Pope Francis was clearly a man of the people. He spoke often of the need for humility and, indeed, lived it. He did much to help the oppressed and the poor, for which he was widely acclaimed.
He was also perhaps the most political pope of my lifetime.
He advocated loudly for climate change, denounced poverty and inequality, decried capitalism’s “trickle-down economics,” and championed the rights of gay people, migrants, and refugees. Once he even declared President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall along America’s southern border “not Christian.”
All of which I probably could have lived with.
What finally got my gourd, however, was seeing baby Jesus lying on a kaffiyeh in the Vatican’s manger last Christmas. It was as if, depicting Jesus as a Palestinian, he was not only rejecting a major tenant of history and his own Church—i.e. that Jesus was Jewish—but siding with terrorists against the Jewish state.
“To suggest that Jesus was a Palestinian is to push a political agenda that is extremely offensive,” Pastor Mark Burns of South Carolina’s Harvest Faith Center told the New York Post. “The nativity is…something that should surpass politics.”
Added Dr. Andre Villeneuve, a professor of Old Testament and Biblical Language at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Michigan: “Dressing baby Jesus in a kaffiyeh is not only a cynical exploitation of the manger scene for political and propagandistic purposes, but also an absurd rewriting of history.”
Making matters worse, the pontiff also called for an investigation into Israel’s alleged “genocide” in its existential war against the terrorists who brutally attacked it on Oct. 7th, 2023, a demand the Wall Street Journal characterized as giving “aid and comfort to the enemies of the Jewish people and all civilized society.”
And, while declining to condemn Hamas, he reportedly told Israeli President Isaac Herzog that it is “forbidden to respond to terror with terror,” later decrying the “fuse of hatred” and “spirit of evil” (presumably Israel’s) fomenting war.
“It is impossible to overstate what a disaster this is for Jewish-Catholic relations,” Villanova University professor Ethan Schwartz wrote.
Followed more recently by another devastating assessment from former Israeli ambassador to the Vatican Zion Evrony: “The fallout from this series of incidents,” he wrote, “has cast a shadow over decades of progress in Jewish-Catholic relations since 1965 and brought interfaith dialogue to a pause.”
So, it’s not surprising that, following the pope’s death the day after Easter, Israel posted (accidentally, it said) condolences on social media, which it almost immediately deleted. Then sent a lowly ambassador to the massive funeral, attended by numerous heads of state including Trump.
This week, 135 cardinals are expected to gather in the Sistine Chapel to begin the process of electing a new pope. Three of them, in fact, will be Filipinos: Cardinals Pablo Virgilio David, Jose Advincula, and Luis Antonio Tagle, who has been discussed as a possible successor.
Let me say up front that I won’t be rooting for David, who I denounced in a January column under the headline “Filipino Cardinal Leaps Aboard a Sinking Ship” after he delivered a Christmas Eve homily bemoaning Gazan refugees “displaced from their lands that Israel has occupied.” Advincula, on the other hand, has simply prayed for peace, an entreaty with which it is hard to argue. And Tagle, apparently, has made no public pronouncements at all regarding the Middle East since Oct. 7, so I guess we shall see.
I should probably mention here that I’m not Catholic, though I do live in a predominantly Catholic country, have a Catholic wife, and send my children to Catholic schools.
All of which portends my complete agreement with what an anonymous diplomat recently told the Times of Israel. “It’s the low point in a spiral,” he said of the conflict between the pope and the Jews. “I hope both sides will be able to overcome the differences and climb out of this together.”
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, broadcaster, and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
