{"id":477,"date":"2009-05-13T12:12:26","date_gmt":"2009-05-13T12:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/benedict-as-reagan.html"},"modified":"2009-05-13T12:12:26","modified_gmt":"2009-05-13T12:12:26","slug":"benedict-as-reagan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/benedict-as-reagan.html","title":{"rendered":"Benedict as Reagan"},"content":{"rendered":"

That is the trope taken from Pope Benedict’s words today in the Aida refugee camp. The full text is here<\/a>. And as Cindy Wooden writes in CNS<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

While Israeli officials, citing security concerns, forced organizers of the event at the camp to move the papal reception away from the wall, the miles of concrete slicing through the countryside and through people’s yards, gardens and fields were impossible to miss.<\/p>\n

And for a person born in Germany, a country divided by a wall for decades, it was impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n

“Towering over us, as we gather here this afternoon, is a stark reminder of the stalemate that relations between Israelis and Palestinians seem to have reached — the wall,” Pope Benedict told Palestinian officials and refugees.<\/p>\n

The meeting took place on the basketball court inside the Aida camp’s school directly across the street from the wall, which Israel insists is necessary to protect its citizens.<\/p>\n

The Israeli government says terrorist attacks have declined since the construction of the barrier — a series of cement slabs, barbed wire fences and security roads which, if completed as planned, would stretch nearly 400 miles and restrict the movements of 38 percent of residents of the West Bank.<\/p>\n

“In a world where more and more borders are being opened up — to trade, to travel, to movement of peoples, to cultural exchanges — it is tragic to see walls still being erected,” the pope said at the Aida camp, home to nearly 5,000 Palestinian refugees.<\/p>\n

“How we long to see the fruits of the much more difficult task of building peace,” Pope Benedict said.<\/p>\n

“On both sides of the wall, great courage is needed if fear and mistrust is to be overcome, if the urge to retaliate for loss or injury is to be resisted,” the pope said.<\/font> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

John Allen of The National Catholic Reporter also goes there<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

On his lone day in the Palestinian Territories, Benedict delivered the papal equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 “tear down this wall!” speech in Berlin.<\/p>\n

Standing in a Palestinian refugee camp located in the shadow of Israel’s towering security wall, Benedict forcefully criticized such barriers between peoples.<\/p>\n

“In a world where more and more borders are being opened up – to trade, to travel, to movement of peoples, to cultural exchanges – it is tragic to see walls still being erected,” the pope said. <\/p>\n

Later, he said such walls “do not last forever” and “can be taken down” – a fairly clear hint that, in his mind, the wall should come down as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n\"Aida<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That is the trope taken from Pope Benedict’s words today in the Aida refugee camp. The full text is here. And as Cindy Wooden writes in CNS: While Israeli officials, citing security concerns, forced organizers of the event at the camp to move the papal reception away from the wall, the miles of concrete slicing through…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nBenedict as Reagan - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/benedict-as-reagan.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Benedict as Reagan - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"That is the trope taken from Pope Benedict’s words today in the Aida refugee camp. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}