Showing posts with label Vatican. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vatican. Show all posts

Thursday, March 14, 2013

New pope has history of good relations with Jewish community

End Of Days News

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was first to sign petition demanding justice in AMIA bombing; rabbi calls him a ‘warm and sweet and modest man’

Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Bergoglio, who took the name of Pope Francis, was elected on Wednesday, March 13, 2013 the 266th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. (photo credit: AP/Natacha Pisarenko, file)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentinian cardinal who was elected pope late Wednesday and will take the name Francis I, is said to have a good relationship with Argentinian Jews.
Bergoglio, 76, a Jesuit, was the choice of the College of Cardinals following two days of voting in Vatican City. He is the first pope to come from outside Europe in more than a millennium; reflecting the changing demographics of Catholics, he comes from Latin America.
As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio attended Rosh Hashanah services at the Benei Tikva Slijot synagogue in September 2007.
Rabbi David Rosen, the director of interfaith affairs for the American Jewish Committee, told JTA that the new pope is a “warm and sweet and modest man” known in Buenos Aires for doing his own cooking and personally answering his phone.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Lightning strikes Vatican hours after Pope resigns

End Of Days News

And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.
 
Did SATAN just arrive to take his place in the next POPE as the false prophet?
Coincidence  is not a word in the Hebrew Language!
 The POPE resigns lightning struck the Vatican!
 
 
 

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Op-Ed: Exclusive: A Seat for the Pope at King David's Tomb

End Of Days News

An historic agreement has been drafted between Israel and the Vatican. The Israeli authorities have granted the Pope an official seat in the room where the Last Supper is believed to have taken place, on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and where David and Solomon, Jewish kings of Judea, are considered by some researchers, to also be buried.

It is the culmination of a long campaign by the Catholic Church to regain religious stewardship over the place where Jesus is supposed to have broken bread and drunk wine with his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion.

This is an enormous issue pushed through without any public debate.

According to our sources, the agreement, which is expected to be ratified next June, gives the Pope a “special authority” over the second floor of the building, so that Christian pilgrims will be able to celebrate religious functions like Pope John Paul did in 2000.
The agreement constitutes Israel’s capitulation to the Vatican’s efforts to “Christianize” the holy site, like when a Catholic convent was built in Auschwitz.

The Catholic Church has long wanted control over part of the area on Mt. Zion so as to turn it into an international religious center for Catholics. The blueprint of the agreement reads as follows: “The Vatican hands over this use of the Cenacle to the Custody of the Holy Land which will keep the Cenacle open from 6 AM to 8 AM for the celebration of the Holy Mass”.

In the long term, the gesture will increase tensions between Jews and the large assets of the Vatican. The Church has long been working to reduce Jewish rights in Jerusalem and in the Old City. Now, after the Muslim Waqf authority expelled the Christians from the Temple Mount and turned it into a mosque, it’s the turn of the Vatican to lay its hands on the Jewish Jerusalem.

The Custody of the Holy Land, the Franciscan order who, with Vatican approval, is in charge of the holy sites, campaigns with the Arabs against Israel.
As far back as May 2000, Yasser Arafat met Islamic and Christian clergymen at the presidential offices in Ramallah to back Palestinian Arab sovereignty over Jerusalem. Among the clergymen who attended the meeting, Diodoros I, patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, Torkom II, patriarch of the Armenian Orthodox Church, Catholic Patriarch Michel Sabbah and officials from the Custody of the Holy Land.

"An official meeting took place in Ramallah, Palestine, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the State of Palestine". This is the official note of the Vatican press office about the meeting between the Catholic officials and the PLO representatives which took place this week.

The Vatican is also asking that Israel hand over to the Vatican’s control dozens of sites, 19 in Judea and Samaria and 28 in Jerusalem. The Catholic Church want to discuss some properties on Mount of Olives, Har Hazeitim, which is the very history of the Jewish people. If you want to keep Jerusalem united, you have to keep Har Hazeitim. The Vatican knows that.

In 1989 charges were made by the Catholic authorities that Israel desecrated the Cenacle on Mount Zion. The charges, which appeared in the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire, said that the Israelis put a memorial plaque on the roof of the Cenacle. The plaque was put in place after the 1948 War of Independence in memory of soldiers who fell in the Old City and whose burial place was unknown. Every year, the bereaved families cleaned the plaque.

Why did the Catholic authorities complain? Last year a similar charge was made from the Catholic authorities that Israel wants to “Judaize” Mount Zion.

Should the Vatican gain sovereignty over Mount of Zion, millions of Christian pilgrims will flock to the site, and this will threaten the Israeli presence in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter and Jewish access to the Western Wall.
The Vatican wants the Jews out of the Old City and apparently Israel’s government is agreeing with them. Turning the Cenacle into an active church is also a way of desecrating the holiness of the site known as the Tomb of David.

The Vatican and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation expressed a common position in the Basic Agreement of 15 February 2000, intended to support the recognition of a special statute for the City of Jerusalem. In the memorandum, signed by Vatican officials and the PLO, an organization dedicated to the mass deportation of Israel’s Jews, the Catholic Church wants Israel relinquishing sovereignty at the Western Wall and the Temple Mount. The Vatican-PLO agreement’s preamble on Jerusalem shows that the Vatican's attitude on Israel's capital is still stuck in the unforgivable anti-Semitic rhetoric of the 1940s.

Until 1948, Christian access to the Cenacle was severely limited, because it was used as a mosque. Since then, the State of Israel is committed to protecting the holy places of all religions, and guaranteeing the right of worship for all faiths.

But no Israeli government must tolerate any policy of division, “shared control” or “internationalization” that opens the door to a return to the Arab apartheid of Jordanian occupation between 1948 and 1967.

Jerusalem is not for sale. For thousands of years, the Cenacle area was almost always totally closed off to Jews.

Sovereignty over Mount Zion is politics, not only religion. The day after the Pope celebrated a mass on Mt. Zion in 2000, he went to Yasser Arafat headquarter to support the Palestinians’ right to return.

A few months later, the Oslo war began. And Jews were sacrified again on the altar of “peace”. It was their last supper.

This week, the Vatican in its official documents began referring to the "State of Palestine".

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Head of Catholic sect calls Jews ‘enemies’ of Church

TORONTO - Jews are "enemies of the Church," the head of a radical Catholic sect said in Canada.

Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, made the remark during a Dec. 28 address at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy in New Hamburg, Ontario, about 90 minutes' drive west of Toronto. He was reviewing the situation of the society, which opposes Catholic Church reforms decided by the Second Vatican Council and is not recognized by the Church.

According to an audio recording posted on YouTube two days later, Fellay spoke about the society's three years of discussions with the Vatican over the society's future and explained how he interpreted behind-the-scenes communications.

Apparently speaking without a text, Fellay asked, "Who during that time was the most opposed that the Church would recognize the society? The enemies of the Church: the Jews, the Masons, the Modernists."

According to the Catholic News Service, Fellay added that Jewish leaders' support of reforming Second Vatican Council "shows that Vatican II is their thing, not the Church's."

As of Friday, there was no response from the society's Swiss headquarters to a Catholic News Service email request for comment, the agency reported.

The Society of St. Pius X, , was founded in 1970 as a reaction against the Vatican's efforts to modernize. In 2009, Pope Benedict launched talks with the society and lifted excommunications imposed on its four bishops.

One of the bishops was Richard Williamson, who has denied that the Nazis used gas chambers and asserted that no more than 200,000 to 300,000 Jews died during World War II.

The society's founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy regime in France and the far-right National Front, and in a 1985 letter to Pope John Paul II identified the contemporary enemies of the faith as "Jews, Communists and Freemasons."


Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Holy chip: Vatican introduces swipe cards after ‘Vatileaks’

A Swiss guard stands guards whille ecclesiasts pray during the celebration of Vespers on the feast of the Presentation of the Lord on January 2, 2012 at St Peter's basilica at the Vatican.(AFP Photo / Vincenzo Pinto)
 
 
The Holy See is launching a swipe card system to get a better idea of what its employees are doing when they’re in the Vatican. But is it a measure to increase efficiency or a means to snoop on workers following the ‘Vatileaks’ scandal?
­Microchips hidden in every card allow Vatican officials to track every person in their clerical and lay employment, this amounts to around 3,000 staff from the Apostolic Palace to the Secretariat of State.
Visitors are allowed in by invitation only and have to sign a register, but workers can be casually greeted by a nod of recognition from the guards in their colorful Renaissance uniforms. The system bears little resemblance to the up-to-date measures used in most governmental offices or private companies.

It also seems the Vatican has been quite lax about enforcing work hours, relying mainly on the staff’s sense of responsibility.

"When a journalist asked Pope John XXIII how many people work in the Vatican, he replied: 'About half'," writes Robert Mickens, a correspondent for The Tablet daily, who used to work at Vatican Radio.
"The Vatican has tried hard to check that people stick to their working hours for years," Mickens said. "At Vatican Radio they introduced electronic badges years ago because people would go for their coffee break and return hours later. So I think that this is more of a case of the Vatican trying to check that its employees do their job than to prevent them from leaking information."
Other reports suggest that the swipe card system has been mooted for years, but was only pushed through after the butler scandal.
Moreover, it is just one measure to beef up security in the Vatican City.

Pope Benedict XVI’s new butler is prohibited from carrying out any secretarial tasks, the Daily Telegraph reported. The new butler won’t even be sharing an office with the pope's personal secretaries, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein and Monsignor Alfred Xuereb.

All this was never the case with former butler Paolo Gabriele, who was convicted of stealing the pontiff's private documents and leaking them to Italian media sources. Gabriele was sentenced to 18 months in jail by a Vatican court, but was pardoned by the Pope this Christmas.

Another brick in the new security bastion is appointing anti-espionage expert Mitja Leskovar to oversee coded messages and photocopies, now anyone wishing to get a photocopy has to add their name and what they are copying, to a special register. The registers are then checked by Leskovar, who has been nicknamed 'Monsignor 007'.