Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, prefect emeritus of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, celebrates the seventh Novendiales Mass for Pope Francis on May 2, 2025, in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. | Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/EWTN News

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July 02, 2025

Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, prefect of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, said in an interview that “people are helplessly watching the devastation that is spreading like wildfire” in “the Christian East, a land of martyrs: there is a danger of extinction.”

“People are losing what they had built up over the centuries in terms of thought: freedom, individual rights, international rights and humanitarian rights,” Cardinal Gugerotti continued. “It seems that everything is vanishing, and the Pope clearly states this” in a recent address.

The prelate added:

People witness helplessly the devastation that is spreading like wildfire. And when the powerful of the day are reproached for violating international and humanitarian law, they do not respond—as if to say, it does not interest me. So how can we think of dialogue? ...

It is a land of martyrs that continues to be prey to martyrdom. This system of violence forces Christians to flee, effectively eliminating them from their land: and they are one of the cultural, social and political foundations of those same lands ...

In a land where schools and churches are destroyed, what future could there possibly be?... The risk is that of losing a treasure made up of the Fathers of the Church, of hymns, of prayers, of traditions. And they cannot be replaced: in the body of Christ there will be a void.