Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa says the war-scarred streets of Gaza are not only the result of bombs and bullets, but also of words. In a video message shared during the closing events of the Venice Film Festival, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem warned that years of dehumanizing rhetoric have helped pave the way for real-world violence — and he called for a new language “that opens horizons and new paths.”
The intervention came as Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania received the festival’s Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize for The Voice of Hind Rajab, a docudrama centered on the final phone call of a five-year-old girl killed amid the 2024 fighting in Gaza. The film — an official competition entry — has stirred audiences and headlines across Europe.
As reported by Eduardo Berdejo of ACI Prensa, the cardinal linked today’s brutality to “years of violent and dehumanizing language,” urging believers, artists, and all culture-makers to “work hard” for a different narrative that resists the pull of extremism on every side.
He cautioned that even when the guns fall silent, the conflict’s deeper wounds will not heal without a conversion of words and imagination.
An act of justice, a space for peace
The Venice backdrop mattered. Ben Hania’s film — powered by the real audio of Hind’s call — won second place and, by multiple accounts, drew the festival’s longest ovation, while U.S. director Jim Jarmusch took the Golden Lion for Father Mother Sister Brother. The juxtaposition kept Gaza in the spotlight and underlined Pizzaballa’s plea to reclaim public speech from “radicals” and “extremists.”
For Catholics, the call for a renewed vocabulary isn’t just civics — it’s discipleship. The Catechism teaches that hatred “is contrary to charity” and can lead to grave sin (CCC 2303), while truth-telling and guarding our neighbor’s dignity are moral duties (CCC 2477–2478).
Building a culture where every person is spoken of as fully human is an act of justice that can make space for peace.
Pizzaballa’s message also offered a pastoral diagnosis: When suffering becomes overwhelming, people can lose the capacity to notice the other’s pain. Changing how we speak is one practical way to resist that numbness. It begins, he suggested, with the storytellers — filmmakers, journalists, teachers, parents — who can seed a different moral imagination.
The cardinal was also echoing one of Pope Leo's first addresses.
To be peacemakers was the first exhortation the new pope made to journalists, just four days after his election, saying that the beatitude "Blessed are the peacemakers" is "particularly relevant" to those in this field.
He urged them to strive for a kind of communication that "never separates the search for truth from the love with which we must humbly seek it."
He told them:
Peace begins with each one of us: in the way we look at others, listen to others and speak about others. In this sense, the way we communicate is of fundamental importance: We must say “no” to the war of words and images, we must reject the paradigm of war.
'Humanization'
In that sense, The Voice of Hind Rajab did more than win a prize. It gave viewers a concrete human face and a small, devastated voice — exactly the kind of humanization the patriarch says is required if the region is ever to step back from the abyss.
As Catholics and as citizens, we can practice this conversion of language in our own circles: refusing slurs and sweeping labels, resisting dehumanizing memes, and choosing words that tell the truth without denying anyone’s dignity. If, as Cardinal Pizzaballa insists, the path to violence is smoothed by speech that degrades, then a path out of conflict will also run through speech that honors.
That is a task large enough for governments and institutions — but small enough to begin in every conversation today.
