People in general do not like to think of the Vatican as being anti Semitic. Irregardless of that which people choose to believe about the Vatican, it is clear that the Catholic faith holds Islam in higher regard than Judaism; so much so, that in the 2nd Vatican council in 1964, the Book of Catechism was amended:
From Answering-Islam.org
Added into the Book of Catechism in 1964:
“But the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Moslems: these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one,merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.” – source
Taken from Israelnationalnews.com
Op-Ed: For the Pope, Israel Does Not Really Exist
For Pope Francis, who, it is said, plans to visit Jerusalem next year, the State of Israel doesn’t even exist.
This is how the Pope greeted the faithful at the end of the General Audience in Rome: “I ask you to pray for the peace in the Middle East: in Syria, in Iraq, in Egypt, in Lebanon and in the Holy Land, where the Prince of Peace is born”.
Where is Israel in the Pope’s statement?
A few days earlier, the Pope had visited St. Francis’ grave in Assisi. There, Papa Bergoglio said: “Let us listen to the cry of all those who are weeping, who are suffering and who are dying because of violence, terrorism or war, in the Holy Land, so dear to Saint Francis, in Syria, throughout the Middle East and everywhere in the world”.
No mention again of the Jewish State or of the two Israeli soldiers murdered by Muslim terrorists this month.
“Terra Sancta”, holy land, is the malignant expression used by the Vatican and the Catholic clergy in the Middle East to deny the very existence of the Jewish state and people. If it is their holy land, it cannot be Eretz Yisrael.
A few days ago Asia News, one of the most important Catholic Church foreign news media outlets, ran an article titled “The Costs of the Israeli Occupation and the Judaization of Jerusalem”.
The two countries which took pride in themselves as true Catholic States during the Second World War, were Slovakia and Croatia. There, more than anywhere else, strong condemnation of anti-Jewish measures could have been expected. But in May 1943, while the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka were turning Europe’s Jewry into ashes, the Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal, Luigi Maglione, in a document, listed a number of arguments to support the Pope’s refusal to help and rescue 2,000 Jewish children from Slovakia. – source
The devil’s stronghold over the Vatican is not hard to comprehend. I believe to the core of my being that the Vatican was either hijacked or was founded by none other than Satan himself. The rabid hatred for Jews is dead give away.
Israelinationalnews.com goes on: (this piece was written in 2013)
Among these, Maglione mentioned the Vatican’s opposition to the Balfour Declaration and the plan to establish a Jewish homeland.
Various reasons were given to explain the Catholic Church’s refusal to recognize Israel for decades after the war. Among these were that Israel did not yet have “recognized borders,” while the Vatican maintains diplomatic ties with other countries without “recognized borders.” Democratic countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria.
But the Vatican’s denial would have existed even if Israel would have drawn its border in Herzliya. It is Israel’s very existence which makes the Vatican’s hierarchy nervous. They cannot even pronounce the name of “Israel”.
David Ben Gurion said it well: “The Catholic Church has a 2,000 years old reckoning with the Jews. The Vatican doesn’t want Israel to rule. There is a dogma (replacement theology, ed.) which has existed for 1,800 years and we gave it the coup de grace by establishing the State of Israel”.
From 1943 to 2013, nothing as really changed in the Vatican’s rejection of Israel’s territorial and religious sovereignty over the “holy land”.
Yesterday it was apathy about a Slovakian Jewish child. Today it is a little Israeli girl from Psagot. – source
Pope Francis has been extremely busy – being a spokesperson for the U.N., especially for climate change and as he says “Caring for Mother Earth.” This smacks of new age philosophy. I do believe that this pope is in the running for being the False Prophet, spoken of in God’s Word.
A little History about the Vatican and Hitler
From Americanmagazine.org
Seventy years ago a fateful meeting occurred in Rome. The Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII), and Germany’s vice chancellor, Franz von Papen, formally signed a concordat between the Holy See and the German Reich on July 20, 1933. This event ended negotiations that began after Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. Among the witnesses to this event were Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Pope Paul VI) and Msgr. Ludwig Kaas, the leader of Germany’s Catholic Center Party. Neither Pope Pius XI nor Hitler attended the meeting; both had already approved of the concordat. The pope ratified the agreement two months later on Sept. 10. The Concordat of 1933 specified the church’s rights in the Third Reich.
The political significance of the signing of the Concordat of 1933 was, however, ambiguous in its day and still remains so. Hitler interpreted the concordat to mean that he had won the church’s approval, thereby gaining international recognition of his Nazi regime. At least some German Catholics took the signing of the treaty as an indication that church officials had softened their opposition to National Socialism. Some political commentators, journalists and historiansthen and now have viewed this event as a manifestation of Pope Pius XI’s and Cardinal Pacelli’s underlying motives, which allegedly included their preference for dictatorships over democracies, their readiness to use Nazi Germany as a bulwark against the spread into Europe of Stalin’s Communism and their disregard for German Jews. The pope and his secretary of state insisted, however, that they approved the agreement simply to protect the church. Cardinal Pacelli said as much in August 1933 to Ivone Kirkpatrick, the British minister to the Vatican: The spiritual welfare of 20 million Catholic souls in Germany was at stake, and that was the first and, indeed, only consideration in agreeing to the concordat. The Holy See had to choose between an agreement on [Nazi] lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich. – source
Brethren, it seems that Pope Francis has taken the anti-Israel position of the Vatican to a new level.
From Jpost.com
Pope Francis is aligning himself against Israel (an op-ed)
Israel and the Jewish people should protest this measure in the strongest possible terms and make sure that Pope Francis realizes the damage he has done.
In a treaty that was finalized in Rome last week, the Catholic Church fired the latest salvo in its 2,000-year-old struggle to disenfranchise the Jewish people. Meeting with Palestinian officials at the Vatican, church officials agreed to formally recognize the “State of Palestine” as part of a deal concerning Catholic activities in the Palestinian-controlled areas.
And just in case anyone failed to get the memo, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi went to the trouble of going on record as saying, “Yes, it’s a recognition that the state exists.”
This outrageous step is a severe blow to Catholic- Jewish relations and it cannot go unanswered.
Israel and the Jewish people should protest this measure in the strongest possible terms and make sure that Pope Francis realizes the damage he has done.
In biblical terms, by recognizing a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, the Vatican is effectively seeking to deny the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people, to whom this land was promised long ago. This is not only offensive and disrespectful, but disingenuous too. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder: what Bible is the Vatican reading? Whichever one it is, it must be missing some pages, as even a cursory glance at the Scriptures makes clear that God promised to give the Land of Israel to the Jewish people and nobody else. In fact, there are over 150 biblical verses ranging from Genesis to Joshua to Chronicles which state this and reaffirm that Israel would return from Exile to this holy soil.
Take, for example, Isaiah 14:1-2: “The Lord will have compassion on Jacob; once again He will choose Israel and will settle them in their own land.” Or how about Jeremiah 31:4, where God says: “You shall again plant vineyards upon the mountains of Samaria.” And there’s Genesis 48:3-4. And Judges 2:1, and Ezekiel 34: 11-13. And Hosea 3:4-5. And Amos 9:14-15. And Obadiah 1:17, Zephaniah 3:19-20 and Zechariah 8:7-8. -source
I love seeing my people from Israel using Biblical references to support the fact the God Himself gave the land to them!
Jpost.com goes on:
Moreover, the Bible stresses that these were not merely assurances, but a Divine oath, one that would never be broken.
“He remembers His covenant forever,” says 1 Chronicles 16:15-18, “the word He commanded for a thousand generations, the covenant He made with Abraham, the oath He swore to Isaac. He confirmed it to Jacob as a decree, to Israel as an everlasting covenant: ‘To you I will give the land of Canaan as the portion you will inherit.’” You get the point. But it seems that the Vatican does not.
In fact, my Christian friends tell me that the words “Palestine” and “Palestinians” do not appear anywhere in the New Testament. Hence, one could argue that Jesus himself would be mystified by the pope’s position.
After all, according to Christian belief, Jesus the Jew was born and raised in Bethlehem, which means there was a Jewish community there, with synagogues, ritual baths, rabbis and perhaps a kosher deli too, centuries before Islam was even founded.
So would the Catholic Church now deem Jesus to have been a “settler” or “occupier” of Palestinian land? For an institution that bills itself as “the Holy See” and which claims to uphold sacred values, the Vatican’s profane involvement in Middle Eastern politics is simply unbecoming.
And given its sordid history of anti-Semitism, book-burnings, forced conversions and Inquisitions, the Catholic Church should think a hundred times over before daring to step on Israel’s toes.
If anything, the pope should be down on his knees pleading for forgiveness from the Jewish people and atonement from the Creator for what the Vatican has wrought over the centuries.
The current attempt to undermine and deny Israel’s right to Judea and Samaria by recognizing Palestinian statehood smacks of “supersessionism,” or replacement theology, a doctrine according to which the Church replaced Israel as God’s chosen instrument nearly two millennia ago.
Over the past 50 years, since the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church had slowly begun to acknowledge that the Jewish people are “a covenanted people,” thereby shifting away ever slightly from supersessionism.
But conferring legitimacy on a Palestinian state is akin to suggesting that the Palestinians have replaced Israel as the rightful owners of the land, a position that flies in the face of history, theology and common sense.
It is nothing less than supersessionism via diplomatic means, and a cruel insult to the generations of Jews who longed for Zion while enduring Catholic oppression and persecution.
Israel needs to respond to this affront forcefully. We cannot stand by and watch as our national integrity is called into question. A good place to start would be to withdraw our ambassador to the Holy See, curtail the number of visas granted to Vatican officials, and rule out any possibility of giving the Church the foothold it so sorely wants at the Tomb of King David on Mount Zion.
What a shame it is that after so much progress in Catholic- Jewish relations over the past few decades the Vatican would now betray all the headway that has been made.
But Pope Francis needs to realize that by recognizing the fictitious “State of Palestine” he is aligning himself against Israel, the Jewish people and the bible itself.
And that is something we cannot forgive, nor soon forget. – source
“Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it” (Zechariah 12:2-3)
Shalom b’Yeshua
MARANATHA