Pope John Paul II’s appointment Monday of a Palestinian as Catholic patriarch of Jerusalem is being viewed here as a political as well as religious move, despite Vatican denials of any such motives.
No one has expressed doubts about the ability of the new patriarch, 54-year-old Michel Sabbah, who was born in Nazareth.
The Israeli Embassy in Rome said “the nomination is a choice of the church. We, on our part, wish the patriarch-designate active success and we hope for a profitable and constructive cooperation, like that already existing with the other authorities of the various churches in Israel.”
Sabbah will be the first Arab to head his church, which number 67,000 worshippers, 85 percent of whom are Arabs, Sixty-five of the 78 priests under him also are Arabs.
Sabbah, replaces 77-year-old Italian Giacomo Giuseppe Beltritti, who is retiring because of age. Vatican sources called Sabbah “the right person for the right job.”
Nonetheless, coinciding as it did with the current unrest in the administered territories and the controversy over tough Israeli measures against Palestinian protesters, the appointment of Sabbah was greeted by supporters of the Palestinian cause as a demonstration of papal understanding and support for the Palestinians.
PLO APPRECIATIVE
“We greatly appreciate this appointment,” the Rome office of the Palestine Liberation Organization said in a statement which noted that the move came “in a particularly delicate moment for the Palestinians.”
“It is often forgotten that many Palestinians are Christian,” the statement said. “The pope’s choice is a recognition of this religious presence among our people.”
Even more enthusiastic than the PLO in his reaction was Monsignor Hilarion Capucci, the Melchite Catholic archbishop of Jerusalem and Palestine National Council member living in exile in Rome since his expulsion from Israel in 1977 for his PLO links.
“It is a marvelous and splendid thing,” said Capucci, who for a week has been staging a hunger strike in support of the Palestinian protesters in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
He called the appointment of Sabbah, “an objective moral support for the Palestinian people,” adding that “I’ve always followed with pleasure every initiative of the pope and I greet this new initiative with extreme pleasure as a great gift to the Palestinian people.”
Orazio La Rocca, a Vatican correspondent for the leading Italian newspaper La Republica, said it was difficult not to view the appointment as “an explicit, even if indirect, political signal” on the part of the pope.
POPE WANTS ‘END OF KILLING’
“Only a week ago,” La Rocca noted, the pontiff asked, in the course of a prayer in St. Peter’s Square, for “the end of killing in the land of Christ.” According to the Vatican correspondent, the pope was referring to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, “expressing himself clearly in favor of a homeland for the Palestinians.”
He observed that the appeal was launched in the presence of 13 Arab ambassadors accredited to the Holy See who, responding to an initiative of the PLO’s Rome office, gathered on Dec. 20 in St. Peter’s Square “to silently protest against Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territories and to urge a direct intervention by the pope.”
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, however, denied deliberate political overtones in the pope’s appointment of Sabbah.
“The criterion followed for the selection of the new patriarch,” he said, “was strictly religious and pastoral, taking into account the local reality, that is, that it is the only diocese for the 65,000 faithful of the Latin Rite, 85 percent of whom are of Arab origin, in the territory of Israel, Jordan and Cyprus.”
He added, “Any criterion based on political opportunity was simply not taken into account.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
