The Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land were forced to close their convent in Tyre, a port city in southern Lebanon, after a missile fell very close there and after the local population fled due to the war.
“A missile fell a few dozen meters from our convent,” explains one of the Franciscans, Father Toufic Bou Mehri.
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“Two children sheltered by us were injured, hit by some fragments. We are not here to be heroes, but to serve our people. After a few days, everyone fled, at this point it no longer made sense to stay,” said the friar, according to the CTS website.
The closure of the convent took place on October 1. That day Father Toufic and the other Franciscan in the convent, Brother Pierre Richa, left for the convent of Saint Joseph in Beirut, capital of Lebanon.
With them they took the Blessed Sacrament, the relics of the convent and the holy oil paintings.
In Beirut, aid continues. Friar Toufic relates that “the same night we arrived in Beirut, they bombed Deir Mimas,” a Christian town a few kilometers from the border with Israel. Everyone fled there: 148 families who are now in Beirut.
“There are also three or four families in an apartment. As Custody we try to help them cover their expenses, get food and medicine, but also clothing, because they have left everything behind. The young people of the country have organized themselves to serve everyone and know their needs,” says the Franciscan priest.
“I have experienced that Providence has not abandoned us, I do not believe that it will leave us right now,” shares the Franciscan.
After pointing out that they quickly integrated into the community life of the convent of San José, Fray Toufic commented that there “we have rediscovered our dimension as Franciscans also from the point of view of the community and the order, and we see that we are still capable of do all the work and respond to those who need us.”
Walter Sanchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.