Reading from a different bible

“We are an integral part of the Palestinian people, yet we are virtually invisible for those in the White House who claim to care about Christianity,” witnesses Fr. Emmanuelle Awwad, parish priest of the Palestinian village of Aboud.

“When they talk about ‘Christianity,’ they seem to be reading from a different Bible.”

Before twentieth-century mass immigration of European Jews to the Holy Land and the vicious Zionist terror campaign that bombed, shot and murdered Palestinian civilians, British civil servants, policemen and soldiers – which eventually led to the imposition of the State of Israel upon the Palestinians in 1948, with the resulting wholesale destruction of Palestinian villages along with the death and forced exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families – Palestinian Christians constituted more than ten-percent of the Holy Land. Today, less than two-percent.

The Church vehemently opposed Zionism and warned, if implemented, it would lead to the destruction of Christianity in the Holy Land.

“How can we deliver up the country of our redeemer to a people of a different faith? ” – Cardinal Merry del Val (1st April 1904)

“We cannot give approval to the movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we could never sanction it. The soil of Jerusalem, if it was not always sacred, has been sanctioned by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church, I cannot tell you anything different.” – Pope Saint Pius X (January 1904)

“The Holy See has never approved the project of making Palestine a home for the Jews.” – Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Pope Pius XII‟s Secretary of State (3rd March 1943)

“Catholics would be injured in their religious sentiment and rightly fear for their rights if Palestine would belong exclusively to the Hebrews,” – Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Pope Pius XII‟s Secretary of State (7th April 1943)

In its issue dated 15th May 1948, L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Holy See, wrote that “Zionism is not the true heir to the Israel of the Bible……. the Holy Land and its sacred places belong to Christianity, which is the true Israel.”