The Pope and the Wall

by Editor · June 11, 2014

When in January we previewed Pope Francis’ May visit to the Holy Land, we expressed our hope that the Holy Father would go there as an active agent of peace to build bridges between Israelis and Palestinians.

Pope Francis speaks during an invocation for peace with Israeli President Shimon Peres, left, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, right, in the Vatican Gardens on June 8. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

The pope did just that by inviting the presidents of Israel and Palestine, Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, to the Vatican to pray for peace on Pentecost Sunday. Implicit in this was the suggestion that previous attempts at finding peace did not begin with prayer.

In our editorial we also suggested that in Bethlehem the pope might stop at Israel’s eight-metres-high separation wall which encircles the city and virtually imprisons its population. In the event, this was not part of the official programme.

So it was all the more dramatic when Pope Francis ordered his motorcade to stop, exited his car and made a spontaneous prayer at a section of the wall, beneath a huge watchtower, which displayed the provocative graffiti: Pope we need someone to speak about Justice. Bethlehem looks like Warsaw Ghetto.

The image of the Holy Father, in his white robes, impulsively praying at the separation wall in the way he would later pray at the Western Wall became instantly iconic. With a simple and heartfelt gesture – one which placed at the centre not political contention but God the pope brought into the world’s consciousness a symbol of injustice and suffering.

For Palestinians it was an unexpected show of solidarity, especially for the diminishing Christian community to whom Pope Francis has pledged his support.

The prayer at the wall was made also in friendship with Jews. There can be no peace with the wall and the policies that underpin it.

Pope Francis prays in front of the Israeli separation wall in Bethlehem durijng his visit to Palestine on May 25. (CNS photo/L’Osservatore Romano, pool)

Pope Francis is no less conscious of the obligations which the Christian church has towards Jews than Pope St John Paul II, whose apology during his 2000 pilgrimage for the Catholic Church’s complicity in centuries of anti-semitism did much to heal old wounds.

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio maintained close ties with the city’s Jewish community. In Jerusalem last month he laid a wreath on the grave of the founder of Zionism and visited the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial. The pope’s affectionate relationship with Judaism is beyond doubt.

So it was all the more surprising that some Jews would characterise Pope Francis’ prayer in Bethlehem as a betrayal. Canada’s most-read Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Tribune, went as far as calling it a slap in the face.

The pope could not have chosen to insult the Jewish people with any greater gesture. What an insult to the victims of Nazism. What a mockery of history, the newspaper wrote.

It is true that to invoke the crimes of the Holocaust in describing the injustices which Israel visits upon Palestinians, as the graffiti reference to the Warsaw ghetto did, is to intrude into a sensitive domain. Whatever the merits of such an allegory, it will be seen by many as incendiary.

Nevertheless, the pope was right to pray there. The separation barrier high walls in some places; wire fences in others is not a security measure. If it was, Israel would have built it on its own land in accordance with the internationally recognised boundaries, the so-called Green Line.

The barrier exists to protect the illegal settlements which Israel has been building on illegally occupied land and to redraw the borders in ways that puts control of the most fertile land and access to water in Israeli hands.

The wall and the settlements have made the prospects of a two-state solution, currently favoured by the Vatican, impossible. There is no inherent anti-Judaism in criticising the policies of Zionist expansionism.

The barrier is used to degrade, disempower and dispossess Palestinians, including Christians and even Catholic missionaries, as the Salesians in the Cremisan Valley have found.

The Church in the Holy Land is therefore unequivocal in its robust condemnation of the wall. How could the pope not express solidarity with the Palestinian people and the local Church?

Pope Francis’ concern is for justice. Our task now is to join him in pursuing the elusive peace in the Holy Land, using prayer as the starting point.