At the International Meeting of the Sant Egidio Community "Bridges of Peace" - Italy

The Middle East Council of Churches Secretary General Dr. Souraya Bachealany called the world community for more serious efforts to ensure peace in the Middle East.

Together with Pope Francis in the Bari Meeting, she said: “Our call is bold and clear: we want peace for children, for the vulnerable groups, for those whose dignity is violated; for all those who are the closest to the heart of Jesus”.

The call of Bachealany comes on the second day of the International Meeting of the Sant Egidio Community “Bridges of Peace”, in Bologna – Italy, during a panel entitled “Christians in the Middle East”. She was hosted together with Anba Pola, representing the Coptic Orthodox Church, and former Lebanese minister Tarek Mitri from the American University of Beirut AUB, as well as Syrian Orthodox Bishop Dionysius Jean Kawak.

Bachealany added: “We Choose to Fight Against the Killing Indifference Towards the Middle East. We want to be the voice of the voiceless, of those who swallow their tears, as Pope Francis said, in a devastated and agonizing Middle East, tyrannized by Money and Power, and War”.

The Sant Egidio meeting brought together hundreds of spiritual, lay, and cultural leading figures from all over the world, as well as a large number of youth groups who came to Bologna for the year’s largest demonstration in the name of dialogue and of reconstructing the bridges of peace.