Three great ironies about Benedict's Holy Land visit

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NCR :

Three great ironies about Benedict’s Holy Land visit

After the most demanding high-wire act of his papacy, a grueling week that saw the 82-year-old pontiff deliver 28 speeches while shuttling among Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, it seems terribly simplistic to offer a report card, but here we go nonetheless: Give Benedict XVI an A for effort, and a B for execution.

Benedict scored gains in getting Catholic-Muslim relations back on track, especially in Jordan, and with a high-profile visit to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. He also offered forceful words on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, endorsing the two-state solution as a global moral consensus, and offered a shot in the arm to the struggling Christian population – though how much any pope can do to bring peace to the Middle East, or to arrest the long-term demographic movement of Christians out of the region, is open to question.

In Israel, and in Catholic-Jewish relations, was there more ambivalence. The headline of an essay in today’s Jerusalem Post summed things up by asking, "Why have so many Jewish leaders here been reluctant to accept the pope’s gestures of dialogue and peace?

. . . . .

Nonetheless, the pontiff did make three points that in the context of a new Israeli government sending mixed signals, and a Palestinian leadership influenced by militant currents in Hamas, were undoubtedly worth making. Perhaps only a pope could make them:

• The two-state solution reflects a global moral consensus
• The wall between Israel and the Palestinian Territories is a tragic contradiction in an increasingly inter-connected world, and must, sooner or later, come down.
• To retain moral credibility, the Palestinians must reject terrorism.

Whether all this will change things is anyone’s guess, but at a minimum one can say that the bookish Benedict showed a fairly deft real-world political touch.
A pro-Israel pope has his toughest time in Israel
Perhaps the deepest irony of the week is that Benedict XVI is arguably the pope most inclined to be sympathetic to Israel since the Jewish state was founded six decades ago, yet the Israelis in some ways were his toughest crowd.

Three cheers for Il Papa!