The Church and the Jews

Koenig’s Eye View

New book: J’Accuse: The Vatican Against Israel

By Giulio Meotti

“For over 100 years, and half a century after the Holocaust, the Vatican has been hostile to the creation of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East with its capital as Jerusalem. For sixty years after the Jewish State gained independence in 1948, the Catholic Church adopted a policy fitting to Israel’s Arab-Islamic enemies: total non-recognition of Jewish statehood and peoplehood.

Despite acceptance by every Western nation, Israel was not accorded formal diplomatic recognition by the Vatican before 1993.

The Church formally recognized Israel’s existence only two decades after Israel’s foe, Egypt’s Sadat, signed a peace treaty with the Jewish State. Apparently, the Vatican considered only the State of Israel undeserving of its recognition. How do we explain this refusal?

“Catholicism had long viewed Judaism as a pariah faith, and the Jews a group destined to wander the earth for their complicity in the death of Jesus.”

The Second Vatican Council partially revoked this anti-Semitic doctrine in 1965. But since then, the Vatican rapprochement with the Jewish people took place at two levels, which the Vatican separated: theology and political level. Each advance on the first plane was counterbalanced by a deeper regression on the second, as if the two movements were synchronized. The closer the Vatican seems to draw toward reconciliation and dialogue with Judaism, the louder grew the clamor supporting the Arab cause against Israel.

“For the first time, my book deciphers the Vatican’s criminalization of the State of Israel and appeasement to anti-Semitic terrorism in the period between 1945 to 2013.

My book explains:

• How the Vatican glided from anti-Semitism to anti-Zionism.
• How the Christological themes of Palestinianism developed based on the Judeo-phobic schemas of crucifixion and the Arab Churches, supported by the Vatican, transfigured Palestinian terrorism into a Christ-like image.
• How during the last fifty years, the Vatican authorities obfuscated the reality of a Jewish State as democracy under siege by calling it “apartheid.”
• How the Arab Catholics waged a war against the Jewish people. Because of their proximity to Christianity’s holy sites, these Arab bishops have ready access to visiting Christian leaders in the West who are all too willing to accept a distorted narrative about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
• How the Vatican has been able to impose a narrative in which “peace” is contingent on Israeli concessions and efforts to dismantle the Jewish State.
• How Vatican leaders use deicide imagery in reference to Israel, portraying Israel’s efforts to prevent civilian casualties as “collective punishment” and associating the Israeli Jews with “militarism,” “colonialism” [and] “injustice.”
• How after 1967, the Vatican has become the unabashed apologist for Arab rejectionism, by sponsoring international conferences in which Zionism was associated with racism.
• How a Middle Eastern version of liberation theology, supported by high profile Catholic clergy, presented the Palestinian Christians as “the true Israel,”oppressed by a malevolent occupation government of theologically cursed Jews.
• How within the Catholic hierarchy, which has been influenced by Islamic fundamentalism, there are growing numbers of leaders who demonize Israel because they believe that Jews are not entitled to any part of the Holy Land;indeed, they feel that a Jewish state is both theologically “illegitimate” and intrinsically “racist.”
• How the State of Israel has been abandoned by the Vatican during its darkest periods, such as the Second Intifada of the suicide bombers, the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, the Church of Bethlehem’s siege [and] Iran’s Holocaust denial.
• How since the First Intifada, the Palestinian Liberation Organization found an ally in the Vatican in its war against Israel.
• How the Catholic NGOs encouraged an inversion of stereotypes, in which Jews become modern-day Roman “oppressors” humiliating the Palestinian people, whose suffering is likened to that of Jesus.
• How the latest Vatican synods have demonized the “unchosen” Jewish people.
• How the Vatican abused the Holocaust memory and used it as a weapon against Israel.
• How the Catholic ecumenism and interfaith meetings, from Durban to Jerusalem, have been traps for anti-Jewish rhetoric and sentiments.

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Meotti interview: J’Accuse: The Vatican Against Israel

Arutz Sheva interviews its well-known columnist on his book accusing the Vatican of blatant anti-Zionism — acting as an ally of the PLO.

Israel National News

Excerpt:

Question: Can you provide us some examples of the Vatican’s new anti-Semitism?

Meotti: Here are a few:

• October 2010, Vatican synod of the Middle East bishops in Rome: The clerics proclaim that there is no “promised land” nor “chosen people.”
• April 2002, Palestinian terrorists entered Bethlehem’ Jesus Nativity Church: The Catholic authorities became the worldwide leaders of an unprecedented campaign of verbal assault against the State of Israel. The Vatican, from the NGOs to the Pope to the Osservatore Romano, sanctioned the terrorists’ right to use the church as a shelter and turned Israel into the aggressor.
• 2009, Cast Lead Operation: Pope Benedict condemned the “massive violence” in Gaza only after Israel bombed the terrorists’ installations, not before when rockets were fired against Israeli civilians. Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican Council for Justice, called Gaza “a concentration camp.”
• July 2005: Pope Benedict condemned a litany of terrorist atrocities, avoiding mentioning the 57 Israelis killed in that year of Second Intifada. In this pro-Palestinian Vatican mantra, epitomized by humanitarian Catholic organizations such as Caritas and Pax Christi, Arabs are the innocent “victims” of Israeli occupation.

The corollary is that the Palestinian Arabs are a priori exculpated from any responsibility for their plight, especially terrorism against civilians, including the use of suicide bombers and rockets.

Question: What do you expect for the future?

Meotti: The Christian West has authority and power concerning Israel’s existence and survival. It must act now to condemn the appeasement of Israel’s enemies and to recognize that Israel’s existence is a gift to the Gentile community of nations.

A century ago, Europe was the center of Jewish life. More than 80 percent of world Jewry lived there. The Holocaust pulverized that Jewish existence, and the Vatican almost stood silent. In the near future, the same percentage of world Jewry will live in the State of Israel.

That is why the Vatican’s stance on the Jewish State is the only measure of whether the Church is really serious about atoning for its sins against the Jewish people.

Question: What is the most telling conclusion of your book?

Meotti: After centuries of anti-Semitism spawned by the Church, the Vatican had the religious, moral and political obligation to help make the world a safer place for Jews. I believe the Catholic Church has failed, tragically so. That is why I wrote my own J’accuse.

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Op-Ed: Terrible days are coming upon Europe: Hatred and anti-Semitism exploding –Gulio Meotti

Israel National News

Excerpt:

Only negativity is unleashing in the spiritual sky of Europe. In some European countries, such as Greece, Hungary and Ukraine, anti-Semites are already serving openly in parliaments.

In Italy, one of the lawmaker of the Five Stars movement, the country’s biggest party, Paolo Bernini, just called Zionism “a plague,” not so much different from Iran’s Rouhani rhetoric.

Just as 14th-century Christians once held the Jews responsible for the epidemic Black Death,the Israelis are now blamed by the Europeans for all the ills of today’s world.

Anti-Semitism in Europe has become a spiritual disease which is growing like a cancer, like the HIV virus, which ultimately destroys the body.

And what is most frightening is that Europe’s nations are disintegrating socially; along with it, their spiritual essence is lost in favor of relativism and multiculturalism. Hatred and anti-Semitism always explode when a nation shows a derisory survival instinct — and it is pervaded by illogic and inconsistency.

Terrible things are going to happen here in Europe. A horizontal feeling of desperation is ravaging the continent.