By Judith Sudilovsky
Bishops from three continents met virtually with Catholics in the Holy Land this year and, despite not being able to meet face-to-face, said remote discussions have still allowed them to listen to local Christians and demonstrate their solidarity.
“We are all sharing hope; it is something which has to be generated,” Bishop Noel Treanor of Down and Connor, the diocese based in Armagh, Northern Ireland, told Catholic News Service Jan. 18 in a virtual interview. He said the bishops, members of the Holy Land Coordination, would use technology to share what they have learned with their local communities.
Memory is a funny thing.
It can sneak up on you in the strangest ways – like when I get a whiff of cardamom that takes me back to playing at my grandfather’s feet while he drank his coffee as the sun came up.
And suddenly, that memory overtakes me and makes me a child again.
Or when I gather with my family for a festive meal – the same jokes, the same gripes… our faces may age but we are the same, and I go back to the role I always played around the family table the kid, the jokester.
Did Israeli soldiers arrest Palestinian youths recently for the “crime” of picking flowers and vegetables located on a Jewish outpost.
At the same dinner, which took place on December 28, Shtayyeh also declared that Christmas, “The birthday of our lord Jesus … takes place at the same time as the outbreak of the Palestinian revolution, for which thousands of Martyrs have paid with their lives.”
Shtayyeh’s comments are disgusting and dishonest. First off, Jesus was not the “first Palestinian.” He was a Jew born in Bethlehem of Judea, who lived in the Galilee and died in Jerusalem.
It’s one thing to assert that on a symbolic level, Jesus stands with the oppressed people of the world, but it’s another thing altogether to declare that, as a historical figure, Jesus was a Palestinian. Stripping Jesus of his Jewishness, as Shtayyeh did, allows people to deploy Jesus as a weapon against the Jewish people.
Armenian Christian Community Caught Between Israelis & Palestinians
(RNS) Jerusalem’s Armenian Christian quarter dates back to the fourth century, when a small band of pilgrims and monks from the newly Christianized Armenia 800 miles away on the far side of Turkey settled in the neighborhood around the Upper Room, the building thought to be the site of the Last Supper. Today, Armenians still occupy a large part of the Old City where the Armenian Apostolic Church, under the independent Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, maintain its own chapels and a school.
Simon Azazian, a communications director at the Palestinian Bible Society whose father is Armenian and mother Palestinian Arab, says that positive relations between Armenians and their Palestinian neighbors, like much in Jerusalem, have a long history.
Messenger
The Christian component of the Palestinian people is considered the most important and oldest in history for belonging to the land for a period six centuries before Islam. Nevertheless, we do not find a real Christian presence among the members of the resistance movement, since its inception, except for what is rare despite the significance and moral influence of their presence especially in the Western countries.
Unfortunately, the matter was not limited to marginalizing their role despite their large percentage and better education, but rather reached the level of hostility and some movements encouraged them to emigrate, and this weakened their presence in the civil and military movements.