ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

I do not understand this despicable toadying-to-Israel article by an Italian journalist whom I do not recall to have been so virulently anti-Vatican and pro-Israel before. He's perfectly within his rights, obviously, but as a journalist, he also has a duty to be honest and fair, which this thoroughly one-sided article is not!

Even worse, it fails to mention that Israel has been 'punishing' the Vatican for more than 14 years now by finding every reason not to move forward on implementing a 'fundamental agreement' with the Vatican. And yet, Israeli leaders openly declare that they count on the Pope to stand up for the nation's legitimacy in the court of world opinion - especially now when, for the first time, they have an American President who considers Israel almost expendable in his totally unproductive politics of accommodation with America's most rabid opponents!

The Church and Israel
by Giulio Meotti

Mqrch 11, 2011

Who killed Jesus two thousand years ago is simply not the question at hand. What is happening now is what matters.

Pope Ratzinger, in a new book, exonerates the Jews of allegations they were responsible for Jesus Christ’s death.

Israel’s relationship with the largest Christian group is different from Israel’s relationship with, say, Albania or Lesotho, because the Catholic Church has more than one billion adherents.

In 1948, the Vatican described Zionism as a “new Nazism”. This was a forerunner of the infamous UN resolution – “Zionism is Racism”. The repudiation of Israel after the Shoah is an everlasting stain on the Christian’s conscience. [I imagine a whole book can be written to point up the fallacy and falsehood in these statements.] Since then, the Holy See has taken positive steps toward Israel, like the formal recognition in 1993.

However, Ratzinger’s teaching on Christ sharply contrasts with the latest Vatican’s stances against the State of Israel. This is the real issue in the relations between the Church and the Jews. For example, the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, appointed by the Pope in 2008, just joined a Christian-Muslim workshop in Doha.

The meeting of the Arab League was focussed on “interreligious conflict regarding Jerusalem”. No Jews were invited.

La Civiltà Cattolica is a very special Vatican magazine. Every one of its articles is reviewed by the Vatican Secretary of State before publication, so the magazine reflects his thoughts faithfully. [I doubt that Bertone himself personally reviews the articles, which may reflect the official diplomatic position of the Vatican or at least, other positions which the Vatican does not necessarily endorse or oppose.]

The January edition of this magazine opens with a large editorial on the Palestinian refugees. Adopting the Arab propagandist word Nakba, the magazine declares that the refugees are a consequence of “ethnic cleansing” by Israel and that “the Zionists were cleverly able to exploit the Western sense of guilt for the Shoah to lay the foundations of their own state”. [This statement reflects all that is objectionable about the open partisanship not just in favor of Palestine, but deliberately hostile to Israel, that is evident in some statements from the Vatican and among Catholic bishops in the Middle East.]

Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric rants on the Holocaust are not very different. “A recent Vatican Synod on the Middle East marked a great regression in attitudes towards Israel”, writes the historian Sergio Minerbi in the Jerusalem Report.

The Vatican’s instrumentum laboris, a document for the synod on the Mideast just hosted in Rome, blamed Israel as uniquely responsible for the Middle East crisis. The synod was carefully prepared for a year, and it produced a rash of anti-Jewish statements on both political and theological issues. [This is a totally biased and one-sided statement.]

This ungenerous expression was particular harsh, because whoever goes to Jerusalem sees it filled with crowds of pilgrims, processions, the religious faithful, ethnic groups and all faiths. Religious freedom, freedom of access and belief is total, as it has never been since the time of Islamic conquest. [That may be so, but why does Israel continue to restrict visas to Catholic priests sent to Israel on mission?]

At the synod, the archbishop Cyrille Salim Bustros, a cleric chosen by Ratzinger to draft the synod’s conclusions, denied the Jewish people’s biblical right to the Promised Land. [A deliberate mis-statement of facts. Boutros was elected by the Synod not by the Pope, who does not make the minor appointments. And his controvesial statement was an expression of his personal opinion, which the Vatican underscored at the time, and is obviously not part of the Synod's conclusions, as Meotti maliciously implies.]

“We Christians cannot speak about the Promised Land for the Jewish people. There is no longer a chosen people”. Bustros revived the “replacement theology”, the most ancient calumny that says that because of their denial of the divinity of Christ, the Jews have forfeited G-d’s promises to them, which have been transferred to Christians.

This idea was reinforced in the synod’s final message, which argues that “recourse to theological and biblical positions, which use the Word of G-d to wrongly justify injustices, is not acceptable.” [While this statement, read in full, can be seen to refer more to Islamist misuse of God's name, it can be offensive to Israel as well, as are the following statements by various prelates, which I find objectionably and senselessly partisan:]

Edmond Farhat, a Maronite Apostolic Nuncio, described Israel’s place in the Middle East in terms of a rejected “foreign implant” which has no specialists “capable of healing it”.

The former patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, named by Benedict XVI to work on the conclusions of the synod in a Vatican-owned building run by the Custodian of the Holy Land, presented a document against Israel called “Kairos”. Among the signators are the Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III, Armenian Torkon Manougian and Copt Anba Abraham, as well as Lutheran Manib Yunan and Anglican Suheil Dawani.

The document says: “The military occupation is a sin against God and against man”, actually excommunicates Christian supporters of Israel, takes sides against the very presence of Israel, likens the defensive barrier that has blocked suicide terrorism to apartheid, attacks the Jewish settlements invoking the name of God and conceptually cancels the Jewish state. It even legitimizes terrorism when it talks about the “thousands of prisoners who languish in Israeli jails” and which are “part of the society around us”. In fact, “resistance to the evil of occupation is a Christian's right and duty".

At the synod, Monsignor Twal said that Israel should be replaced by a new state for Muslims, Jews and Christians, ignoring the problem that Arab refugees and birth rates might sweep away the Jews. Secondly, he said that "100%" of the reason that Palestinians are running away is Israeli occupation.

A century ago, Europe was the center of Jewish life. More than 80 percent of world Jewry lived there. In the near future, the same percentage of world Jewry will live in Israel. That is why the Vatican’s stance on the Jewish State is much more important for the fate of the Jewish people than the old hat question “Who killed Jesus?”.

Under atomic and Islamist existential threats, today the remnant of the Jewish people risks being liquidated before the centennial of Israel in 2048.

Six years ago, the Pope prayed for God to stop the “murderous hand” of terrorists, referred to the “abhorrent terrorist attacks” in Egypt, Britain, Turkey and Iraq, but left out the suicide bombing that had just killed five people in a shopping center in Netanya. [This was an unfortunate omission from a statement made by Benedict XVI at Angelus that then Vatican-spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, then about to step down, tried his best to explain.]

The future of the Jews doesn’t lie in the question on Jesus Christ, but on the fate of two best friends, Rachel Ben-Abu and Nofar Horowitz, both 16, both killed in Netanya during the terror attack that the Vatican “forgot” to mention.

Their funerals were punctuated by wails of “Why, God, why?”. Their graves covered with wreaths and flowers. This is the living cross that the tiny State of Israel has had to carry for the last fifteen years. [Please spare the melodrama! The tragedy of Arab intolerance and fatal hostility towards Israel is bad enough. To accuse the Vatican of anti-Israeli intentions because of the regrettably partisan personal opinions of Catholic bishops sympathetic to the Arabs is, to say the least, not kosher.]