Letter from His Beatitude Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa

Dear Beloved,

May the Lord give you peace!

Despite everything, I continue to believe that the city’s mission is to become “a prophecy and promise of that universal reconciliation and peace which God desires for the whole human family.” In recent years, we have collectively lost sight of this mission, and it is to this mission that we must return.

I write these words not as an abstraction. I write them from a city where the words “peace,” “coexistence,” and “dialogue” have become hollowed out, distant from our daily realities. The violence that has engulfed this land has done more than destroy lives and homes. It has poisoned language itself. And when language fails, silence follows - and in that silence, violence shrieks its brutal language.

It is precisely in that silence that something must be said. Not another condemnation, not another analysis, but a serious and sustained attempt to recover the compass we have lost - to ask again, with honesty and humility, what Jerusalem is for, and what it requires of those who live within its gates and of those across the world to whom it belongs. Establishing Within Your Gates: The Forum for the Universal Vocation of Jerusalem is my attempt to start that journey.

The Song of Ascents invites us to rejoice in finally being within the gates of Jerusalem. These are not gates built for defense. On the contrary, they serve to define a way of life: open in every direction, toward the stranger and the pilgrim, toward whoever wishes to enter and take part. There is no monopoly here; We all belong to Jerusalem. Its walls stand not out of fear, but out of identity - and that identity is constituted by being welcome to all. This is what I wrote to my communities earlier this year. It is also the spirit in which Within Your Gates is built.

My initial interest in creating the Forum stemmed from a desire to understand the Christian perspective on the situation in the Holy Land. The more I have thought about it, however, the clearer it has become that, given this perspective is explicitly universal, it can only be whole when the common good of all communities is integrated into it. The Forum is therefore not designed as a Church institution. My support is intended to provide a faith-based foundation, but its doors are open to scholars and practitioners from different faith traditions, disciplines, and communities: theologians and political scientists, historians and architects, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, believers and those of no faith - all those who share the conviction that Jerusalem’s complexities are not an obstacle but the very conditions that makes a better future possible, all those who care for their own communities while also caring for all the residents of the city.

The Forum will produce applied interdisciplinary research oriented not toward abstract ideals but toward the lived realities of this city and the questions that those realities raise. The work will be scholarly and serious. It will also, I hope, remain human and honest, willing to confront difficult truths rather than paper over them.

This Forum is for scholars who want to think seriously about Jerusalem without being pressed into familiar categories - the Forum follows no political agenda and represents no political interests. For practitioners who work daily in the space between communities and need language adequate to what they see. For people who want to change realities for the benefit of all the city’s residents. For all those - near and far - who believe that what happens within these walls concerns the whole human family, and that Jerusalem belongs, ultimately, to everyone, it is the shared heart of humanity.

The city I have lived in through these years of conflict has taught me that brokenness, honestly faced, can become the ground of something real. Within Your Gates is not a solution to our collective brokenness, but a space for the kind of serious, grounded, and courageous conversations that this city demands and, at its best, still makes possible.

This Forum was founded on a series of workshops and seminars conducted in partnership with the University of Notre Dame’s academic center in Jerusalem. I am entrusting Notre Dame’s team, led by Dr. Daniel Schwake, as the institutional partner to carry this work forward, and I invite others to join us.