‘My trust was in God’: Priest recounts flight from Holy Land amid Iranian conflict

A Jesuit priest says he has a “much larger perspective” of the crisis of war after fleeing the Holy Land at the outset of U.S. and Israeli aggressions against Iran.

Father Anthony Wieck, SJ, told EWTN News he was leading a pilgrimage of about 20 Catholics in the Holy Land when the war began on Feb. 28.

“We had just spent a week in Galilee and prayed our way through the holy sites of Jesus’ teaching and miracles,” Wieck said, describing the region as “a lovely land [God] created for himself to enjoy on this earth.”

The group arrived in Jerusalem on Feb. 26, he said, and the next day word began to spread of the need to evacuate from the region. Several pilgrims were able to leave immediately, Wieck said, while others who attempted to leave the next day were unable to get a flight out and eventually had to return to the pilgrim group.

Ben Gurion International Airport “is not a safe place to be because there are military installations near the airport,” he said. “Iranian missiles were being sent that way, and our people … were taken into the bomb shelter five stories down below the airport.”

Wieck said that even as the conflict broke out, his group still toured holy sites, including the Church of the Pater Noster, where tradition holds that Christ taught the disciples to pray the Our Father.

“We were instructed by our guide to continue the tour and to simply seek cover whenever the sirens went off,” he said, pointing out that “those living in Jerusalem are so used to warning sirens there that they have much less fear than we do. They’re observant but not fearful. And we were trusting them.”

The priest was offering a chanted Mass at the Dominus Flevit Church while explosions sounded in the distance as Israel’s Iron Dome intercepted Iranian missiles.

“It was scary, yes,” Wieck said. “But I continued the Mass with trust, and after Communion (before the final prayer) asked all pilgrims to pray for a couple minutes regarding where the Lord was in all of this situation.”

After Mass, a group of pilgrims from Kansas joined them in the church amid sirens and explosions in the surrounding region.

“It struck me as supremely important that we not make decisions based on fear but on faith,” he said.

The priest’s group took a truncated walking tour of Jerusalem, he said, which “became eerily quiet that evening.”

The tour company ordered them to evacuate the following morning. 

Departing for Jordan, the group found itself stuck amid a crush of evacuations in the area. “A typical two-hour trip to Amman, Jordan, took us seven hours,” Wieck said. And while the group initially “felt much safer being outside of Jerusalem,” they eventually felt “locked in” at their hotel, particularly amid mass flight cancellations.

Jordanians in the area kept assuring the Americans that the country’s King Abdullah II would protect them. “Not feeling the same allegiance to their king, my trust was in God,” the priest said.

The U.S. Department of State provided military evacuations to Americans in the area. “Little by little, our pilgrims found an occasional flight that [shuttled] them out of the war zone,” Wieck said.

The priest and one other pilgrim, a religious from Phoenix, were the last from their group to remain in Jordan before they took a flight with Royal Jordanian Airlines on March 4. Wieck said the pilot took “great efforts to circumvent Israeli airspace.”

The air carrier “was bold enough to keep to their travel plans despite the threats,” Wieck said, describing the airline as “my new favorite.”

‘Truly a Catholic experience’

Wieck told EWTN News that he “would not say that I was stellar in my response to what God was doing here.”

“I wanted to pray much but felt so much stress and trauma around me that it was truly difficult,” he said. “I was exhausted.”

Yet during the frightening evacuation, he said, “hundreds of people” back home were lifting up the pilgrims with prayers and sacrifices.

“They knew our plight was becoming a bit more grave,” he said.

Back home in the U.S., Wieck, who lives in Louisiana, said he was still reflecting on what happened but said the harrowing ordeal gave him “a much larger perspective to have experienced profoundly how much we need the help of our brothers and sisters in times of crisis.”

“It was truly a Catholic experience,” he said.

“Though as humans we usually don’t carry our crosses in times of crisis all that well, our brothers and sisters in the faith can see us through. That was my experience,” he said.

“How wonderful it is to be Catholic!” he added.

Source: https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/middle-east/my-trust-was-in-god-priest-relays-flight-from-holy-land-amid-iranian-conflict