“Catholic pilgrims spend virtually all their time visiting holy sites in Palestinian-run territory, staying in Palestinian Arab hotels and listening to Palestinian Arab tour guides. As a result, these pilgrims return filled with hatred towards Israel.”
Pope Francis should repudiate these tours, withdraw these bus ads, and apologize. But he is probably too busy participating in the latest “dialogue” about “Islamophobia.”
“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)
“Vatican buses promote trips to Jerusalem, ‘Palestine,’” by Giulio Meotti, Israel National News, November 23, 2016:
It was no secret that Catholic tourist maps and pilgrimage brochures omitted the name “Israel”, using instead the sanitized expression “Holy Land”, one of the visible effects of the Catholic “replacement theology”, which adopts a de-Judaizing language.
It was no secret that Catholic pilgrims spend virtually all their time visiting holy sites in Palestinian-run territory, staying in Palestinian Arab hotels and listening to Palestinian Arab tour guides. As a result, these pilgrims return filled with hatred towards Israel.
The Vatican bears a great responsibility in this ritual, since the “Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi”, which manages these tourist tours, is the Vatican office that organizes pilgrimages to Christian sites around the world.
That is why I was shocked when a friend sent me this picture from a bus in Rome, in which the Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi sponsors a trip in “Palestine”, “the holy land”, with iconic Christian sites in Israel’s capital city of Jerusalem.
In 2004 the Catholic bishops of England and Wales released a note to Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem not to take an Israeli bus “the day after a sheikh was assassinated”. A shocking and disgusting note, when Israeli mothers had to decide to send children in different buses so as not to take chances during a spate of horrific bus bombings by Arab terrorists- and in case that occurred, to save at least one of them….