The Catholic chaplain at Columbia University is encouraging students to meet the anti-Israel encampment on campus with prayer, charity and adoration of the Eucharist.
“I’ve challenged the students … that in response to those who are encamping for a political cause, why don't we encamp in all-night adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, asking the Prince of Peace to give us his peace so that we can offer each other the sign of peace,” Father Roger Landry told host Dr. Grazie Christie on EWTN's radio show and podcast Conversations with Consequences, airing April 27.
Pro-Hamas students on April 17 began living in tents near the heart of the campus in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. The protest entered its ninth day Thursday.
The situation there is tense. Father Landry told the Register that he started hearing helicopters overhead in the early morning hours.
Many students aren’t sure what to do.
“For me as a Catholic chaplain here, the Catholics have questions about how they’re supposed to respond to this circumstance. And I have said to them many times: We as Catholics, the most important things we can do is we can pray and we can exercise charity — in every circumstance, no matter what, those are the two most important things we can do,” Father Landry said.
Father Landry, a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, said he tries to get students to realize that they aren’t likely to solve the generations-long divisions in the Holy Land through protests on a college campus halfway around the world.
“But what they can do,” he said, “is they can care for their Jewish elder brothers and sisters here on campus, most of whom feel very unsafe on campus, in the heart of New York City, which is the largest concentration of Jews outside the Holy Land. There's no reason why Jews need to feel persecuted and beleaguered.”
“They likewise need to reach out to those Palestinians here, including some students who come from Gaza, who have just seen their life changed irrevocably because of what has happened since Hamas did its evil on Oct. 7 there in the Holy Land,” he said.
Since Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel counterattacked and eventually invaded Gaza after that, Columbia’s campus has been “in a state of chaos,” Father Landry, a frequent contributor to the Register said.
The priest said he was disturbed to see the tenor of some of the pro-Hamas demonstrations beyond the barriers at the edges of the campus last October.
While Jewish demonstrators held posters of loved ones harmed or missing after the Hamas attack, the pro-Hamas posters “were all very communist, explicitly communist,” he said, “describing that the Palestinians and the Gazans were part of an oppressed class” and justifying violence against Israelis.
“And so, we have to be alert to the presence of outside actors who are trying to bring people into this oppressor-oppressed Marxist matrix, which is absolutely contrary to the Gospel, to what Jesus himself teaches, and to what he sent us out to live,” Father Landry said.
Catholics are against “all forms of injustice” and should “be willing to fight for those who are having it taken away from them,” he said.
“But the way toward justice, the way toward harmony, the way toward peace, is not by the types of diabolical divisions that so many false leaders try to foment,” Father Landry said. “And so, to prepare Catholics to bring the Gospel into these situations, to bring the light of the Lord, to bring the peace of the Lord, to bring the joy of the Lord, this is a context in which Catholics can really shine.”
The key for Catholic students at Columbia, he said, is to live their faith.
“We are disciples of the Prince of Peace, who by his passion, death, and resurrection brought reconciliation to the world. And unless we're living that as Catholics, we’re not really living the Catholic life,” the priest said. “And so I tell the students that I challenge them: This is a time where your Catholic faith is going to make a huge difference, not just for you, but for others here [at] Columbia.”