Good Papal Intentions, and God's Choices

Allow me to stand corrected: both Stephen Kruiser and Tom Gross are certain Pope Francis’ reference to “angel of peace” in connection to Mahmoud Abbas was a hopeful suggestion, rather than a proclamation of fact. So stipulated.

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That such a turnabout by Mr. Abbas, ally of Hamas, would be a miracle should not discourage the pontiff from wishful optimism; popes are the business of miracles. Besides, one can argue, it would have been a lost opportunity for him not to have spoken as he did. After all, how often have much lesser public figures lamented that if they had but the opportunity to sit down and reason with that nice Mr. Hitler (or bin Laden, Stalin, Tojo, Abdulhamit, etc.) then (World War Two, the Soviet deportations, the Nanking massacre, the Armenian Genocide, etc.) would have been avoided?

Great leaders must grasp the doors opportunity opens for them, muster their best intentions, and march through. This, we are told, is the case here.

But good intentions are not policy.

Pope Francis’ plea, if that’s what it was, to the chairman of the PA — whose component parts are dedicated to the destruction of a neighboring state because of the religious faith of its inhabitants, and to the subsequent genocide of those people — is defined as kindly as possibly as only that: good intention.

But Papal State recognition of Abbas’ “state,” co-governed with the sin-ridden, murderous Hamas, is policy.

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The Vatican assures us the instrument of recognition will contain guarantees of religious freedom. If Mahmoud Abbas agrees those guarantees shall extend to all faiths — including Jews — then the pope’s dream will have become concrete reality. (Assuming the PA is good to its word.) If, on the other hand, the guarantee extends only to religious groups favored by the pope, then the pope’s dream has been made a nightmare — a horrid relic of the European hatred of the 1930s, now in glorious redux both there and throughout the extreme precincts of Islam.

The hypocrisy of such a treaty would be a triumph for moral relativists everywhere: liberation theologists, Alinskyites, “progressives,” Leftists, Fascists, Communists, and of course, anti-Semites.

As God instructed Moses to tell the assembly ay Mt. Sinai: “I have today set before you a choice … ”

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