As Pope Leo XIV concluded his visit to Lebanon on Dec. 2, holding up the Levant as a model of interreligious coexistence, Michèle Burke Bowe, the ambassador to Palestine for the Order of Malta, was preparing soon to head in the opposite direction, from her home in Washington back to the West Bank, where her work is focused.
Since 1985, the Order of Malta has been responsible for all operations at Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem. (The ambassador also serves as the president of the hospital’s foundation.) Formerly a general hospital, Holy Family now provides state-of-the-art pediatric, obstetric and gynecological care to women and children in the Holy Land.
A teaching hospital that trains medical professionals and social workers, it is open to all who seek care, regardless of religion, nationality or ability to pay. Since 1990, Holy Family Hospital has delivered more than 100,000 babies in Bethlehem, treating more than 500 infants in its neonatal care unit each year.
On Dec. 1, Ambassador Bowe was honored by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association with its 2025 Faith and Culture Award, “in recognition of her committed defense and advocacy of the marginalized and powerless, particularly in the Holy Land.”
Going to the periphery, as Pope Francis often urged, is no metaphor for the work of Holy Family Hospital, the ambassador pointed out during an interview with America on Dec. 2. Its mobile clinics depart from Bethlehem weekly for service visits to Bedouin and other Palestinian communities where few own cars or have access to other forms of transport. Many live in villages that have been cut off because of Israeli security walls and roadways prohibited to Palestinians across the West Bank.
“We go to the periphery, and there are times when we definitely smell like the sheep, because sometimes you find yourself in a big herd of sheep,” she added with a laugh. “The last time I was out there a couple of weeks ago, there [were] camels, just literally everywhere, strolling around.”
The isolated villages served by these mobile clinics, she said, are often surrounded by Israeli settlements and “people are afraid to leave, for fear of having something happen—maybe to their crops or their homes or have their land taken, particularly now.”
Security walls meant to separate West Bank Palestinians from Israeli settlers have proved to be not just physical barriers, she said. Recalling a more peaceful time when Jewish, Christian and Muslim families would cross communal lines to shop and visit restaurants, she said, the walls are “making it more difficult for people to ever talk to each other, ever to see any commonality.”
“We’re afraid of what we don’t know,” Ambassador Bowe said. Because of the walls, “we have a whole generation of young people who don’t know each other.”
West Bank Christians remain something of an oddity, even an unknown to many American Catholics and other Christians, the ambassador said, attempting to explain why the plight of contemporary Palestinian Christians has proved a matter of indifference and inaction among many U.S. Christians. She recounted the story of a Palestinian friend on a fact-sharing tour in the United States being asked when his family “converted” to Christianity.
“Well,” he told his well-meaning, if not terrifically informed interlocutor, “my family met this guy about 2,000 years ago…”
Christians are often seen as the bridge-builders in the Holy Land, and Palestinian and other Holy Land Christians are frequently lauded for their resilience and urged to remain in a region that has proven fractious and even mortally dangerous to them. But is it really fair to rely on the sacrifice and risk asked of the Christian community to maintain the region’s Christian witness?
Ambassador Bowe could only describe the stubborn hope and humble trust in God’s goodness among the Christians she lives and works with in Palestine.
During her address at the CNEWA gala, the ambassador said, “Pope Francis and Pope Leo have asked the Christians to remain on their land to sacrifice and not leave the conflict zone, this place which holds the bones of 50 generations of their forefathers.”
“That’s a big ask of people who’ve been without salaries for over two years.”
“I hope that His Holiness Pope Leo asks them again, and then I hope he turns to us, the Christians in the diaspora, to ask us to match the sacrifice of those Palestinians, the very first Christians who have given their pledge to remain,” she said.
“Matching their sacrifice means building apartment blocks so the youth can marry and have children. That means funding entrepreneurs to manufacture goods. This highly educated population deserves a chance to put their education to work.”
The ambassador expanded on that theme in her conversation with America. “What I try to do at places like Holy Family Hospital, where we have just great Palestinian doctors, is try to make sure they have the life-saving equipment that they need,” she said.
She worries that otherwise these professionals may begin to doubt their vocations as they compare the capacity offered at facilities in other cities that they might have the opportunity to emigrate to outside the Holy Land.
“We don’t have fancy equipment,” she said, “but we have enough to have outcomes that for the children parallel [neonatal intensive care units] in major American cities. And for women, we far exceed good outcomes at our hospital in Bethlehem.”
West Bank Christians have no government to turn to for social services. Even basic services like water and electricity are unreliable on the West Bank, where Christian communities have been among those targeted by Jewish settlers in attacks on farmland, grazing herds and cars and other household properties.
Conditions on the West Bank, never well acknowledged, have grown perhaps even more invisible over the last two years since “the eyes of the world are on Gaza,” she said. But they are dire.
The region’s tourist and pilgrimage industries, on which most West Bank Christian families rely, already pummeled during the Covid-19 pandemic, have been further harmed by the intense conflict in the region. West Bank Christians have “sold their cars, their couches, household goods,” she said.
Many were already predicting that it would take a generation to recover from the economic impact of the pandemic before Hamas lurched the region into an even greater crisis after its attack on Israel in October 2023. After more than two years of conflict, work permits in Israel have been canceled, and many families are completely bereft of household incomes. The political uncertainty and heightened tensions because of settler attacks compound the economic and civic gloom.
“We pride ourselves at Holy Family Hospital because it’s the work of the Order of Malta to be an employer of choice, a good neighbor and a good corporate citizen,” Ambassador Bowe said. That means in addition to providing “good, safe, accessible health care, we also pride ourselves in providing good employment with training and wages paid in full and on time.”
The Palestinians working at Holy Family Hospital have become an economic lifeline for the entire West Bank, she said.
Though their numbers have been declining, how the embattled West Bank Christians who remain hold on through it all remains something of a marvel.
“The Christian communities are small and precious today, but they are faithful,” the ambassador said. “The churches are full; they are overflowing. I think we find that in any kind of community under siege. When the stock market has a really bad fall and there are lots of layoffs here [in the United States], our churches are fuller. People go to their knees.”
They have reason to do so these days. “Right now, with this war in Gaza, even though it’s 45 miles away from Bethlehem and maybe 60 miles away from Taybeh, we hear the airplanes, we see the drones.”
On the West Bank itself, “we have incursions” conducted by the Israel Defense Forces. Many days, she reports, security conditions are so unsettled that even the clearly marked mobile clinic cannot be allowed out on its scheduled route “out to our villages and our desert communities.” That is a calamity, she reports, because when a village visit is canceled, it will be two weeks before West Bank villagers may see a doctor or midwife, “and two weeks is too long to wait for medical care.”
The two-state solution for Israel and Palestine seems farther away than ever before, though Pope Leo again endorsed it on his return from Lebanon as the only viable solution to eight decades of conflict in the region.
“The current situation is not tenable” is the ambassador’s assessment. Though it may seem vain to invest in weakened states, it is far more costly to attempt to “fix” a failed state, she pointed out. “Look at Gaza,” she said, counting off a litany of expensive restorations that will now be required to restore some degree of habitability to the strip.
She recalled the words of Pope Benedict, “seared into my heart,” from his encyclical, “Spe Salvi” (“Saved in Hope”): “Those who have hope live differently.”
It is incumbent upon those who enjoy a degree of comfort and affluence in the world, she said, to “give people without hope, hope.”
“It’s the people next door, it’s the people in your family, but it’s also the people around the globe who don’t have hope.
“And I feel very strongly, as a Catholic, that the biggest five-alarm fire [in the world] is our potential loss of Christianity in the birthplace of Christ,” Ambassador Bowe said. But it “wouldn’t take much,” she believes, to engage positively in the region and restore some “radical hope,” so that people on the West Bank may have the God-given opportunity not just to survive but to flourish.
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