Hope When All Seems Lost: Gaza, Prayer, and the Human Need for Miracles
Two million displaced people, no schools, no shelter, severe malnutrition — and a papal agency still on the ground. What CNEWA's psychosocial work in Gaza reveals about the architecture of hope when ordinary life has collapsed.
Michael La Civita, director of communications at the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), reached for a single phrase to describe Gaza in June 2026: a permanent state of waiting. With upwards of two million people displaced, homes destroyed, no schooling, no commerce, and very little access to clean water or food, it has become, he told EWTN News Nightly, 'a very still, quiet, and dark place.'
That phrase is worth sitting with. It is not merely logistical. It names something the human person experiences as a wound: the suspension of future orientation — the sense that tomorrow will not be meaningfully different from today.
What the person needs that bread alone cannot supply
Severe malnutrition affects children, pregnant mothers, and the elderly. Hepatitis A and other sanitation-linked diseases are active threats. Child marriage has been reported elsewhere in the region as economic desperation rises, and La Civita acknowledged the conditions make it imaginable in Gaza as well. 'The situation there economically is pretty horrific,' he said.
Material deprivation this total does more than threaten the body. It dismantles the preconditions for agency, for meaningful time, for the sense that one's choices matter. The Catholic understanding of the human person — a unified whole, rational, relational, embodied, ordered toward transcendence — means that when the structures of ordinary life collapse, the interior life is also at risk.
This is why CNEWA's most important work may be what La Civita described as psychosocial support: for children, the elderly, vulnerable populations, and their families. The organization, founded by Pope Pius XI in 1926, operates through Church networks that have remained on the ground throughout the conflict. That sustained presence is not incidental. Trauma research consistently identifies perceived relational continuity — someone still here, still caring — as one of the strongest protective factors against long-term psychological harm.
Hope is not optimism
C.S. Lewis observed that comfort cannot be found by looking for it directly — only by looking for something true, and receiving comfort as a consequence. The same logic applies to hope. Optimism calculates probabilities. Hope orients toward a good that exceeds present evidence. These are not the same movement.
What CNEWA's workers offer, by remaining present in conditions that offer no easy outcome, is a living enactment of the second kind. Pope Leo XIV, renewing his appeal for humanitarian assistance in Gaza on May 26, chose the word accompaniment — sustained presence with someone in their waiting. That word does real work. It names what makes hope transmissible between people: not cheerfulness, not reassurance, but refusal to leave.
What those at a distance can do
For people far from Gaza who feel the weight of what they cannot fix, La Civita was direct: 'Catholics and other Christians can first of all, pray.' This is not a consolation prize for those without resources. Prayer, in the Catholic understanding, is real action — ordered toward the one from whom all actual help comes, and capable of moving things that human logistics cannot reach.
Beyond prayer, CNEWA accepts donations that flow directly to the Church networks operating inside Gaza, funding medical care, psychosocial support, and emergency relief. Financial support at a distance has a concrete local effect: it keeps workers on the ground, supplies available, and the relational continuity intact that vulnerable people depend on.
Sharing accurate information matters as well. The conditions La Civita described — the scale of displacement, the malnutrition, the psychological toll — are not widely understood. Speaking about them with specificity, in families, parishes, and communities, sustains the social attention that makes political and humanitarian response more likely.
None of these actions resolves the crisis. But they refuse the posture of helpless spectatorship, which is itself a form of despair. The children receiving psychosocial care through CNEWA's partners today are the young adults who will rebuild Gaza — not only its infrastructure, but its interior life. What they carry forward will depend in part on whether the wider world remained present, or looked away.
The appeal is still open.
Source: EWTN News, reporting on statements by Michael La Civita, CNEWA, June 2, 2026.