one by one, starting with those killed on 7 October by the murderous madness of Hamas, from which we must distance ourselves, as from any ideology or calculation that reduces the other to an object, to something residual, to an enemy. They ask us all to commit ourselves to finding or pursuing with more intelligence and passion the path to peace, starting with the ceasefire and offering the conditions to do so, from the release of hostages to not taking an entire people hostage,' he added. The initiative was launched by the Piccola famiglia dell'Annunziata, the monastic community founded by Giuseppe Dossetti, who is buried a short distance away. The community is present at the sites of the massacre in order to constantly remember it.