John Allen skriver som alltid grundig om innsiktsfullt om hva paven gjør, og han skriver her en grudig evaluering av den nylig avsluttede turen til Jordan, Israle og palestinernes områder.
Han skriver bl.a.:
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, many Jewish and Israeli leaders declared themselves content. In effect, they argued, the very fact that Israelis weren’t content just to see a pope at Yad Vashem, or at the Western Wall, is itself a sign of progress. It means that a pope coming to Israel is no longer a revolution or a cause célèbre, but rather an expression of a basically normal relationship.
Historically inclined Israelis see a progression from Paul VI’s visit in 1964, when the pontiff refused to utter the words «state of Israel» or to refer to the country’s president as anything other than «mister»; to John Paul in 2000, a trip that transformed relations; to Benedict in 2009, a visit reflecting a now-routine friendship, with its ups and downs, but fundamentally there’s no turning back.
…. 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.
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.
….. Israeli leaders … rushed to Benedict’s defense when the criticism began. At the inter-faith event in Nazareth, for example, Bahij Masour, who heads the religious affairs division of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, made a point of saying during his introduction that the pope «has clearly condemned anti-Semitism and denial of the Holocaust.» Certainly Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, went out of his way to be gracious to the pope, including hosting a lavish gala in his honor at the presidential palace in Jerusalem on Tuesday.
As Israelis sort through the images left behind by the pope’s trip, perhaps more of this will become clear.
Neineinei. «A for effort, A for execution». Kanskje reagerer jeg slik for jeg ikke er en journalist. Jeg er bare en sønn av Benedikt XVI. En sønn som beundrer faren sin. En sønn som ikke tør å lure på om den hellige Far har gjort hva han skulle. Det får jeg ikke behov for, jeg. En venn fra Roma har sendt til meg Paven Benedikts siste tale, som han har redigert helt i siste liten: fantastisk. «A for execution», ja, definitivt og uten tvil.