I'm not here to make excuses. I'm here to laugh out loud. At you and your mouth-breathing pals who swallowed this hit piece, holus-bolus. There's no transcript of his speech, no context, no block quotes of any substance. The article is nothing but a piece of trumped up trash.
The headline alone made me crack up. Why are there quotes at the end of the sentence ...Israel is a baby-killer"?? The Cardinal never uttered that sentence. It's the invention of the author of this despicable garbage. Where do the quotes begin? The Cardinal was speaking at the presentation to the press of the Pope's new book "The Infancy Narratives" which deals with the early part of Jesus' life. He gave a lengthy discourse and according to this week's L'Osservatore Romano:
Introducing the third and last “panel” of the “triptych”, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, presented the almost cinematographic technique of anticipation with which Benedict XVI begins his book: “in the ‘antechamber’ he voices a question that will echo in the face of the Roman praetor of Jerusalem, when the governor Pilate was to question the accused, Jesus. Póthen ei sy; “Where are you from?” (Jn 19:9). According to Ravasi, Ratzinger proposes four keys for understanding the Infancy narratives. “The first and principal” one is the interaction between “history and faith”, then between “history and prophecy ”. The third key is the dialogue between the author and the reader, while the last key is the “linguistic method”.
I have yet to find a full length transcript of Ravasi's remarks but they were, for sure, not directed at Israel. I'll keep looking and if I track them down, they will be posted. Not that it would make any difference to the pitiable creatures who flocked to this rotting carcass.