THERE is something about Pope Francis which inspires not merely
hope but also a sense that change can really happen. The dexterous
politics of his trip to the Holy Land offers a key example, with
its defining image of the Pope at prayer with his head resting on
the eight-metre wall dividing Bethlehem from Jerusalem.
It was an image bombarded by politics. The Palestinians see the
barrier as a symbol of Israeli oppression. The Israelis see it as a
safeguard of their security against terrorist bombs. The two sides
had played a cat and mouse game in the days before the papal visit,
spraying the wall with slogans, painting it blank, spraying
graffiti again.
When the Pope ordered his vehicle to stop - something he had
planned the day before - it was by a section on which the words
"Free Palestine" and "Bethlehem looks like Warsaw Ghetto" had been
sprayed so recently the paint was still wet.
Some had hoped the Pope would take sides. The Anglican priest
the Revd Dr Naim Ateek, founder of Palestinian liberation theology,
had called on him to speak against illegal occupation of land by
Israeli settlers. Pope Francis was more subtle than that, but his
message was no vague appeal for an end to violence. In his actions
and gestures he outlined clear criteria for peace. His official
itinerary referred to "the state of Palestine", and he travelled
directly to the West Bank from Jordan rather than entering via
Israel.
And yet the Pope was deft in his political balancing. He
included an unscheduled stop on the Israeli side, too, by a
memorial to the victims of terrorist bomb attacks. He placed his
hand, though not his head, on that wall, too. Among his marathon of
public events and private meetings in Israel was a visit to the
Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem.
He kissed the hands of six Holocaust survivors as he heard their
stories. That, with his impromptu condemnation of the anti-Semitism
of Saturday's attack on the Jewish museum in Brussels, made up for
what many Jews felt was a tepid speech by the German Pope Benedict
XVI in 2009. But most significant politically was the wreath he
laid at the grave of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, a man
rebuffed by Pope Pius X in 1904 with the words: "The Jews have not
recognised our Lord; we therefore cannot recognise the Jewish
people." Pope Francis's wreath laid to rest an era of Roman
Catholic anti-Semitism.
All this was recognising the right of two states to exist,
opposing the strangulation of the Palestinian economy by the
security wall and yet declaring that violence and terrorism can
never be the path to progress. At the Western Wall, a site holy to
Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, Francis embraced old friends,
a rabbi and imam from Argentina who had accompanied him throughout
the trip. "All communities who look to Abraham," he said, must work
together for justice and peace.
His surprise invitation to the Israeli and Palestinian
presidents to visit the Vatican next month for prayer was accepted
by both sides. The Americans, under whose aegis successive peace
initiatives have failed, rather sniffily announced that
"negotiations are conducted in other channels".
But what is inescapable is that, yet again, Pope Francis, with
his insistence that the current stalemate "has become increasingly
unacceptable", has changed the mood. He has done it not through the
mere authority of his office but by the respect that he has won
throughout the wider world. And that is how change begins.
Press