One of Sabbah’s central theses is that “just as anti-Semitism and the Holocaust set the context for Jewish-Catholic relations in the West, in the Holy Land the agenda ought to be set by a century of Zionist nationalism, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.” Sabbah says of the Israelis: “In the end, we will send them away just as we did to the crusaders.” The idea is widely held in the patriarchate that the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 683 was a “second Pentecost.” One distinguished Israeli leader, Ambassador Gadi Golan, the head of the department of interreligious affairs for the foreign ministry, has called Sabbah “the Islamic patriarch.”

Jesuit Father Francesco Rossi de Gasperis of the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Jerusalem – a friend, contemporary, and teaching colleague of Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini – has written acute analyses on this Arab-Christian theology. He has shown that it leads to a “theological negation of the people of Israel, a kind of cultural and spiritual Shoah, not dissimilar to what was seen in the churches of Europe during the age of ‘Christendom’.”

# posted by Squach : 8:58 AM   |