Pope Francis: Funeral and Hurt Feelings
The Catholic Church has tried to make amends to Jews but still has a Zionism problem.
The Forum of Holy Land Christians sent an open letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu condemning Israel’s decision not to dispatch a high-level delegation to the funeral of Pope Francis this past Saturday. Beyond that “painful” “afront,” the group lamented the difficulties facing Christians living in Israel, such as decreased subsidies to their schools.
Even more disturbing is that this decision comes immediately after the deeply troubling events at the Holy Sepulchre Church this past Saturday, where Israeli police forces violently disrupted Christian worshippers who had gathered peacefully to await the Holy Fire — the holiest moment of the Orthodox Christian calendar, announcing the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I don’t know what happened at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City. I want to think that the worshippers encountered trouble only after they disregarded Israel Police safety guidelines for the ceremony. Either way, I am saddened that Forum members felt their holy occasion was marred.
To the larger point, regarding Christians in the Holy Land, citizens and non-citizens alike, we Jewish Israelis continue to fall short of our aspirational values: “No sojourner shall you oppress, for you know the sojourner’s heart, since you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9 translation by Robert Alter.)
From their letter, the Forum looks to be comprised of individuals who are not looking for confrontation:
“We remain committed to building an Israeli society in which all citizens work for the common good on the basis of mutual respect. It is time for the government to show that it is equally committed to preserving and honoring the Christian community of this land and the sacred values we uphold.”
I agree.
Pope Francis’s funeral
Some 130 delegations attended Pope Francis’s funeral, including 50 heads of state, but no senior Israeli official beyond our ambassador to the Holy See, Yaron Sideman.
Netanyahu tweeted — Israel’s “deepest condolences to the Catholic Church and the Catholic community worldwide at the passing of Pope Francis. May he rest in peace,” — on social media, as did President Isaac Herzog. Peculiarly, the Foreign Ministry under Gideon Sa’ar deleted the condolences it had briefly posted.
Among the Diaspora figures who attended were Rome’s chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, and the AJC’s director of Interreligious Affairs, Rabbi Noam Marans.
Why it matters
The Pope is the spiritual leader of an estimated 3 billion Catholics worldwide. Inside Israel, there are perhaps 100,000 Arabs who identify as Catholic. So, the funeral on Saturday of Pope Francis, an Argentine of Italian heritage, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was a big story. The Conclave, which will start on May 7 at the Vatican, in which 135 cardinals will choose a new pope, will further hold the world’s attention.
The Pope also matters to the Jewish world.
Nostra Aetate
After centuries of teaching contempt for Judaism, the Catholic Church reversed itself. In a document called Nostra Aetate, in 1965, the Church repudiated its imputation that the Jews killed God – deicide. Removing this calumny required theological and liturgical changes, including moving away from the Latin Mass.
So, after centuries of Crusades, blood libels, Inquisitions, mass expulsions, pogroms, persecutions, and ghettoization culminating in the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust, Catholicism deemphasized the pernicious claim that Jews were Christ-killers (as portrayed in Matthew 27:24-25). The Church further renounced its deep-rooted antisemitism and declared that God’s Covenant with the Hebrew people was, in fact, eternal. It did all this partly at the initiative of the saintly Pope John XXIII (died 1963) and of Augustin Cardinal Bea (died 1968). They set off the process that culminated with the Nostra Aetate proclaimed by Pope Paul VI in 1965.
Jews, yes. Zionism, no.
Theologically, Zionism presented an even bigger problem for the Church than the Jews as a scattered people. On January 26, 1904, Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism, obtained an audience with Pope Pius X and appealed for Vatican support. He described the “terrible straits” under which the Jews in Eastern Europe lived.
“We cannot be in favor of it,” the Pope replied.
Realistically, how could any pope at the time support a reconstituted political Israel when the Catholic Church identified itself as the True Israel? When it still considered Jews to be Christ-killers and the Children of Satan.
It’s now often forgotten that Christian Arabs in the Middle East were in the vanguard of anti-Zionism and rejectionism in the early 20th century. After Israel was born in 1948, the Holy See – meaning the Church in the diplomatic sense, the Pope as a political actor, and the Vatican’s ecclesiastical government – found it politically challenging to come to terms with the idea of a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.
And pragmatically, the Church had to worry about Christians living in the 57 countries that comprise the Muslim world, not to mention the 22 Arab states in the Middle East. In all these places are vulnerable Catholic communities, for instance, in Egypt and Lebanon. The Church worries, too, about expatriate Catholics from such places as the Philippines and India working in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
Since 1948, the Church has been largely indifferent to Israel’s fate. And its support of the Palestinian Arabs has been unwavering. For example, on September 15, 1982, Pope John Paul II received PLO leader Yasser Arafat at the Vatican. Recall that at the time, Arafat made no effort to disguise his mission: the elimination of Zionism. In 1987, the same Pope met with Austrian president Kurt Waldheim despite revelations of his Nazi past. And on March 28, 1990, Mother Teresa – yes, even Mother Teresa! – received Arafat warmly in Calcutta.
Obviously, the Church could not continue to “cancel” Israel once the PLO itself ostensibly recognized its existence in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Accordingly, on December 30, 1993, the Vatican established diplomatic relations with Israel.
In practice, the Holy See had been relating to Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization as a state since the United Nations General Assembly voted in 2012 to recognize it as a non-member observer state. In 2015, the Vatican officially granted diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine even though the PLO did not exercise supreme authority within any territory or have definable borders – elemental ingredients of sovereignty. The PLO did not even control the Gaza Strip, which it lost to Hamas in 2007.
Pope Francis and Israel
When it comes to Pope Francis and Israel, don’t look for consistency. In his final address read aloud for him on Easter 2025, Francis bemoaned the “deplorable humanitarian situation” in Gaza. Fair enough, except that he never once denounced Hamas for the October 7, 2023, massacre that set the stage for those deplorable conditions.
On Christmas 2023, in his annual “Urbi et Orbi” address, Francis called for the release of Israeli captives, counterbalanced by a plea for Israel to end its military operations, and – ipso facto leave Hamas in power, its explicitly genocidal commitment to Israel’s destruction notwithstanding.
From Jesuit to Pope
Jorge Mario Bergoglio – the future Pope Francis – was ordained a priest in 1969 and became the leader of the Jesuits in Argentina. Historically, in a Church permeated with anti-Judaism, the Jesuits, founded in 1534, were militantly hostile – arguably sometimes on the racial level – toward Jewish people.
I recall Father Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit who, in my college days, was much admired in anti-Vietnam War circles but was also a vitriolic anti-Zionist. Never mind that so many US Jews were at the forefront of the antiwar movement, Berrigan accused “Zionists” in America of “ignoring the Asian holocaust in favor of economic and military aid to Israel.”
True, the aforementioned Cardinal Bea was a Jesuit, but he may be the exception that proves the rule.
We know that as a Cardinal, Bergoglio had good relations with Buenos Aires Jewish leaders; that in June 2010, he visited the rebuilt AMIA Jewish Center, which had been bombed in 1994 by Hezbollah at Iran’s behest, killing 85 innocents.
Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013. In October 2015, he said: “To attack Jews is antisemitism, but 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢-𝐒𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐦. ... Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity.”
Francis visited Israel in 2014 and urged Palestinian Arabs to recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel to recognize the right of Palestinians to a sovereign state. In Jerusalem, Francis slipped a prayer note between the cracks of the Western Wall. Like all foreign heads of state, the Foreign Ministry schlepped him to Yad Vashem and – in a first for a pope – to the nearby tomb of Herzl. The Pope balanced these pro-Israel optics by posing at the security barrier between Bethlehem and Jerusalem to look at graffiti that crassly compared Bethlehem to the Warsaw Ghetto.
Now, maybe the Pope really did not know that the horrid security barrier was erected, following rancorous internal Israeli opposition, during the second intifada to block car bombs and suicide bombers.
In a sense, it was “built” by the Palestinians themselves.
In 2015, he canonized two Arab nuns born in Ottoman Palestine. Also in 2015, Francis praised Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Abbas as an “angel of peace” during a meeting at the Vatican.
By 2021, it seemed as if Francis was backsliding even on Nostra Aetate. In a homily on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, he taught that “The Law [meaning the Torah] does not give life. It does not offer the fulfillment of the promise because it is not capable of being able to fulfill it. Those who seek life need to look to the promise and to its fulfillment in Christ...in the “radical newness of the Christian life.”
Granted, this is Christianity 1.0, yet I don’t recall a sermon in which Francis affirmed that the Koran does not supersede the Christian Bible, as Muslims assert. Indeed, when it came to Islam, he went out of his way to deny any connection between the Muslim faith and Palestinian terrorism or al-Qaida and ISIS terrorism. “I do not like to talk of Islamic violence because every day, when I go through the newspapers, I see violence, this man who kills his girlfriend, another who kills his mother-in-law. And these are baptized Catholics. If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence.”
No filters
As Francis got older, and with the October 7 Gaza War raging, the Pope’s filters came off. True, three months into the war, he had denounced the tsunami of antisemitism that was sweeping the Western world. However, by November 2024, Pope Francis was calling on international authorities to investigate whether Israel was carrying out genocide in Gaza. To state the obvious, he never urged those same international agencies to determine whether Hamas was engaged in genocide.
Grotesquely, on the first anniversary of October 7, Pope Francis wrote a letter to Middle Eastern Catholics pressing them never to give up on peace while calling on them to fast and pray to “defeat our one true enemy: the spirit of evil that foments war, because it is ‘murderous from the beginning...a liar and the father of lies...”
His phraseology is noteworthy because the Pope was citing John 8:44, which places these venomous words directed at the Jews into the mouth of Jesus:
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
Yes, Francis also made time for several audiences with the relatives of Israeli hostages and with freed hostages. But then again, it might be argued that putting pressure on Netanyahu to cut a hostage deal also served Palestinian interests.
Throughout the October 7 War, the Pope did not miss an opportunity to condemn Israeli airstrikes in the Strip. I could not find any instance where he explicitly condemned Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah, or Hamas for striking at Israel. However, he never hesitated to badger Israel not to retaliate when it was attacked.
Shortly after the war began, Pope Francis made daily calls to the Holy Family parish in Gaza, speaking to Father Gabriel Romanelli, the parish priest, and Youssef Asaad, the rector. He would ring every evening at 7 PM. “They tell me about what happens there. It is very tough, very tough. I listen, and they tell me things. There is a lot of suffering.”
I would not expect him to call the rabbi of Kibbutz Alumim along the Gaza Strip, the rabbi of Sderot in the Negev, or the rabbi of Kiryat Shmona in the north to check in. Nor would I expect Father Romanelli to tell him how many times the “Palestinian resistance” may have used the Church’s compound as a sanctuary. Let’s posit that the Pope got a skewed picture of the conflict. So much so that Francis began his 2024 Christmas address with, “Yesterday, children were bombed [by the IDF]. This is cruelty. This is not war. I wanted to say this because it touches the heart.”
Perhaps this explains the shameful image of the Pope, now wheelchair-bound, paying homage at the Vatican’s official “Nativity of Bethlehem” installation in which baby Jesus is wrapped in a keffiyeh. So, what if gullible Catholics (or callow, chronically online Instagramers) are left with the impression that Jesus was a Palestinian Arab?
Conclave
Pope Francis was a humble man, a preeminent religious figure, who did his best to lead the Church through its travails. Maybe it is unfair to spotlight his record on Israel when he did so many good things. That said, my impression is that he cut my country no slack, held us to a double standard, and never castigated our mortal enemies. So, I am left agnostic about the decision by the Netanyahu government not to send a high-level delegation to his funeral.
As the cardinals gather for their Conclave to select a new pope, I can’t help but muse over what motivated Pope Francis to elevate Father, later Monsignor Pier Battista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem since 2020, and former custos of the Holy Land, to the College of Cardinals in 2023.
Few know better than Cardinal Pizzaballa that we Israelis have too often failed in our fiduciary responsibilities to the Christians in this country. Culpa nostra. I am somewhat comforted that he has lately reassured Hebrew University Prof. Sergio Della Pergola that he is still fair-minded toward Israel.
Pizzaballa speaks (among other languages) Arabic and Hebrew, and I see that he is in the running to be the next Pope. We could all use a new beginning.
