כּנור דוד

Kinnor David - "a most attractive blog".

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

His Holiness Benedict XVI and the State of Israel

Discarded Lies is carrying this link to a BBC News article dealing with a glaring omission from the Holy See's response to the terrorist attacks of the past few weeks:

Israel has summoned the Vatican's ambassador to explain why the Pope left the country off a list of those recently hit by terrorism.

Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday deplored attacks in "countries including Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Britain".

Israel said he had failed to mention a 12 July suicide bombing in Netanya that killed five Israelis.

The foreign ministry said it would be interpreted as "granting legitimacy to... terrorist attacks against Jews".

"We expected that the new Pope, who on taking office emphasised the importance he places on relations between the Church and the Jewish people, would behave differently," the ministry said in a statement.

The cynic in me says that such stories are difficult for the UK national broadcaster; when two favourite BBC sneer targets are at loggerheads, at which do they sneer first?

In addition:

Pope Benedict has accepted an invitation to visit Israel but has yet to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in public since taking office in April.

Well, I suppose silence is preferable to donning the keffiyeh as has recently become fashionable in some Protestant circles.

This leads me to a new blog dealing with Jewish / Christian interfaith issues, in particular where they relate to Catholicism, the State of Israel and Zionism - Christian Attitudes on Jews and Israel. This blog is well worth a look and is written by "RC Neo-Jew", who some may know as a long-time commentator on LGF and Discarded Lies.

RCNJ finds another Protestant ecclesial community donning the brown shirt and links to two other interesting articles:

  • First, this assessment of the first three months of His Holiness' pontificate - in which the author points out His Holiness' continuation of his predecessor's concern for Catholic / Jewish interfaith relations, and
  • more equivocally, this article in The Washington Times which reveals some of the difficulties and contradictions that inhere in the Church's relations with Judaism.

Here are Christian Attitudes' two quotes from the latter article. They are both important, and taken together, quite puzzling. On the one hand:

"In the Old Testament the special significance of this choice is emphasized again and again, in Deuteronomy, for instance. God says to the people through Moses: I did not choose you because were a great and numerous people, an important people, not because you possess this or that quality; but because I love you I have freely chosen you....

...He then takes up the question of 2,000 years of Jewish exile yet "their religion has not evaporated ... phenomenon still without parallel in the history of mankind," as the interviewer put it. Does world development have "some mysterious connection with the development of the Jewish people"..

The future pope replied: "God did not make His people into a great power; on the contrary, they became the people who suffered more than any other in the history of the world. But they always kept their identity. Their faith could never die. And likewise it is still like a goad in the very heart of Christianity, which sprang out of the story of Israel and is inseparably bound up with it. ... The great powers of that period have all disappeared. Ancient Egypt and Babylon and Assyria no longer exist. Israel remains -- and shows us something of the steadfastness of God, something indeed of his mystery."

And yet, on the other:

There is one puzzling section in this interview and that involved Cardinal Ratzinger and his view of the State of Israel or rather his nonview, when he said: "This tiny people, who no longer have any country, no longer any independent existence, but lead their life scattered throughout the world, yet despite this keep their own religion, keep their own identity; they are still Israel, the way the Jews are still Jews and are still a people even during the 2,000 years when they had no country; this is an absolute riddle."

Has His Holiness heard of what a French Diplomat infamously called a certain "shitty little country" in the Middle East? It's been in the news a lot for the last half-century or so.

Curiouser and curiouser.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think the Pope is generally one of the Good Guys, but with a few blind spots. Hopefully, he'll learn from this.

What a beautiful blog, by the way. Thanks for your kind words about mine. By the way, have you seen the website within which my blog is embedded,? http://www.zionismontheweb.org/

Full of good things, and the Forum even has a special section for Australians! (All needs are catered for!)

Give my love to Aisha!!

5:13 PM  

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