Holy Land Association came into being by a decision of the Custody of the Holy Land.

The values at its origins can be traced in the history and in the activity of the Custody itself.

“Custody of the Holy Land“is the name by which are known today Franciscans of the Order of Friars Minor, present in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea from the earliest days of the Order, founded by St Francis in 1209 and custodians of the Holy Places in the name of all Christianity.

“St Francis was the man of the Incarnation. The man in love with Christ who became man. Francis wanted to identify even physically with Jesus, he desired to become completely one with him, even in the most concrete sense of the term. And he could not identify with Jesus in abstraction from the place where He lived.”*

Brief history

The Province of the Holy Land was created at the General Chapter of 1217, which divided the Order into Provinces; it covers all the regions of the southeast basin of the Mediterranean, including homeland of Christ and the places where the mystery of our Redemption was accomplished.

Between 1219 and 1220 Francis lived in the Holy Land, meeting and dialoguing with the Sultan, who was considered the enemy par excellence, the infidel.

In 1263 the Province of the Holy Land was reorganised into smaller entities called Custodies.

In spite of the numerous difficulties ensuing on the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land, the Friars Minor continued to be tenaciously and passionately present there and to carry on every possible form of apostolate.

In 1333, thanks to the generosity of the royal family of Naples, who acquired the Holy Cenacle from the Sultan of Egypt and the rights to celebrations in the Holy Sepulchre and gave them to the friars, the legal possession of particular Sanctuaries and the right of use of others became definitive for the Franciscans. The Bull of Clement VI in 1342 approved the actions of the royal family of Naples and made it official with the juridical Constitution of the Custody of the Holy Land.

In 1992 Pope John Paul II wrote a personal letter to the Minister general of the Order of Friars Minor, in which he recalled the event of the entrustment of the Holy Places to the Order and exhorted them to continue to develop the mandate conferred on them by the Holy See in his day. On the occasion of the Great Jubilee of 2000, Pope John Paul II reminded the world that the Friars Minor are custos of the Holy Places by the will and mandate of the Universal Church.

The present Custos, Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, explains thus the meaning of the Custody:

“Having the Custodianship of the Holy Places: this has been our primary task and remains so today ... after the end of the Crusades, the only persons who could remain in a land in the hands of the Muslims were the Franciscans. For this reason the Pope entrusted to the Order the task of recovering the Holy Places of Redemption and then of caring for them and also reconstituting a Catholic presence around the sanctuaries, to save an essential principle: to ensure that they were not just stones, but ‘living stones’”.*

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The Custody today

The Franciscan vocation in the Holy Land is today structured around three principal axes:

Prayer in the Holy Places

The daily prayer of the friars in the Holy Places is a reminder to all that these places are not museums. Each of them commemorates a particular moment in the life of Christ and of his disciples. Praying there, making memorial of the Salvation Story, means making present Christ himself.

Welcoming pilgrims

The task of the Franciscans is to help pilgrims from all over the world not only to be in the Holy Places but also to follow an itinerary of faith.

Service of the poorest and guardianship of Christianity

The Custody has always been committed to caring not only for the Sanctuaries in the physical sense of the term, but also to preserving the “living stones” of the Holy Land, that is the local Christian communities, who live in difficult conditions in the Holy Land.

In all the countries of the Middle East in which the Custody is present, the Christian communities are in the situation of being a tiny numerical minority, (at the present day they constitute less than 2% of the population) with respect to Muslims or Jews. Moreover the particular political situation created by the Arab-Israeli conflict has produced and produces a constant outflow of the local Arab Christian population.All this gives rise to unusual problems, to which the Franciscans strive to respond concretely in the best possible ways, aiming to maintain the continuity of skilled and motivated Christian communities. The so-called ‘option for the poor’ is not however limited to Christians: the Franciscans have always been committed to the service of the poorest sectors of the population, without distinction of creed, faithful to the condition of missionaries and prophets of reconciliation and peace and to the simple style marked by dialogue taught by St Francis.

“St Francis set out our style from the beginning here in the Holy Land: a simple style, the style of poor folk, always in contact with the people ... in quest of a dialogue with the Islamic majority and today also with the Jewish majority at times argumentative but always fraternal and free.”*