blood on his hand

"It’s not that I don’t accept God; I simply most respectfully return my ticket."

In a CNN interview last month with photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, a video shows two wounded boys on what looks like a hospital stretcher. One of them—who looks like he is about four or five, the same age as my nephew—is trembling in shock. He is covered in a fine layer of dust and his eyes are wide with the horror that all parents would rather die than have their five-year-olds feel.

An older boy—maybe eight?—next to him, whose head is bandaged with gauze and whose face is bruised with dried blood, puts a hand on his shaking leg, in a gesture that seems like comfort or calm.

The five-year-old looks down at his hand like a foreign object. In the middle of his palm is a spidery splotch of blood. He holds it up to the older boy, confused. Can he clarify what this wound means? The older boy just stares, not unkindly. But saying nothing. No understanding flickers on his face. At that point, a pair of strong adult hands—wedding band on the left hand—enter the frame and begin to brush the dust off the young boy.

I hope you pray for these two young boys. I hope they are still alive. The task of healing from such wounds seems so immense. We are all one of another: their suffering is ours. Let us not let them suffer alone.

On Monday, reports came out of Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza, that Palestinians returning to the city after having fled three months ago, had found a mass grave near Nasser Hospital—it is one of three mass graves that have been uncovered in the last month.

You may remember Khan Younis being in the news in December, when Israel began its invasion of the city. And you may remember Nasser Hospital also being in the news, because it was one of the largest hospitals in Gaza. It was destroyed by the Israeli military in February.

In October, 200 days ago, Israeli troops warned Gazans to flee south from Gaza City and surrounding areas in the north. They traveled down the 25-mile strip and Israeli troops followed them.

More than one million Gazans have been squeezed into the southern city of Rafah, which is located on the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt. Israel continues to conduct air raids on Rafah—an Israeli bombing killed 18 children on Sunday. Nearly half of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million (as of October 6, 2023) are children.

Upon returning to Khan Younis, healthcare workers, doctors, and families discovered a grave of at least 310 bodies, some of the bodies discovered had their hands and feet tied. They were buried deep in the ground, the United Nations’ human rights chief, said, and covered with waste. Footage the BBC obtained from Israeli soldiers of their prisoners being held, naked and bound suggests the torture and mistreatment of prisoners—to be buried with your hands bound and tied suggests that as well. The Israeli army denies responsibility for the mass grave. The New York Times reports that hospital workers at the besieged Nasser hospital spoke about digging mass graves for 150 casualties in the middle of the Israeli military attack on the hospitals this winter. At least 2,000 people are still missing—potentially buried under the rubble—as well.

Two-thirds of the nearly 34,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza are women and children. One does not kill women and children because you are defending yourself or afraid for your life. One kills women and children in order to make a nation sterile: in order to pull up a root and destroy the future. One kills women and children when you are killing a specific race of people indiscriminately. One kills women and children when committing a genocide.

Since their deaths and this genocide have been carried out by a government and military that receives billions of dollars of support from the United States each year, you and I, federal-tax-paying Americans, are responsible, too. One journalist calculated he had contributed $150 to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and invasion of Gaza.

The Catholic Church in the United States has worked very hard to ensure that American’s federal tax dollars will not be used to fund abortion. The USCCB and other Catholic institutions have successfully lobbied Congress so that Catholic dioceses and institutions will not be required to fund contraceptive medical technologies for employees of Catholic schools and Catholic churches.

Shouldn’t the U.S. Church be just as loud when U.S. tax dollars are used to kill innocent children? A pro-life Church would be. It is hard to argue that funding healthcare plans that cover contraception is a more proximate cause of evil than the federal taxes Catholics are paying being used to fund weapons that leave 34,000 people dead.

Why you would fight so hard for a world in which five-year-olds are born and then seem to have no concern about, once they’re here, whether or not they are bombed or shot or tortured to death? That is not how a parent behaves.

The U.S. bishops (unfortunately) are not making headlines for lobbying against war, the military-industrial complex, gun violence, or child abuse. I mean, God love these sweet bishops, but they are probably the very last people on the Lord’s green earth that anyone would look to as experts on preventing child abuse. Not after the last 20 years and not after several dioceses spent at least $10 million lobbying against states’ statute of limitation reforms that allowed victims of child sex abuse to file a new complaint against their abuser. In searching around to see what the USCCB is lobbying for these days, I found the USCCB website has several pages of “abuse prevention resources” accompanied by the frequently repeated copy: “The Catholic Church is absolutely committed to the safety of children.” Which is very “the lady doth protest too much.” Show us where and how you are actually committing yourself to the safety and well-being of children, please and thank you, Mr. Bishops. Because you seem to be rolling your eyes—literally—instead of healing the pain many Catholics feel.

And this is a problem we’ll come back to next week. Because when those with spiritual power do not seem to be working for the good of those they serve, we have a crisis of spiritual authority. And we do have a chronic crisis of spiritual authority in the Catholic Church, and that is causing real pain to real people who are yearning to encounter Christ and yearning for the truth to set them free. If I were a shepherd, I wouldn’t be rolling my eyes right now. Would the good shepherd?

It is indefensible and unnecessary to create a world that treats children as cruelly as we do. A five-year-old is not collateral damage. He’s not just “the sad cost of doing business.” A world that fills a five-year-old’s eyes with the dark horror of that dust-covered boy is not a world worth having.

“It’s not that I don’t accept God,” Ivan tells Alyosha in Brothers Karamazov, “I simply most respectfully return my ticket.” Ivan refuses any sort of cosmic harmony—his ticket to heaven or eternal bliss, a moment where “it all makes sense”—if the cost is the torture of one innocent child. Our hearts are stonier than Ivan’s.

We try to pretend that our choices are sealed off from a larger world, that we exist in a private sphere where our lives have nothing to do with this boy on a hospital bed in Gaza.

We cannot go to heaven alone, Dorothy Day wrote in 1940, Otherwise, she said, quoting the French poet Charles Péguy, God will say to us, “Where are the others?”