The January edition of
La Civiltà Cattolica – the most authoritative magazine of
the Jesuits, printed under the supervision of the Vatican – opens with an
editorial about Palestinian refugees. Adopting the Arab propagandist word
Nakba,
it declares they are a consequence of “ethnic cleansing” by Israel. The journal
also supports anti-Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, and falsely proclaims that “the
Zionists were cleverly able to exploit
the Western sense of guilt for the Shoah
to lay the foundations of their own state.”
The Latin patriarch of
Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, just joined an “interreligious meeting” in
Doha, Qatar.
Sponsored by the Arab League, the event occurred on Jerusalem, with the
participation of “Christian and Muslim leaders.”
But no Jewish
presence.
The slandering of Israel is growing among the most important
Catholic journalists. Vittorio Messori, who conducted the first book-length
interview with
Pope John Paul II, recently wrote an editorial for the Italian
daily
Il Corriere della sera where he stated “All governments of all Muslim
nations are under the tsunami of the violent intrusion of Zionism that has come
to put its capital in Jerusalem.”
The Vatican’s teachings have a direct
influence on 1.166 billion people. To understand its new mood about Israel, one
has only to read
what happened in the special synod on the Middle East, hosted
in Rome. Nothing was said about Islamist persecution of Christians; indeed,
every effort was made to show the Catholic Church sympathetic to Muslim
grievances, especially against “Zionism” – a word evoked as a symbol of
evil.
Archbishop Edmond Farhat – the official representative of Vatican
politics – proclaimed that the ultimate cause of all the evils in the Middle
East is that “foreign body” which is Israel: “The Middle Eastern situation today
is like a living organ that has been subject to a graft it cannot assimilate and
which has no specialists capable of healing it”.
US Archbishop Salim
Bustros wrote the final message of the synod, claiming that the Jewish Promised
Land had been “nullified by Christ,” thus reviving the infamous replacement
theology that played a great role in the Holocaust. Bustros also claimed that
the Bible can’t be used to justify the “occupation” of the West Bank, attempting
to sever any link between the Jewish people and its homeland.
The former
patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, named by
Pope Benedict XVI to address the
concluding session of the synod, presented a document against Israel called
“Kairos” bearing the signatures of many Christian leaders in
Jerusalem.
It says: “The Israeli occupation is a sin against God,” and
takes sides against the very presence of Israel.
It likens the security
barrier that has blocked suicide attacks to “apartheid,” it cancels the concept
of a Jewish state and proclaims that “resistance to the evil of occupation is a
Christian’s right and duty.”
The document was presented in a
Vatican-owned building run by Pax Christi, Catholic Action and the Franciscan
Custodian of the Holy Land.
THE CURRENT Vatican patriarch of Jerusalem,
Fouad Twal, affirmed also that “you can’t have both Zionism and democracy,”
supporting the “one-state solution” – a euphemism for the destruction of the
Jewish state. Elias Chacour, the Catholic archbishop of Galilee and Nazareth,
went on to say that Israel committed “an ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians.”
Israel bashing is also part of the strategy of the Vatican
Secretariat of State in the Middle East; its default position visà- vis militant
Islamism is to try to reach accommodations with regimes and forswear
condemnation of Islamist ideology. Israel is easily expendable in this
horrendous scheme.
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