Tears in Gaza, the Mystical Body, and Our Catholic Vocation

“Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them.”

— Ecclesiastes 4:1

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes does not flinch from reality. He names what is still all-too visible in the modern world: the cries of the oppressed, the unchecked power of oppressors, and the loneliness of the afflicted who suffer without a comforter.

When we watch the devastation in Gaza – children digging through rubble, mothers clutching the bodies of their lifeless children, fathers staring blankly into a future already left permanently violated by war – we see Ecclesiastes written again in the dirt and blood of our neighbors. King Solomon’s cry echoes across the centuries: “The tears of the oppressed … and they had no one to comfort them.”

Yet Scripture does not merely leave us aghast – overwhelmed by the horrors that moved Solomon but only as spectators.

The Book of Job takes us from seeing suffering to feeling it. Job, the righteous man, is struck down not for his sins but through a mystery beyond human understanding. His lament becomes the lament of every innocent victim. His body, family, and dignity are wasted away. And his friends – representing all of us who try to explain or justify suffering – only add salt to his wounds.

To walk with Job is to learn empathy. To sit with him on the ash heap is to understand that suffering cannot be explained away, politicized, or rationalized. It demands presence, solidarity, and tears. Job teaches us to weep with those who weep, to suffer with those who suffer, and to reject cheap explanations.

When we read of a father in Gaza burying his child or of families sheltering in a bombed church, we are called to move from being spectators of tragedy to companions in grief. Job’s cry is not a puzzle to solve, but a summons to compassion.

The New Covenant: From Empathy to Vocation

But Scripture pulls us even further in… The Bible does not end with Ecclesiastes’ lament or Job’s endurance. In the New Covenant, we are given more than reality and empathy: we are given vocation.

Christ fulfills Isaiah’s promise in His first sermon at Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives….” (Luke 4:18)

This is not only Christ’s mission – it is the mission He entrusts to His Body, the Church. In the New Covenant, the world is not left without a comforter. The Comforter has come – first in the Holy Spirit, and through the Spirit, in the Mystical Body of Christ.

Venerable Fulton Sheen saw that reality with prophetic clarity. In “The Mystical Body of Christ,” Sheen wrote that the Church “continues Christ, expresses Christ… makes it possible for Him to prolong his influence unto all times and all men… de-temporalizes and de-localizes Christ so that He belongs to all ages and all souls.”

And again: “Christ has not left this world; He still lives on in His Body, the Church. He suffers in us, He consoles through us, He reaches the world through our hands.”

Here is the answer to Ecclesiastes’s all-but-despairing cry: the oppressed now do have a comforter. The tears of Gaza are not unseen by God, nor unanswered by His Body. The vocation of the Catholic is to be the hands of Christ in history, the comforter for those abandoned by the powers of the world.

This vocation is not abstract. In Gaza, it is embodied in the witness of the Church herself.

When Israeli strikes hit the Holy Family Catholic Church in July, Pope Leo declared with fatherly urgency: “It is time to stop this slaughter.”

He expressed to Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Patriarch of Jerusalem, his “closeness, care, prayer, support, and desire to do everything possible… not only a ceasefire but also an end to this tragedy.”

Cardinal Pizzaballa, who entered Gaza to console the faithful, proclaimed: “Christ is not absent from Gaza… He is there – crucified in the wounded, buried under rubble, and yet present in every act of mercy, every candle in the darkness, every hand extended to the suffering.”

These words are not only poetry – they are true theology made flesh. They manifest the Mystical Body of Christ alive and active: present in Gaza’s churches, in the families who remain, in the priests and sisters who refuse to abandon their people.

The Fathers of the Church anticipated the vocation we find ourselves called to in the life of the Church today.

• St. Gregory the Great saw Job as a figure of Christ and the Church: patient in suffering, intercessor for the world, wounded yet faithful.

• St. Augustine taught in “The City of God” that the fellowship of believers is bound together by love, bearing one another’s burdens, building a city not on domination but on charity.

• St. John Chrysostom insisted that Christ is met in the poor and suffering, and that to ignore them is to ignore Christ Himself.

The Fathers remind us that the Church is not an idea or institution alone – she is a living body, consoling and suffering with the world, precisely where the wounds are deepest.

If Ecclesiastes shows us the reality of oppression, and Job teaches us empathy, the New Covenant commissions us into a real-world vocation:

• To comfort: We are to be the presence that wipes away tears, the voice that says, “You are not alone.”

• To accompany: We are called to share in suffering, not explaining it away but bearing it together.

• To advocate: Like Pope Leo and Cardinal Pizzaballa, we must raise our voices for peace, for justice, for the defense of the innocent.

The Comforter Lives

To summarize: Ecclesiastes lamented a world where the oppressed had no one to comfort them. Job gave us the language of empathy, the cry of the innocent. The New Covenant transforms both into a vocation: the Church is Christ’s Mystical Body, His hands and heart present in the world’s darkest hours.

What that means could not be more pointed or urgent. It means we are Christ’s Body in the world. To put a finer point on it: It means that if Gaza weeps without comforters, it is because we have failed our vocation.

In Gaza today, our vocation is urgent. The Comforter is here, not abstractly, but concretely – in the Church that remains amid ruins, in the priests who pray beside the wounded, in the faithful who share their last scraps of bread, in the Pope and Patriarchs who cry out for peace.

Our task as Catholics is simple and radical: to ensure that no one suffers without comfort, that no one dies unheard, that the Mystical Body of Christ is truly present where the world would leave only silent pain.

Fulton Sheen’s words ring truer than ever: “He suffers in us, He consoles through us, He reaches the world through our hands.”

In Gaza, that is not a metaphor. Christian, it is your vocation.

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