GREENSBORO — About 85 Order of Malta members and parishioners attended the Holy Family Hospital Mass and Benefit Dinner Dec. 6 at St. Pius X Church in Greensboro to raise funds for a Catholic teaching hospital located in the heart of Jesus’ birthplace.
Each year during the Christmas season, St. Pius X Parish hosts a benefit dinner for the hospital in Bethlehem. At Father Christian Cook’s invitation, Michele Bowe, ambassador of the Order to Palestine and president of the Holy Family Hospital of Bethlehem Foundation, travels to Greensboro to update the community on conditions there.
The connection between St. Pius X, The Order of Malta and Holy Family Hospital is strong. The parish supports the birthplace of Jesus through prayer and financial assistance of the hospital and its state-of-the-art maternity facility. Father Cook and parishioners look forward to helping Bowe maintain some stability in Bethlehem.
As St. Pius parishioner and emcee, Derek Ritzel, said, “They are preparing for a birth as well, but the birth of the next baby. The next baby will be born to a family in need that can’t afford to pay their own bills. They cannot afford the care their child needs, 1,500 steps from the manger where Jesus was born.”
The staff of roughly 170 Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, claim they see the face of Jesus in every child. Those faces are born to the poorest mothers, who are never turned away regardless of religion, origin or economic status.
About 4,500 babies are delivered at Holy Family each year, with 500 requiring the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), the only one in the region able to assist micro-preemies under 26 weeks or under two pounds.
“Seventy percent of the people in Bethlehem are born there, and everyone else knows someone who works there. It is a birthplace of hope. It is a touchstone,” said Bowe.
Bowe had the room laughing and crying at stories from the 63-bed maternity hospital.
Recalling the struggle of a barely viable infant, she shared the doctor’s words: “‘You can’t force a miracle, and you can’t prevent a miracle; no matter what you do, you have to do your best, but God is the author of life.’ That is really our leading principle at Holy Family.”
The hospital serves the poorest of the poor, and due to current conditions, there are a lot. Located in the middle of the war zone on the West Bank, a 30-foot wall separating it from Israel, it faces challenges. With a majority of Bethlehem’s population economically dependent on tourism, the current conflict has been devastating – unemployment has soared from a hardly manageable 14 percent to more than 65 percent.
“Bethlehem depends on tourists to stay in the hotels, to eat in the restaurants, to use the tour buses, to visit the stores, and all of that came to a halting stop in October of 2023,” Bowe said.
Bethlehem remains a crossroads of religion and hope, and that hope is seen in the babies born at Holy Family, where dames and knights from the Order of Malta are personally invested. Considered the oldest surviving order of chivalry, the sovereign institution manages and funds the hospital that was entrusted to them by St. Pope John Paul II in 1989.
Ever since, the Holy Family of Bethlehem Foundation and the Order of Malta have made the hospital their top priority, often referring to it as their “crown jewel.”
The late Monsignor Anthony Marcaccio, former pastor of St. Pius Church and chaplain of an Order of Malta chapter, took his flock to the Holy Land and its miracle hospital.
“Monsignor loved Holy Family Hospital. He took many trips there and saw all the work being done firsthand,” said banquet organizer Al Abram. “We are grateful to Father Cook, who in his pastorate has continued the good work done at St. Pius X for the benefit of the mothers and babies of Bethlehem.”
Many attendees have experienced the hospital firsthand.
“You just cannot help but feel the joy that is there in what they do,” St. Pius Administrative Assistant Liz Pendergrass said. She initially visited the Holy Land in 2020 with Monsignor Marcaccio. At the time, Bowe showed them a statue of Mary with an object in her hand.
“It was a key, and the reason that key is there is that there are many families that come to the Holy Family Hospital to have their babies, and the only thing that they have with them is the key to their home—that’s it. It’s a reminder of the circumstances under which some of the people at the hospital are under,” Pendergrass said.
Pendergrass, mother of a son born prematurely at 28 weeks, sees it as a personal mission. She was amazed that the level of care at the war-torn hospital matches that in the United States, as babies have the same survival rate. Pendergrass said, “The Divine Creator is at work even on the very most vulnerable. And these babies are our Christian hope in the Holy Land.”
Today, each little miracle is wrapped in a Maltese Cross-emblemed swaddle blanket.
“Each child is a child of God. ... We are 5,000 miles away, and we need to care about that one baby born in Bethlehem at 26 weeks, because it is our humanity,” Bowe said.
— Lisa M Geraci
More online
At www.birthplaceofhope.org: Learn more and donate.