---

Parishes in the Albany Diocese will take up the annual Holy Land collection on Good Friday, April 22, to support the shrinking Christian community in the Middle East.

Funds raised by the Holy Land Franciscan religious order support the ministries, shrines, chapels and schools of Christians in Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The order also offers housing and health care to poor residents.

The collection "aims to promote among the Christian faithful a love for the Land of the Lord," Bishop Howard J. Hubbard wrote in a pulpit letter. "For the Church to survive there it must rely upon a loving and nurturing solidarity on the part of each Christian, a solidarity which bears witness to faith in Him who was born in that land, who preached the Gospel there and who also died and was resurrected there."

The Albany Diocese raised $86,015 in 2009. In recent years, the Holy Land Franciscans have been able to:

• rent apartments to 350 low-income families;

• restore uninhabitable dwellings in the Old City of Jerusalem;

• educate young men entering the Franciscan order;

• give pastoral care support to 29 parishes, including three in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem;

• sustain the Magnificat Institute, which unites Jewish, Muslim and Christian students and teachers with music;

• operate the Franciscan Children's Home for troubled children;

• support biblical studies at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem;

• support the Franciscan Media Center, which broadcasts the message of local Christian communities through television; and

• intervene in Syria and Lebanon by restoring convents, churches and a school and constructing apartments and a nursery school.[[In-content Ad]]

---