The Pope in Winter by John Cornwell

Author:John Cornwell [Cornwell, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-04-06T22:00:00+00:00

21. To the Holy Land

If there was any truth in the assertion of his Curial aides that travel, in this late stage of his pontificate, brought John Paul out of his tendency to low spirits, his first and principal trip of the Jubilee year stood to give him an unparalleled boost. During the last week of March, in the run up to Holy Week and Eastertide, he realized one of his most cherished ambitions – to spend time in the Holy Land in this year of all years.

He arrived on Wednesday 22 March after several weeks of jaundiced reaction in the Israeli media, and expressions of reckless optimism on the part of Palestinian Muslims and Christians. The Tablet Middle East correspondent Trevor Mostyn, for example, reported that ordinary people were saying, ‘Something wonderful will happen when the Pope comes.’ They were seeing a parallel between this visit and his trip to Poland before the collapse of Communism. There was more than a hint of millenarianism in the air. But there were hostile opinions, too, from those who saw John Paul as a representative of the West, and therefore part of the problem rather than its solution.

The visit was an act of personal devotion and pilgrimage in keeping with John Paul’s mystical vision of his purpose and the narrative of his papacy, but it was also an opportunity to make the right noises about hopes for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. Even more important, it was an occasion, yet again, to attempt to mend fences between Catholicism and Judaism. There had been continuous rumours since the autumn of the previous year that Pius XII, the pope who had remained silent during the Holocaust, was about to be beatified. The announcement that Pio Nono had been nominated as a substitute had done nothing to quash rumours that Pius XII would be raised to the altar before the year was out. Jewish opinion was restless on the issue.

Not surprisingly the trip presented an opportunity for Palestinians and Israelis to exploit the papal visit to their own ends. Flying into Bethlehem by helicopter, Yasser Arafat greeted John Paul formally as he alighted: ‘Welcome, your Holiness, to Palestine, Bethlehem and to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Palestine.’ The Palestinian leader went on to say that he appreciated the pope’s ‘just positions in support of the Palestinian cause’.

When he finally spoke, John Paul commiserated with Palestinian suffering: ‘Your torment is before the eyes of the world. And it has gone on too long.’ There would be no end to the conflict in the ‘Holy Land’, as he guardedly put it, ‘without stable guarantees for the rights of all peoples involved, on the basis of international law and the relevant United Nations resolutions and declarations’.

Representatives on both sides of the divide were quick to translate his message to their own advantage. Yasser Arafat’s wife told assembled journalists that the pope’s speech sent ‘a clear message for an independent Palestinian state’. The Israeli authorities dismissed the speech, saying that it represented ‘nothing new’.

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