In 7-Hour Vigil, Pope Leo’s Envoy Reads Every Child’s Name Killed in Gaza War
From an Italian church destroyed by Nazis, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi led a solemn roll call of more than 12,000 Palestinian and 16 Israeli children lost to war.
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The latest installments include his decades-long friendship with Pope Francis, his closest confidant, Cardinal Tagle, his nearly three decades in Peru, and the prophetic witness of his top envoy in Gaza.
At Casaglia — the skeletal ruins of a church the Nazis burned in 1944 — Cardinal Matteo Zuppi did what our politics rarely attempts: he made the dead visible.
On August 14, on the Assumption’s eve, the pope’s envoy for peace led a seven-hour vigil in the Monte Sole park near Bologna, where participants read the name and age of every child killed in the Israel–Hamas war: 16 Israeli children from October 7, 2023, and 12,211 Palestinian children in Gaza through July 25, 2025.
The list ran 469 pages. They read them all.
Zuppi said plainly: “We pronounce their names one by one. They ask us all to pursue the path to peace…starting with a ceasefire…from the release of hostages to not taking an entire people hostage.”
Monte Sole wasn’t incidental. This hillside remembers a wartime atrocity that exterminated entire Italian villages; hundreds of civilians — including many children — were murdered around Casaglia.
The site is now a school of peace, designed to inoculate against the lie that civilian death is a legitimate cost of war.
For Zuppi, this isn’t a one-time effort. As the pope’s peace envoy for the war in Ukraine, he has shuttled to Kyiv and Moscow to push for prisoner exchanges and the reunification of deported Ukrainian children — small agreements that save actual lives.
The Church has been warning for weeks that Gaza’s children face death not only from bombs but from hunger and disease.
UNICEF and the WHO have flagged a lethal surge in child malnutrition. The longer the war drags on, the worse the situation gets.
The moral and strategic cases have converged to offer a better way forward: an immediate ceasefire, the release of hostages, protection of civilians, and unblocked aid.
Pope Leo put it starkly at Castel Gandolfo last week: “After all this time, what is the purpose of war? We must always seek dialogue…not violence, not weapons.”
The vigil’s answer is the only one that lasts: begin by telling the truth about who has been lost — and refuse to let them disappear.
Seven hours of names. That’s not politics, that’s liturgy. Every syllable breaking the spell of statistics, dragging the dead back into memory where they belong. While leaders argue about maps and missiles, a cardinal stood in ruins where Nazis once burned villages and simply said the children’s names. That is the sermon war never wants preached.
Profound leadership!