Cardinal Pizzaballa celebrates Holy Thursday Mass in Church of Holy Sepulchre, days after he was denied entry

April 03, 2026

The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem celebrated the Holy Thursday evening Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (video), four days after Israeli police denied him access to the church on Palm Sunday.

Following international condemnation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would permit Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, O.F.M., the Latin Patriarch, to enter the church. On Monday, the Latin Patriarchate confirmed an agreement with Israeli police.

Cardinal Pizzaballa celebrated the Holy Thursday Mass in Latin, ad orientem, in a church largely empty because of wartime restrictions on access to the area. In his homily, the prelate contrasted the Israelites’ exodus from slavery in Egypt with Christ’s exodus into service in the washing of the feet of His apostles.

Cardinal Pizzaballa preached:

To gird one’s loins, in the Bible, is the gesture of one who is preparing to set out. It is the gesture of one about to make an exodus, to leave the land of slavery and enter into freedom. That night, the people of Israel ate the lamb with their loins girded because they were about to go out. The belt was the sign of a passage at hand.

And now Jesus, at the hour of his own passage, girds himself. But he does not gird himself in order to depart. He girds himself in order to bend down.

This is the first thing we must truly see: Jesus transforms the gesture of one who sets out into the gesture of one who serves. In God’s logic, the Exodus is not a flight away from the world, but a descent into the world, all the way to its depths. The girded loins of Jesus are no longer the sign of one fleeing from slavery, but of one who freely makes himself a slave out of love.

After recalling St. Peter’s reaction—“You shall never wash my feet”—Cardinal Pizzaballa said that “Jesus’ reply is even more uncompromising, and it is one of the most severe statements in the Gospel: ‘Unless I wash you, you will have no part with me’ ... It is as if Jesus were saying: Peter, you may admire me, you may follow me, you may even defend me—but if you do not accept this way of loving, you will not enter into my passage. You will not share in my Passover.”

He added:

Dear friends, the question this liturgy places before us is simple and radical: do we wish to have a part with him? Not in the abstract, but concretely. Do we want to enter into a love that humbles itself? Do we want a salvation that comes through service? Do we want a God who does not dominate, but bends down? If we say yes, then an exodus begins for us as well. Not an exodus that draws us away from reality, but one that leads us into reality with a new gaze: a passage from self-defense to self-giving, from fear to trust, from pride to communion ...

This expression—“to have a part”—resonates in a particular way for us, the Church of the Holy Land. We are not a strong Church, nor a large one, nor a Church that can afford easy paths, and we experience this constantly. We are often a weary Church, a Church put to the test, at times tempted to defend itself rather than to give itself. And yet today the Lord does not ask us to be powerful, but to share in his life. He does not ask us to resolve everything, but not to reject his way of loving. For the Church shares in Christ not when it is secure, but when it accepts to share in his self-lowering.

To have a part with him, for us who live and bear witness to the Gospel in this land, means learning the language of humility, the language of bending down. Bending down to fears, to misunderstandings, to the daily burdens of those who risk losing hope. Bending down without claiming to have immediate solutions, but by offering a faithful presence. Perhaps we cannot change the great movements of history, but we can decide whether to stand with Christ in his way of being within history: not above it, not against it, but alongside it.

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