Thinking straight about Israel, the Jews and the Archbishop [John Allen]

[Catholic_Press]

Article Details The Synod of Bishops for the Middle East produced 44 propositions for Pope Benedict XVI and a 5,000-word final message, both of which contain a bewildering array of insights and ideas for solidifying the Christian presence in the Middle East and contributing to its great dream. Yet the only storyline that’s had any traction in the American press is Israeli and Jewish backlash to a comment by one synod participant in the closing press conference on Saturday.

                                http://ncronline.org/files/bustros.jpg?1288194201        
    

                                Melkite Bishop Cyrille S. Bustros of Newton, Mass., speaks during the final press conference of the Synod of Bishops for the Middle East at the Vatican Oct. 23. (CNS photo/Piotr Spalek, Catholic Press Photo)

We in the media have a genius for grabbing a small but sensational piece of a bigger picture and banging it like a cheap drum, which usually produces a fun-house mirror view of reality: Relatively small things seem huge, while bigger and more significant things shrink into near invisibility.

To take the most obvious recent example, whatever the big picture is for Islam in America, it certainly isn’t an epidemic of Qur’an burnings. Yet the mere threat of such an event from a Florida pastor whose entire congregation could fit into a phone booth held the world hostage for a month thanks to saturation “will he or won’t he?” coverage.

In some ways, reaction to the close of the Oct. 10-24 Synod of Bishops for the Middle East is following the same script.

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[tomarin]

Interesting. Somehow I got the impression that there was a historical precedent for mutual hostility between the Melkites and possibly all Middle Eastern Christians on the one hand, and Jews and/or the state of Israel on the other, the source of which I’m not familiar enough with the history and sociology of the region to identify, and that that explained the anti-Israeli tone of the Archbishop’s comments. The fact that his eparchy is in Massachusetts, which wasn’t evident from the earlier reports I read, certainly puts things in a different perspective (that is, as Allen suggests, his intended audience may have been American evangelicals not Middle Easterners.)

But yeah, this does ultimately turn into a PR problem for the Vatican whether they are responsible for what he said or not, and whether his comments are being properly interpreted by the world outside Catholicism or not. Funny how that goes.