Vatican Jєωιѕн relations remain difficult

By Alphonse de Valk
Catholic Insight
Issue: December 2010
http://catholicinsight.com/online/church/vatican/article_1067.shtml



On October 23, 2010 a Rome Press Conference drew immediate fire from Israeli officials when Melkite Archbishop Cyrille Bustros commented on the Mid—East Synod’s final communiqué that “the word of God” should not be misused to “wrongly justify injustices.” The Archbishop explained that Christians cannot speak of a specific “promised land,” because Jesus Christ came to establish the Kingdom of God in the world and to make all who follow him His “chosen ones”. That means, Bustros said, that the idea of the “promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jєωs to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians.” He added “Sacred Scripture should not be used to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestine.”



Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Daniel Ayalon — who currently heads the Israeli delegation with the Vatican on the status of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land on which no progress has been made for 16 years — denounced the Archbishop’s remarks as “Arab propaganda”. The Jerusalem Post charged that the Mid—East Synod had been “hijacked by bishops from Muslim countries” who re-iterate “anti-semitic theological positions that contradict the 1965 interfaith docuмent Nostra Aetate” which “radically revamped the Church’s previous negative views of the Jєωιѕн people.” Other Jєωιѕн authorities such as Rabbi David Rosen chimed in calling upon the Vatican to repudiate at once the Archbishop’s “outrageous and regressive comments.” (The Wanderer, November 4, 2010 “No promised Land” remark draws Israeli anger.)



The conversions


The Vatican has not repudiated the Archbishop’s remarks. Why not? The answer is illustrated by an article in the Vatican’s newspaper L’Osservatore Romano of November 10, 2010. The editor allowed the head of Italian Jєωry, Renzo Gattegna, to write an opinion piece. As a step forward to reciprocal understanding, Gattegna wrote, it would be “useful, necessary and certainly appreciated” for the Vatican to openly and forcefully renounce “any manifestation of intent aimed at the conversion of Jєωs.”



This, he said, should be accompanied by the elimination of a Good Friday prayer calling for the conversion of the Jєωs [Editor: in what is now called the Extraordinary Rite of the Latin Church]. (Canadian Jєωιѕн News, November 18, 2010.)