Among prayers for peace offered across the world, Church leaders particularly prayed for the Asian migrants who provide much of the workforce in the Gulf states suffering Iranian strikes.
The Archbishop of Tehran was evacuated from Iran along with Italian diplomatic staff as Israel and the US intensified their attacks.
Cardinal Dominique Mathieu OFM Conv arrived in Rome on Sunday, saying he left his see “not without regret and pain for our brothers and sisters in Iran”.
“While waiting to return there, I pray for the conversion of hearts to inner peace,” he told the Belgian outlet CathoBel on Monday.
The 62-year-old has been Archbishop of Tehran since 2021, leading the Latin-rite minority among Iran’s roughly 20,000 Christians. Pope Francis made him a cardinal in December 2024.
The Conventual Franciscans reported last week that they lost contact with Cardinal Mathieu, a member of the order, following the first attacks on Tehran on 28 February, but later confirmed it had been restored.
Strikes continued throughout the week, killing more than 1,200 Iranians including civilians according to United Nations estimates, and on Monday the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) announced it had launched a new “wide-scale wave of strikes against infrastructure of the Iranian terror regime”.
Iran attacked US allies and other targets across the Middle East, while its proxy Hezbollah launched missiles into northern Israel from Lebanon. The IDF launched strikes against Lebanon in response, reportedly killing scores of people.
Among prayers for peace offered across the world, Church leaders in India and the Philippines particularly prayed for the Asian migrants who provide much of the workforce in the Gulf states suffering Iranian strikes.
“Iran has attacked exactly where many Catholic migrant workers work, for example in Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait,” commented Abbot Nikodemus Schnabel OSB of the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion.
“In the last attack on Israel, a Catholic migrant was killed. Be it in Iran, Israel, Palestine or the Arab states – the victims with the highest death toll are the vulnerable whose names are not known. These are the ones that are so cynically called ‘collateral damage’.”
He told Domradio: “Before I became abbot, I was a patriarchal vicar in charge of all Catholic migrants and asylum seekers here in the Holy Land. These are exactly the ones who are now trembling again.”
“It is war and the nervousness is tangible,” Schnabel said of conditions in Israel, condemning those outside the region treating the violence “like a football match, full of excitement”.
The abbot said that he was shaken their response, “because I experience how it is really all people who suffer – be it in Iran, in Israel, in Palestine or Kuwait. We are all part of the one human family.”
Israeli police closed the Dormition Abbey to the public for safety reasons.
Schnabel said that due to heightened security tensions the monastery is no longer “a place which one can enter freely to take a deep breath”.
It remains open for the monks, house guests and students undertaking the “Theological Year”.