The
Vatican has been at best indifferent and at worst, like today, willfully
harmful to the Jewish State
Giulio Meotti |
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal,Frontpage and Commentary.
A few days ago, before his deplorable meeting with PA
Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the Vatican choose to recognize the
“State of Palestine” in a historic move severely criticized by Israel. The
Zionist Organization of America rightly condemned it as “the Pope recognizing
Jew/Christian-Hating Palestinian State”.
There is nothing new under the sun. Despite the fact that there
are many Catholics around
the world who share a pro-Israel attitude, the Catholic Church has always been
at war with the Jewish State and did everything in its power to prevent its
establishment and then to derail it.
After the pro-Jewish Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Vatican’s
opposition to Jewish territorial sovereignty grew more entrenched. In the years
after the Holocaust, Vatican anti-Zionist policies attempted to block the
partition of Palestine at the United Nations, and to secure Jerusalem as an
international, sovereign “corpus separatum”, which was meant to prevent the
Jews from setting a foot in the Old City of Jerusalem and on the Temple
Mount.
Two major cardinals were active in British Palestine in the first
twenty years of the 20th century: the British Francis Bourne and the Italian
Filippo Giustini. Cardinal Bourne in 1919 sent a letter to the then British government, writing that Zionism had not
received the approval of the Vatican, and that if the Jews would “ever again
dominate and rule the country, it would be an outrage to Christianity and
its Divine founder”.
Cardinal Giustini in that year cabled the Pope from Jerusalem asking
for his intervention “to prevent the re-establishment of Zionist Israel in
Palestine”. In another letter from Jerusalem, Cardinal Bourne defined Zionism
as “contrary to Christian sensitivity and tradition”.
“There was no real reason why the Jews should be back in Palestine. Why should not a nice place be found for them, for instance in South America?”.
Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, who was Secretary of State under two Popes (Benedict XV and his successor Pius XI) said that “the most dangerous threat is the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine”. Gasparri claimed that, “It is better [to have] the internationalization of the Holy Sites rather than see Jerusalem in the hands of the Jews”. Then Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Luigi Barlassina, condemned the creation of an “autocratic Zionist domination” in many articles and dispatches to Rome.
And during the ‘30s, while the Jews were under attack in Germany
and Italy, Domenico Tardini, the Vatican Undersecretary of State, told a
British diplomat in 1938: “There was no real reason why the Jews should be back
in Palestine. Why should not a nice place be found for them, for instance in
South America?”.
The Vatican not only opposed the Balfour declaration at the League of Nations,
it also endorsed the British “White Paper”, which fought the Jews’ right to
immigrate to their Holy Land.
Even Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, later to become Pope John XXIII
and recognized by some Jews as a friend, wrote that he was “uneasy about the
attempts of Jews to reach Palestine, as if they were trying to reconstruct a
Jewish kingdom”.
At the peak of the Holocaust, the Vatican’s main thought was to
oppose the creation of a Jewish State, which if it would had been established
before could have saved many Jews fleeing Hitler. Pope Pius XII made his
opposition toward a Jewish homeland known to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Dated
June 22, 1943, the letter sent by Amleto Cicognani, the Pope’s special
representative to the US, to Ambassador Myron Taylor, Roosevelt’s emissary to
Pius XII, made Pius’s policy against Zionism crystal clear.
On 10 April 1945, while the war was still going on in Europe,
Moshè Sharet of the Jewish Agency, was received by Pope Pius XII. He hoped for
the “moral support” of the Catholic Church for “our renewed existence in Palestine”.
But he did not receive any support; on the contrary the Vatican started a new
campaign for “the internationalization of Jerusalem” supported by France,
another name used to deprive the Jews of their homeland.
Giorgio Hakim, then Catholic bishop of San Giovanni d’Acri, in 1947
delivered a letter by the Muftì of Jerusalem to the Pope in the Vatican —
who had been an ally to Hitler in the “final solution” — against Israel’s
projected establishment. Pius XII reacted “very cordially”. In 1948, when
Israel was fighting six Arab armies which wanted to annihilate the tiny
and fragile Jewish State, the Catholic press and the Vatican officials
attempted to tie the Arab Christian refugee crisis into its general critique of
“Israeli incursions” and “Jewish imperialism”.
In 1949 the Italian embassy in the Vatican dispatched a message
that the Holy See had the opinion that “the Israelis are using against the
Arabs the same methods that the Nazis used against them”.
I could go on with this list of Vatican’s attempts to derail the
creation and survival of the State of Israel. Emanuel Ringelblum, the great
historian of Polish Jewry who was killed during the Holocaust, noted that
during the war “when the blood of Jewish students was shed and anti-Semitic
savages rioted, the clergy either kept silent or approved these deeds...”.
Those words, pronounced by a hero of the Warsaw ghetto, could be
used also today for the Vatican’s indifference to Israel’s mortal siege. And
just as it did in World War II, by choosing to recognize the “State of
Palestine,” the Vatican made common cause with an evil Palestinian Arab Islamic
power in a vain attempt to buy temporary security for their own communities.
But despite these attempts, the Jewish people will grow in its
land and city. All the land is theirs. Period.