By Jack Nassar
Each October, as the Feast of Our Lady Queen of Palestine comes near, my heart fills with both love and sorrow together. Love, because she is our mother, the mother of this land, its olive trees, its stones and most importantly, its people. Sorrow, because her children continue to live under military occupation, siege, humiliation, displacement and death.
I was born and raised in the land where Mary herself walked, where she said yes to the angel in Nazareth, and where she gave birth to her child in Bethlehem. For us Palestinians, she is not a faraway figure in heaven. She is the mother who stands with us at military checkpoints, in demolished streets and homes, who weeps with us when another child is buried, as she once wept at the foot of the cross for her own son in Jerusalem. In almost every Palestinian Christian home, her statue, picture or icon is more than a decoration. It is protection, it is memory, it is the nearness of a mother who already knows what it means to lose a son to the violence of an empire.
The title Queen of Palestine is rooted in the devotion promoted by Latin Patriarch Luigi Barlassina, who placed Palestine under Mary's patronage in 1920. The Holy See officially recognized the feast in 1933. The feast is celebrated each year on the last Sunday of October. Barlassina also established a shrine in her honor at Deir Rafat, halfway between Jerusalem and Jaffa-Tel Aviv. The ceiling of the church carries the words Hail Mary in 280 languages, a sign that her motherhood is not for one people alone, but for all people.
But there is something else about Deir Rafat that should never be forgotten. It was a Palestinian village until Israel expelled its people and destroyed it in 1948, during the Nakba. The shrine survived. The village did not. Today the shrine remains a place where Palestinian Christians from across the Holy Land and from the diaspora come to pray, to remember, to cry and to give thanks, as generations have done before them.
For me, this is what makes the title so powerful. It is not simply an old Catholic honorific kept in the books. It is connected to a living people and to a living land. When we call Mary Queen of Palestine, we are not naming something confined to scripture. We are naming the place where Palestinian Christians still live, pray, work, suffer and raise their children today. Yet outside the Holy Land, how many Catholics really know this feast, or the story of Deir Rafat, or that the Church has called Mary Queen of Palestine for more than a century now? This is why I call it a forgotten feast. It is not forgotten by us. Here in the Holy Land, we know it and we celebrate it. But in much of the wider Catholic world, Mary is often separated from the living people of the land that carries her title. It becomes somewhere to visit on pilgrimage, a stop between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, while the Palestinian Christians who still live here become almost invisible.
Mary herself gives us a way to understand why this should trouble us. In the Magnificat, she does not sing only about comfort and mercy. She sings about a God who brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, who fills the hungry and sends the rich away empty. This is not a quiet prayer asking us only to feel peaceful. It is the song of a poor young woman living under the rule of an empire, proclaiming that God sees the powerless and does not forget them. A Church that venerates Mary's image while ignoring the people of her land has kept the icon and lost the Magnificat.
For three years, Gaza has suffered what can only be described as a genocide. Even the late Pope Francis referred to claims by experts that what was happening in Gaza had ‘the characteristics of genocide’ and called for it to be investigated. Tens of thousands have been killed, including Palestinian Christians. Hospitals, churches, schools, homes and entire neighborhoods have been destroyed.
In Jerusalem and the West Bank, Palestinians continue to face Israeli settler terrorism, movement restrictions, home demolitions and the continuing presence of the apartheid wall. I have seen priests stopped by soldiers and nuns insulted. This has been our daily reality for many years. It is not something we read about from far away, but sadly it is becoming normalized.
And where is the Church in all this? Where are the 1.4 billion Catholics?
Too many Catholic leaders, in the United Kingdom, United States, Italy, France, the Philippines, Brazil and Canada among others, remain silent, or speak of violence on both sides as though genocide were a misunderstanding between equals. They organize pilgrimages to venerate the stones where Christ walked, yet too often fail to see His body still suffering there today. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has failed us, and KairosPalestine has called on them to correct their position, as have the Canadian bishops in theirown case. Most Catholic media, meanwhile, speak of Marian devotion through the year but almost never name Our Lady Queen of Palestine or her people's own pain at all. Silence in the face of evil is not neutrality. It is a participation in evil itself.
There are also voices of courage, and they should be named. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, has called the war "an ongoing massacre of a defenseless population. A growing number of priests have refused to stay silent too. The network “Priests Against Genocide,” formed in August 2025, now counts more than 2,500 priests and bishops from five continents among its members. Just recently, around 150 of them marched to the Vatican together with nuns and a bishop, carrying a shroud bearing the names of 300 Palestinian and Lebanese children killed even after ceasefires had been declared. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, has spoken repeatedly about the war on Gaza and has gone himself into the ruins of Gaza several times, even during the genocide. Many priests, nuns and lay Christians continue to feed the hungry and care for the wounded, speaking for those who have nobody else to speak for them. But they cannot carry the whole Church alone.
We hear calls for peace, but peace cannot mean asking the oppressed and the powerful to carry the same burden. We hear the language of reconciliation, but reconciliation cannot come without truth and justice first.
For Palestinian Christians, this is not a devotion we imported from somewhere else. This is our own mother, in our own land, in a faith our families have carried here from generation to generation. When I pray to Our Lady Queen of Palestine, I do not pray to a distant queen. I pray to my queen, my mother, the mother of a people who have known exile, occupation, loss and grief, the mother who stood beside the cross when her own son was executed under an empire. If we honor her image but remain indifferent to the suffering of her people, I ask what exactly it is we are honoring.
The official prayer to Our Lady Queen of Palestine asks her to look with compassion upon the land that gave her birth, and to watch over it until the promise of her Son is fulfilled. Those words should not become empty. When we pray them, we should remember that Palestine is not only a name from the Bible. It is a land with a living people. It is our home. We will gather at Deir Rafat again this October, as we always do, and call her by this name. What I want is simpler than hope. I want the Catholics who venerate her image in Washington, in Rome, in Paris, in Manila, in São Paulo, to learn that her title has a village behind it, a people behind it, and a Church here still trying to bury its dead and keep its schools open. Kneel before her if you wish. But know who is kneeling beside you.
About the Author - Jack Nassar is a Palestinian Christian writer whose work focuses on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Palestinian Christianity, Christian Zionism, and Arab and Middle Eastern Christianity. He is founding the Mawadda Palestine Institute, which works to promote social cohesion and interfaith dialogue in Palestine, and his writing has appeared in Church Times, Premier Christianity, The Catholic Herald, Baptist News Global, and Baptist Standard. He can be reached at jacknassar@aol.com.
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