Posted on 07/29/2016 5:36:19 PM PDT by kindred
Pope Francis forgot to mention: the Vatican has walls. He also keeps protecting mistaken Catholic doctrine about Israel.
Pope Francis endorsed the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, including east Jerusalem. This should surprise no well-informed person. Francis, like his predecessor, Pope Benedict, knows where the holiest and most world-significant site of the Jewish People rests. He knows about the theological significance of the Temple Mount and how it casts a question on Catholic dogma. But let me focus on the learned Benedict whom, unlike Francis, one cannot mistake for a Leftist.
Pope Benedict’s dilemma
Professor Joseph Alois Ratzinger, who visited to Israel in 1975 and again in 1994, was not a naïve academic. He understood that an Arab-Islamic state in Israel’s heartland dooms the Jewish State. But given the doctrine of papal infallibility to which Roman Catholics genuflect, the rebirth of the Jewish state in 1948 must stick like a bone in the throat of any Bishop of Rome.
Ratzinger understood that Israel’s rebirth is one of the most significant events in history. This event has had, and continues to have, profound repercussions for a very large part of mankind.
Stunned and embarrassed, Christian (as well as Islamic) theologians have had to perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to account for the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland.
Catholic Christianity especially discomfited.
For millennia the Church propagated the theological doctrine that the Jews are eternally damned and rejected by the Almighty for having refused to recognize the Nazarene. No wonder the Vatican refused, until recently, to recognize the Jewish State of Israel.
This passage from the Jesuit revue Civilta Cattolica tells it all:
1827 years have passed since Jesus of Nazareth’s prophecy that Jerusalem would be destroyed, that the Jews would be exiled as slaves among the nations and remain scattered to the end of time…. According to the holy scriptures, it is incumbent on the Jewish people to live forever scattered and wandering among the gentile nations, in order to provide testimony to Jesus, not only via the writings, but by means of their very existence. Being that Jerusalem has now been rebuilt, to become a center for the renewed Israeli State, we are duly bound to add this is a direct contradiction to Jesus’ own prophecy.
In 1948 the Vatican, in an English radio program, hailed the new Jewish state by describing Zionism as a “new Nazism” and Israel as “a grave menace to Christianity.”
Recognize Israel or protect doctrine?
Apparently, the Roman Catholic Church could not recognize the State of Israel without placing in question its own religion. It has compromised itself by its participation and complicity in the persecution and slaughter of millions of innocent Jewish men, women, and children. [See Pathways to the Torah (Jerusalem: Yeshivat Aish HaTorah, 1988), Sect. A14, for a brief survey of some 1,900 years of venomous hatred of the Jewish people by such Christian divines as Tertullian, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory, Pope Innocent III, Pope Paul IV, and Pope Pius VII.]
Consider, also, the horrifying slaughter of Jews by Lithuanian Catholics on June 25, 1941. They tortured, axed, shot, or burned alive more than 10,000 Jews. [See Aaron Sorasky, Reb Elchonon (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Mesorah Publications, 1982), p. 407.]
In February 1992, Argentina opened its files on Nazi war criminals. The files reveal how the Catholic Church aided the escape of these Nazis. One may say much the same of the hierarchy of France’s Roman Catholic Church. [See The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 9, 1992, p. 10.]
Ponder, too, the audiences Pope John Paul II gave to PLO chief Yasser Arafat, the godfather of international terrorism. Some have said in the Pope’s defense he was making a distinction between the sin and the sinner. Judaism also makes this distinction, but the rabbis do not shake the bloodstained hands of murderers – as might paltry politicians. Harsh words? Then let me remind readers of an event that took place in 1929.
The Hebron Massacre
In that year, the Arabs, with British connivance, indulged in an orgy of rape and murder that destroyed the ancient community in Hebron. The British mandatory government invited prominent Jews to Government House, presumably to express condolences for the pogrom which included the most savage mutilation of men, women, and children.
The British Secretary of the Mandatory Government extended his hand to greet Chief Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, the religious leader of the pre-state Jewish Community. And that great Rabbi refused the handshake. He said it was a hand “besmirched with Jewish blood.”
By endorsing a sovereign Arab-Islamic state in Judea and Samaria, Pope Benedict (like Pope Francis) was instructing more than one billion Roman Catholics to support the enemies of the Jewish people whom he piously called “brothers.”
One cannot fight a polite war
With genocide staring Israel in the face from Iran, this is no time for politeness. Millions of evangelical Christian Zionists, and many Catholic laymen, identify with Israel vis-à-vis the menace Islam poses to western Civilization. Now these Christians should expose the Vatican to respectful but incisive criticism on both theological and political grounds. When they do that, they can galvanize Catholic Christianity to speak up against the most horrendous enemy of mankind. That enemy: Islam, which is slaughtering Christians in the name of Allah.
Regrettably, the Vatican fears of a flourishing but self-constrained Judaism more than a supremacist and expansionist Islam. They do so even when ISIS stands at the gates. They do it for theological, as well as for reasons affecting their global status. All good men should rally behind Israel. For Israel stands as the authentic champion of ethical and intellectual monotheism that justifies a multiplicity of nations to manifest the plenitude and creativity of God.
A Charismatic New World Leader Emerges and Suddenly Befriends Israel
Amen.
Yes--that was the tip of the iceberg. Get Fr. George Rutler's eye-opening book on the year 1942 in WWII called Principalities and Powers. It's a story of the encounter with the evil of Progressivism--in the persons of the Nazis and the Soviets and the Italian and Japanese fascists, who were all Progressives. That is, they believed the past knows nothing, and that they could be their own god.
The story is told through news reports, comments, and speeches recorded in Catholic newspapers around the world, the fascist press, The London Times, The New York Times, and other mainstream sources.
What emerges is that the Vatican had the bad guys' number from the start--having a historical memory about 2000 years old--and fought the Axis covertly and overtly, starting with condemnations of Mussolini and of National Socialism in the 1920. It's true that parts of the Church hierarchy in occupied France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Axis countries rebelled and bought the Nazi line. But the Vatican, in the middle of Nazi-occupied Italy, held the line, as did most of the Church around the world.
Not many people know the appalling sacrifices made by nuns, priests, bishops, and cardinals for opposing the Nazis and in particular, for hiding Jews and transporting them to safety. Tens of thousands of clerics were executed by the Nazis in prisons, in concentration camps, on work farms, and in Nazi gas chambers--as were Catholic laymen by the millions, for the crime of failing to discard that ancient religion of theirs and embrace the future, that is, fascism and party-line thinking.
That is true regarding Salvation.
It is also true that God's covenant with Israel was never declared null and void by God. That is why it is a covenant.
Israel (and its rebirth in 1948) is precious to God, and Israel has a major, major, major role to play in both the End Times and the Millennial Kingdom that God creates after the Great Tribulation.
Anyone, or any institution, that opposes Israel, seeks to divide Israel, seeks to take land away from Israel, seeks to take sides against Israel - is an enemy of God.
The Scriptures make this very plain. In fact, it will become even more plain to the entire world when God Himself intervenes during the War of Ezekiel 38/39.
A true follower of Jesus Christ loves Israel, as God does. Replacement Theology is wrong. The Church is the Church, it is not Israel. God still has an agenda for Israel. A big one, including its Salvation.
Not only that, but Israel and The Church have two totally different destinies.
You can really gauge the Spiritual Health of somebody by simply asking them about Israel and letting them talk about it.
You denounce Israel, and you’re messing with the Apple of God’s Eye.
As a position in Christ, yes. That is a different issue.
Paul also says...
Romans 11:28-32
As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies for your sake; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable. Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you. For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.
You are correct, God’s covenant with Israel is not null and void but it finds its completion in the one covenant in Jesus Christ. There are not two covenants, one for Jews and one for Gentiles. Such a thing is clearly denied by Paul. As Paul taught, the Gentiles were grafted onto Israel to form one people. God does indeed remain faithful to his covenant promises but in Jesus Christ. It is now impossible to have a covenantal relationship with God except through Jesus Christ, even for the Jews.
First, the author, Paul Eidelberg, says "given the doctrine of papal infallibility to which Roman Catholics genuflect, the rebirth of the Jewish state in 1948 must stick like a bone in the throat of any Bishop of Rome."
Given that no Pope has ever made an infallible or even Magisterial statement about the Jewish State of Israel --- as FReepers Petrosius and vladimir998 accurately pointed out --- this is a sophomorish gaffe on the part of Paul Eidelberg.
"For millennia the Church propagated the theological doctrine that the Jews are eternally damned and rejected by the Almighty for having refused to recognize the Nazarene."
Here Eidelberg offers a partial and rather tendentious rendering of Catholic Doctrine, which also teaches that those who are “invincibly” ignorant concerning the deity of Christ will not be culpable for this lack of knowledge before God.
That means that all people have the real possibility of salvation even if they never come to an explicit knowledge of Christ and/or his Church. To accurately present Catholic Doctrine, you would have to mention that Christ is described (in our Scriptures) as "the Light that enlightens every man who comes into the world." This implies that "every man" has his opportunity to turn toward the Light --- in a mysterious way that goes beyond what we can explain --- and be saved.
Note this is not "universalism," the notion that "all are saved." It's the doctrine that all COULD be saved, if they accept (however this happens) the Light.
Third example, Eidelberg makes the common mistake of thinking that every political, social or theological opinion he reads in some Catholic publication (like Civilta Cattolica 1827?) constitutes Catholic doctrine. This is not the case. I don't know where I put my early-19th-century archives of Civilta (Ha--- that was joke, son) but I'm pretty sure I could find contrasting views at some point in its publication history. Doctrines are not made in magazines postmarked Rome, even Jesuit ones.
Eidelberg may have some seriously important insights r analysis to share here. but it undermines his credibility when he gets such obvious things wrong.
It's like a sport writer who informs you in his first paragraph that Babe Ruth made the most touchdowns in baseball history. Maybe he has something interesting to say about Babe Ruth, but obviously this is not an author who really knows the game.
Excuse me but I wasn’t talking to you little girl. I think I hear your mommy calling.
while since Catholics got bashed around here. I thought you guys were off of your game, I’m glad to see you’re still up to snuff. been a while since Catholics got bashed around here. I thought you guys were off of your game,I’m glad to see you’re still up to Snuff. I thought I heard it all the other day when someone from free Republic was basically saying he’d rather see America bombed and the Americans killed than Israelis. I’d rather see neither killed. But talk about over the top. Oh I’m sorry continue bashing Catholics because you won’t need us in a war against Muslims. Catholics in America could vote in 90 10 Republican and they’d still be hated ten times more on this board then if the Jews voted 90 10 Democrat. here’s an idea. Why not support both of us Israel and Catholics. And stop insulting my pope. For goodness sake get some class. I’ll lend you the money.
I didn’t expect to see you here on the Catholic bash. a little disappointed. But that’s why it’s America. we’re free to say what we want.
I’m not up on current events but aren’t you a piece of trash for insulting my pope?
Vatican finance minister rejects latest abuse allegationsBy Josephine McKenna | July 28, 2016
http://religionnews.com/2016/07/28/vatican-finance-minister-rejects-latest-abuse-allegations/
“After a lengthy investigation, police have deemed eight accusers’ accounts are credible enough that they’re giving the evidence to prosecutors,” said David Clohessy, SNAP president, in a statement. “That speaks volumes.”
In the meantime I suggest studying what the "Bible" has to say about sodomy, rape, and harming children.
Leave Israel, the "Old Testament," the Prophets, and the Writings to Israel and Jews.
That's a temporary manifestation...
That is 'in' Jesus Christ...Outside of Jesus there are still Jews/Israel...Israel has not been replaced by the Catholic religion...
All are now called, Jew and Gentile alike, to salvation in the one covenant of Jesus Christ. This is true Biblical doctrine.
However, Israeli's eyes have been blinded by God for a season (or three)...They have been put on hold while God deals with the Gentiles...Romans 9, 10, 11...
Wrong...Gentiles were grafted onto the root which is Jesus Christ...We Gentiles did not become Jews, we became Christians...When Jews accept Christ, they are no longer Jews...They are Christians as well...Those who are not in Christ are Jews and Gentiles...
You are correct, God’s covenant with Israel is not null and void but it finds its completion in the one covenant in Jesus Christ.
Nope...The 'covenant' with the church is spiritual...The covenant with the Jews is physical...We Jews and Gentiles, ie, Christians will reign with Jesus Christ over the Jews and Gentiles who get saved during the Tribulation and go on physically into physical kingdom where Jesus physically sit on a physical throne in physical Jerusalem...
The 'church' will be celestial beings while the saved Jews/Gentiles that survive the Tribulation and walk on into the Millennial Reign will be terrestrial beings...
So does the Catholic church have a position on the Nation of Israel??? It must have since it recognizes so called Palestine as state of its own...If so, you can perhaps give us the official position of the Catholic Church on the Nation of Israel...Will Israel ultimately end up in the promised land as God stated??? Will the promised land end up being divided with the so called Palestinians and Jordanians, the Iraqis and Syrians???
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