Jewish-Catholic Relations: A Roundup

• "Catholics and Jews: learning to disagree" - Some commentators argue that Catholic-Jewish relations are at an all-time low. In fact they have attained a new maturity, says the Catholic Herald's Anna Arco. (January 22, 2010).

• "Cordiality" and "mutual understanding" -- and not "crisis" or "breakdown" -- was how a joint Israel-Holy See statement described the most recent round of talks between the two sides. (Zenit News Service December 11, 2009). Speaking of which, here is a lengthy interview with Father David Maria Jaeger, Franciscan friar of the Custody of the Holy Land and a professor of canon law in Rome, on the state of Israeli-Vatican relations and the English-language statement released on January 20, 2010, upon the conclusion of a four-day meeting of the Bilateral Commission of the Holy See and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

• Mordechay Lewy, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, urges Jewish openness to Catholics, admitting that there is an "asymmetry" in this dialogue (Zenit News Service. January 21, 2010):

  Despite the fact that his government is in favor of "continual dialogue at the highest official levels, between the Central Rabbinate of Israel and the Holy See, there continues to be skepticism on the part of the main current of the orthodox," Lewy explained.

• Dimitri Cavalli (Haaretz) on the "much-maligned pontiff, Pope Pius XII":

  The campaign against Pope Pius XII is doomed to failure because his detractors cannot sustain their main charges against him - that he was silent, pro-Nazi, and did little or nothing to help the Jews - with evidence. Perhaps only in a backward world such as ours would the one man who did more than any other wartime leader to help Jews and other Nazi victims, receive the greatest condemnation.

"Treating a Terrorist as a Hero"

Stephen Flatow (The Forward) on an outrage that occurred "right under the nose of our Vice President" during his trip to the Middle East:

On March 11, 1978, a gang of seaborne Palestinian terrorists landed near a nature reserve on the coast north of Tel Aviv. There was only one person who had the misfortune to be on the beach that afternoon, a young American photographer named Gail Rubin. Gail, a native New Yorker who happened to be the niece of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s sister-in-law, was taking pictures of birds.

The terrorists shot Gail dead. They didn’t ask her what she thought about settlements or borders. They didn’t ask if she agreed with this or that Israeli policy. They didn’t care if she was a moderate Jew or a militant Jew. She was a Jew. That’s all they needed to know. And for that reason, they murdered her. Then they hijacked a bus on the nearby Tel Aviv-Haifa coastal highway, ultimately causing the deaths of 37 other innocent civilians. [...]

The P.A. marked the March 1978 massacre by naming a public square near its capital city, Ramallah, after Dalal Mughrabi, a woman who commanded the terrorist squad.

Read the rest.