Pope Francis Keeps Pissin' 'Em Off

Pope Francis with Palestinian
President Abbas 

Pardon for the hiatus—an extraordinarily busy time of year complicated by the high toll pollen can take on the sinuses, combined with a general sense of spring ennui and languor—but I think I am ready to start writing again and Lord knows, there is plenty to comment on both in the past history and history-in-the-making.

Let’s start today with Pope Francis pissing off the pro-Israel lobby by recognizing the Palestinian State.  Rabid Republicans—almost a redundancy these days—are beside themselves: Congressmen (note: Congressmen) Trent Franks, Jeff Miller, Jeff Duncan, Louie Gohmert and others have all spoken up vociferously to condemn the Pope’s legitimizing the Palestinian government.  (By the way, Franks, Miller, Duncan, and Gohmert are all Baptists, a sect historically known not only for its opposition to Catholicism but often for its open and systematic anti-Catholicism.)   

Francis is, as we all know, good at pissing people off.  He certainly made the Turks unhappy last month in referring to the Armenian Genocide.  The same Republicans—and others—who are furious about the Palestinian recognition are also angry about Francis’ role in mediating the half-century old feud between the United States and Cuba.  And when it comes to internal affairs in the Church, Francis pulls no punches.  The Christmas address to the Roman Curia—his administrative bureaucracy—was scathing in the attack on “careerism” and abuses of power by the clergy.  His packing off the overdressed Cardinal Raymond Burke to be grand poobah of the Knights of Malta infuriated those hoping for a revival of the grand pontifical style of Churchmanship that Burke represents.  His removal of several bishops from their dioceses when their lavish life-style came to his attention sent waves of shock (and trepidation) to many who were enjoying the princely life rather than a shepherd’s care for their flocks (though Myers of Newark is still building his country bungalow for a retirement that can come none-too-soon). 

Francis began his papacy—practically its very first act—with a blunt announcement.  He looked at the rack of papal finery he was expected to wear—a fur-trimmed velvet cape, a lacy sort of slip to wear over his plain white cassock, and of course the Prada-style ruby reds, and told the Master of Ceremonies “Carnival is over”—equivalent to the American “Halloween is over.”  He came to meet the crowds in the plain white everyday cassock, his worn-at-the-heels black shoes, and his black slacks showing through the thin white robes.  He won’t get best-dressed but he has already won the best-respected Pope in quite a while. 

The problem with Francis is that he speaks the truth and a lot of people don’t want to hear the truth.  Palestine is our dirty little secret.  The world is standing by as the Palestinian people are being robbed of their land piece by piece, acre by acre.  A “security wall” (actually walls) designed to “protect” Israel has gone up—but the walls separate the Palestinian people from one another and from their ancestral farms and orchards.  Palestinian farmers have to drive miles from their home to get around the walls to their fields and their olive trees.  And one morning or another, they find their trees plowed under and Israeli settlers starting to build homes on land that the Palestinian family has worked for three, four, five centuries.  They return home to find their house demolished or a Israel family moving in.  Palestinians die in ambulances on their way to hospitals held up at “security check-points” in Palestine but manned by Israeli soldiers.  And then there is the issue of child-abuse by Israeli forces.  UNICEF has documented over 400 cases of Palestinian children under the age of 18 who have been abducted from their homes by Israeli soldiers in night-time raids, blindfolded, cuffed, and subjected to various forms of abuse.  UNICEF says that the “ill-treatment of children who come into contact with the system appears to be widespread, systematic, and institutionalized through the process.”  The UNICEF report was forwarded to Pope Francis by 200 clergy—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—who minister among the Palestinian people. 

Now, I will be the first to say that Israel, like all nations, has a right to secure borders.  And I will also say that I am still trying to figure out what Pope Francis meant by calling Palestinian President Abbas “an angel of peace;” that seems, at best, an overstatement.  But I am delighted that the Pope is shedding light on the Palestinian situation.  I have been to Israel/Palestine on four separate occasions, including one trip sponsored by the Israeli government to show-case their political agenda.  I like Israel.  It is a beautiful country.  Jerusalem is one of my favorite cities in the world.  I want to see peace descend upon Jerusalem and upon the entire land, Israeli and Palestinian.  I pray for that every day.  The rabid nationalism of the Netanyahu government is not the path to peace any more than is the Hamas violence. 

One of the funniest lines in American theatre is in the musical The Best Little Whore House in Texas.  The “Governor of Texas” in the play declares, in reference to the problems in the Mideast, that “it behooves the Jews and the A-rabs to settle their differences in a Christian manner.”  Ridiculous, but actually he has a point.  The good Baptists among the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus don’t get it of course; they might know every verse in the Bible but like the man who can’t see the forest for the trees, they can’t see the Gospel for the Bible.  There can be no peace in Israel/Palestine without justice for the Palestinian people. The Hebrew Scriptures tell us as much: just think of Exodus 22: 21; Deuteronomy 1:16; Deuteronomy 10: 19; Deuteronomy 27:19; Jeremiah 7:6; Zechariah 7:10.   The Christian, though apparently not the Baptist, knows not only must there be justice but there must be forgiveness and reconciliation.  We cannot expect either Jew or Muslim to follow in the path that Christ has laid out in the gospels, but as Christians we must adhere to that path and not enable one side or the other to pursue the sort of violence and injustice that has characterized Israeli/Palestinian tensions over the past 67 years, and indeed the decades of struggle that preceded.  That is what Pope Francis is saying.  We need Christian voices to speak up both for the security of Israel and for justice to the Palestinians.  

Our Complicity In Evil

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher,

Jerusalem

Last week—Thursday, February 26,--arsonists set fire to the Greek Orthodox Seminary in  Jerusalem and wrote, in Hebrew, insulting remarks about Jesus on the walls. 

Over the last five years or so Israeli settlers who have moved in to occupy Palestinian villages have not only forced out the occupants, but vandalized Christian Churches, monasteries, and cemeteries.  Two years ago the monastery of the Sisters of Bethlehem was firebombed in a midnight attack, the perpetrators of which left graffiti on the outside walls saying “Price Tag,” “Death to Gentiles,” and “revenge” in Hebrew.  The same terms were painted on tombstones in the Greek Orthodox cemetery in Jaffa.  Israeli settlers vandalized the car of a Catholic human rights lawyer in Jerusalem. 

Vandals left graffiti—in Hebrew—stating that “Jesus is a monkey” on the walls of the Dormition Abbey, a Benedictine monastery that marks the traditional site of the death of the Virgin Mary.  “Jesus is a Son of a Bitch” and “Price Tag” had been sprayed on the Abbey’s walls the year before. 

“Price Tag” refers to a campaign initiated four years ago by Israeli settlers on Palestinian lands to intimidate Palestinians and other non-Israelis into leaving the Holy Land.  It refers to the “price” that Palestinians must pay for their opposition to the expansion of Israeli territory into the towns and villages which they have occupied from time immemorial. 

Now the Israelis want to extend their “security wall” into the Cremisan valley and then expropriate the land there that currently belongs to Palestinian Christians.  The mayor, Vera Baboun, met with Pope Francis to ask his help in preventing this land-grab. 

Why don’t we hear more about these atrocities?  CBS reporter Bob Simon who died last month in an automobile crash in New York did a story back in 2012 on the plight of Palestinian Christians.  Then Israeli ambassador Michael Oren put pressure on CBS to squelch the story before it was even completed.  Simon recalled the incident:

According to Israeli government figures, tourism is a multi billion dollar business there. Most tourists are Christian. Many of them are American. That’s one reason why Israelis are very sensitive about their image in the United States. And that could be why Ambassador Oren phoned Jeff Fager, the head of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes, while we were still reporting the story, long before tonight’s broadcast.  

 Don’t misunderstand me.  I have been to Israel four times.  It is an amazing country.  The Israelis have made the desert bloom.  But there is also tremendous human suffering there, a suffering that former President Jimmy Carter compared to the Apartheid of South Africa until its termination in 1994.  Had Mr. Carter wanted to hit closer to home he could have compared it to the plight of African-Americans in Mississippi or Alabama in the first half of the twentieth century.  The Palestinian peoples who are descended from the biblical inhabitants of Canaan and lived there through the kingships of David and Solomon, through the invasion of the Assyrians, who remained in the land when the Jews were taken to Babylon and when they returned, who survived Alexander and his Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Arab invasion of 636 as well as the Turks in the 12^th century, are now being driven out—Christian and Muslim alike—by policies that want to purge the land of all who are not Jews. 

Today the Master Builder of this racist theocracy is addressing the United States Congress as the invited guest of Speaker Boehner.  I am not in favor of denying any one Holy Communion, but if I could make an argument that the Eucharist should be withheld from any Christian, it would be for John Boehner’s betrayal of his Palestinian brother and sister Christians.  Don’t misunderstand me, Prime Minister Netanyahu is not personally interested in driving all non-Jews from the land of Eretz Yisrael.  I would have some respect—profound disagreement but still respect—for him if this was a matter of something in which he truly believed.  But the Prime Minister, to keep his Likud party in power, courts support from those nationalist and those ultra-orthodox parties and individuals who want to make Israel 100% an Orthodox theocracy.  (note: not all ultra-orthodox wish to make Israel a theocracy; there are many who believe that the political questions need await the Messiah who will decide. And, of course, the majority of Israelis are secular Jews who have abandoned the idea that the land is theirs by a “divine right.”)  Tragically our own nation has involved itself in Israel’s racist agenda by our unqualified support for Israel both politically and militarily.  It is time that we reexamine our policies toward Israel and come to a more balanced and just stance. 

The Ancient Roots of The Palestinian Problem

Interior of a Palestinian Christian

home in the mid-19th century

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he plans to promote legislation that will constitutionally establish the country’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people.  This will effectively scuttle the two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and it plays into the favor of those Orthodox extremists who, believing that the Land of Israel was given by God to the Jewish People and exclusively for the Jewish People, want non-Jews to be expelled because their presence defiles the sacredness of the land given them by God.  (It needs to be clarified that not all Orthodox Jews favor the establishment of a Jewish State as they believe that only the awaited Messiah has the divine authority to restore Israel.)  

The posting that I did recently on Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Teaneck New Jersey and his suggestion to relocate the Muslim Noble Sanctuary from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to “Saudi Arabia, Syria or wherever it is wanted” as well as his encouragement to push the Arab/Palestinian population from Israel/Palestine is symptomatic of this sort of thinking.  After all, it makes sense—the Arabs are latecomers to the Promised Land.  What claim do they have to live in this land that God promised to Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, and gave to Joshua and the children of Israel more than 3200 years ago?

There is some confusion about the Palestinian people and that leads to this racist misconception.  We call them Arabs because they speak Arabic, but their ethnic identity is a bit more complex.

There were native Syrian peoples living in the lands that today are called Israel and Palestine more than 12,000 years ago.  They began as nomadic tribes with their domesticated sheep and goats, but gradually settled down on the rich soil and began raising crops. Like other peoples in the “Fertile Crescent”—that geographic strip that runs northward from Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the East and then crescents south along the coast to Egypt, there was a flourishing civilization in the region some six millennia or more ago.  At this time—c.4000 BC—various tribes such as the Jebusites, Hittites, and Amorites migrated into the land and established their own settlements side by side with those already there. These people are often referred to as “Canaanites” but that term can mislead us to think of them as a single homogenous people. In fact, these various peoples tended to have distinct settlements with a minimal amount of inter-marriage except among the ruling class where inter-tribal marriage forged political alliances.  While they may have borrowed various cultural elements from one another and even borrowed the worship of various gods, they tended to remain distinct from one another with their own rulers and socio/legal traditions. 

Sometime around 2300 BC the Phoenician peoples made settlements along the coast.  Through this period these people tended to be even more unique than the various Cannanite tribes and the Phoenicians, being a sea-going people, branched out westwards into the Mediterranean establishing trading posts and colonies in what is today Sicily, North Africa, and Spain. 

The Israelite exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the land is usually dated between 1250 and 1200 BC.  The Israelites found the land already occupied by the aforementioned peoples but throughout the period of the Judges gradually carved out territories for themselves where they established their own towns and villages.  One of the chief concerns of the Judges, of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, and later of the Prophets, was to prevent cultural assimilation with their non-Israelite neighbors and maintain their distinct tradition, Law, and religion.  This met with mixed success as we see with the infidelities of David and Solomon as well as the criticisms of the later kings for idolatrous practices by the prophets. 

The Israelites were not the last people into the land.  Only a generation after the Children of Israel entered the land of Canaan, the Philistines came and established settlements along the seacoast.  A century later the Arameans came in. 

The Assyrians, the Babylonians, and then the Persians invaded the land in 722, 587, and 540 BC respectively.  The difference with these invasions is that the invaders came to conquer but not to settle, and so they did not leave the imprint on the ethnic makeup of the land that the various settling peoples had.  The Greeks under Alexander the Great would be the next invaders in 333 BC.  They were followed by a small but not insignificant Armenian invasion around 100 BC.  In 63 BC the Romans annexed the land as a “client kingdom” under the Hasmonean dynasty until Herod Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, ruled so badly the kingdom was taken from him and formed into the Roman Province of Iudaea. 

During the period of Greek domination under the rule of the Antiochean Seleucid Kings who ruled the land after the death of Alexander the Great, the policy had been to homogenize the diverse peoples, cultures, and religions of the land into a single Greek culture.  While most of the various peoples dwelling in Syria/Palestine/Judea acceded to this plan and began to cede their unique cultural identities, the Jews, under the leadership of the Macabees, resisted this Hellenization and did so to the point of martyrdom. 

Mark 7:26 has an interesting description of a woman as “Greek, a Syro- Phoenician by nation.”  This indicates that while there was a certain amount of assimilation, particular ethnic identities survived.  One group that was distinct that we have not yet mentioned are the Samaritans.  The Samaritans were Israelites who never accepted the hegemony of the Temple at Jerusalem but had (and have today) their own Temple on Mount Gerizim in what is today Israel.   They were regarded as heretics by the Jews for whom the Temple at Jerusalem was the only place where sacrifice was to be offered.   The Samaritans, a small community today, have retained their distinct ethnic identity to the present day. 

the Jews were expelled from the land of Judea after the failure of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 AD.  While small groups were able to remain in the Galilee, most of what is today Israel remained without Jewish inhabitants until the late 19^th century and the Zionist movement which encouraged Jews to return to the ancient land they claim as their patrimony. 

Under Roman Rule the remaining population continued to homogenize and as the Roman Empire gradually slid into its Byzantine Identity in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity gave an even more unifying force to the once distinct peoples.  Christianity was not totally unifying, however, as the segment of the population that was descended from the various Canaanite peoples and who tended more to be rural, followed the West Syrian liturgy known as the Liturgy of Saint James, while the Byzantines—townsfolk and predominately descendants of the Greeks and the Romans—followed the Greek Rite that would come to be called the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom.  The Armenians retained their distinct identity with their own liturgical rites as well as some basic doctrinal differences with both the Greeks and the Syriacs. 

In the seventh century, invaders came up from the Arabian Peninsula bringing Islam.  While they seized control of the land from the Emperor at Constantinople, they did not force either Islam or the Arabic language on the local population.  Indeed the native population remained overwhelmingly Christian for centuries and Aramaic, the common language of the land in the time of Jesus, remained the ordinary language of most of the population. 

What one had then in the land was a base population that was, except for pockets of Druze and Samaritan minorities, predominately Christian divided into their different villages according to their specific liturgical/ethnic peculiarities: Syrian, Melkite (Greek), Armenian, Maronite and with an Arab Muslim ruling class.  During the period of the Umayyad Caliphate at Damascus, Christians often held key administrative posts.  The father of Saint John Damascene, for example, was a court official of the Caliph. 

Non-Muslims were free to practice their religion but they did have to pay an extra tax, the jizya.  This tax was an exemption from serving in the military, participation in which was limited to Muslims.  Over a period of time, of centuries, more and more of the population converted to Islam, in part to avoid this tax.  Nevertheless, at the time of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, almost half of the Palestinian population, descendants of these Greek-Syriac peoples who themselves were descended—at least in part—from the ancient Canaanite peoples—were still Christian.  They were about half Greek Orthodox, with the other half divided between Roman Catholics and Melkite (Byzantine) Catholics.  There were also significant Armenian and Syriac Orthodox communities and a smaller Coptic Christian community.  As the situation in Israel made life more and more intolerable for the Palestinian peoples, many emigrated to the United States, to Canada, to Australia and to other parts of the world where they would not suffer the limits of freedom and opportunity imposed on them by the unabashedly apartheid policies of the State of Israel.  The Christians, being mostly townspeople and merchants, have found it easier to emigrate than the Muslims who, being predominately farmers, are more closely tied to the land and orchards their families have operated for centuries and which are now being confiscated and turned into “settlements” for the refugees that have flooded Israel from Russia and other Eastern European countries.  

Another Sidebar: You Don't Have To Be Katholic To Be A Krazy

Have you read the segment on the baseball game in the first chapter of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen?  It has nothing whatsoever to do with Catholicism but it captures the profound hate that for pious zealots of any creed provides the foundation of their religion.  Thus we have ISIS brutally murdering Yazidis and Christians in Iraq; we have Christians and Muslims killing one another in Nigeria; we have Russian Orthodox and Greek Catholics locked in battle in the Ukraine, we endured decades of Catholics and Presbyterians in the most savage murders in Northern Ireland; we have Israeli Jews and Palestinians Christians and Muslims in a war with no end; we have Hindu terrorists killing Christians in India; and we have Buddhists killing Hindus in Burma. Amazingly all these people have become so deluded by their “religion” that they think that God has blessed their cause.  There is no way that any such cult can authentically claim to be worshipping God.  True religion—regardless of what doctrines one professes is only as true as are pure the hearts of its adherents.  Hearts shriveled and putrefying with hatred cannot possibly be filled with the love of a deity, any deity, but are in the grasp of Satan. 

One crucial example of religion-gone-rogue that is too often overlooked in today’s American media is the rabid conviction of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel that God has given the land of Eretz Yisrael exclusively to the Jewish People and that consequently the Israelis have a right—actually a duty—to drive all others out of this land which is uniquely Sacred to the Lord God.  And so farmers whose ancestors lived in this land and on this land long before Joshua led the Children of Israel across the Jordan find their olive groves bulldozed, their houses leveled, their orchards and gardens seized and the land given to the “settlements” which are nothing less than a patchwork of thievery.   And this robbery—and sometimes murder—is done in the Name of Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Israel.  What sacrilege against the Holy Name!  The Rabbis and the pious should shudder in a morbid fear at their blasphemy of the Holy Name. 

Now, to be fair, the majority of Israelis, much less the majority of Jews around the world, do not subscribe to this violence.  Far from it.  This exclusionary Eretz Yisrael in which only Jews should be able to put their foot to the consecrated land is the doctrine of only a small group, undoubtedly less than 10%, of Israeli Jews.  But given the peculiarities of parliamentary government, the party in power needs the support of the political parties of these extremists to maintain their voting majority in the Knesset (Parliament) and so hatred—hatred in the name of religion—is empowered to work its evil. 

Christians should not be quick to join in the chorus condemning the sins perpetuated in God’s Name in Israel against the native population of that land.  In many regards this precise blasphemy should be well known to Christians.  When the Jews of Europe were driven from their homes and businesses in England (1290) and then from France (1306) and finally from Spain and Portugal (1492), was it any less offensive to Almighty God?  For that matter, was the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain in 1492 any less evil in the Divine Sight?  And what about the pogroms and riots in which, over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives were lost—was this true and authentic religion?  Is God ever honored by hatred?  Is he honored by hatred now in the death of a Muslim? 

When I look at the Katholic Krazy sites, as much as they view the world beyond Catholicism with the contempt of a Hasid toward the goyim,  they save a particularly bitter hate for those Catholics who disagree with them much as Danny Saunders viewed the apikorsim of the practicing but less orthodox Jews on Reuven Malther’s team.  Somehow we cannot bear that Truth or, for us Christians, Grace, could be found beyond the limits of our own narrow religiosity and that God’s favor could shine as brightly, or even more brightly, on those who are different from us.  A sign of religion-gone-bad is when our religion—be it Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, or pre-Conciliar Catholicism—makes us believe that we stand alone in God’s love.   Such religion is rooted in the hatred of others and renders us with hearts far too impure to ever offer God the Sacrifice which is due him.  Our Mass becomes a Black Mass, a Satanic perversion of the Eucharist and our Sacrifice becomes the sacrifice of Cain as our souls are stamped with the sign of his evil hatred of his brother. 

One of my favorite spiritual writers, the Dalai Lama, says:

“the aim and purpose of religion is to cure the pains and unhappiness of the human mind. …. I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others.” 

Curing the pain and unhappiness of the human soul doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t have beautiful churches or magnificent rituals inside them.  No one appreciates Mozart’s Coronation Mass or the Fauré Requiem more than I, though a capella plain song is more beautiful still.   When I am buying vestments as a gift for the parish or for a particular priest, I go to Barbaconi; Gamarelli’s vestments are far too effeminate and foppish.  Gilles Beaugrand were long the best for sacred vessels, but I have heard that they are closing and would not know where to go for a chalice or monstrance now.   I can’t stand sloppy liturgy and believe that worship calls for a gravity and a seemliness that keeps us mindful of God in whose presence we stand.  All that being said, the true worship of God does not consist in the externals of rite much less of pomp, but of a conversion of the heart by which our hearts are conformed to the heart of Christ so that we can be the worthy sacrifice offered to God and transformed by his Holy Spirit into Christ for the sake of the world’s salvation.  The Dalai Lama is spot on and totally in conformity with Catholic doctrine when he says true religion will reduce our selfishness and implant in us compassion for the salvation of the world.  The person whose love is for doctrine and whose devotion is to ritual worships a false god. 

Ultimately the hatred of Danny Saunders for the apikoros, Reuven Malther, becomes a solid and transformative friendship in which their worlds merge in mutual understanding. It is the triumph of grace over the evils of hatred.   At one point the narrow view of Danny and of his father, Reb Saunders, threatens that evil will overcome good and that separation will frustrate and win out over the friendship, indeed the love, they share.  Hatred always seeks to destroy love.  Fortunately grace prevails and the friendship liberates Danny from the life of fear and its consequent hatred that would have otherwise devoured his soul.  We should pray for the soldiers of Isis, for the Israeli settlers, for the Buddhist monks who are killing Burmese Hindus, and not only for those katholic krazies who are driven by a hatred for Pope Francis or for the Church as it has emerged from Vatican II, but also for ourselves lest evil swallow up good, and hatred devour compassion.