{"id":1444,"date":"2005-10-07T09:22:12","date_gmt":"2005-10-07T09:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/israels-call-to-catholics.html"},"modified":"2005-10-07T09:22:12","modified_gmt":"2005-10-07T09:22:12","slug":"israels-call-to-catholics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/israels-call-to-catholics.html","title":{"rendered":"Israel’s call to Catholics"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Tablet:<\/a><\/p>\n

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THE ANNOUNCEMENT last week that the President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, is to visit the Vatican on 17 November has been widely seen as momentous. After almost 2,000 years of enmity, this is another giant step towards lasting reconciliation between Christians and Jews. It is clear already, after Benedict XVI\u2019s visit to a synagogue in Cologne on World Youth Day, and his hosting of a visit by senior rabbis on 15 September, that relations between the Catholic Church and Judaism will be a main focus of his papacy. <\/p>\n

Less remarked on has been the commitment on the part of Israel to this process, which has its roots not only in theological concerns but also in deeply political ones. <\/p>\n

On the day of the announcement on 30 September, I spent an hour and a half in the company of Obed Ben-Hur, Israel\u2019s Ambassador to the Vatican. It was plain from our conversation that Israel is looking to Rome to help bring about a new climate \u2013 what Obed Ben-Hur called a \u201cpsychology of peace\u201d \u2013 in the Middle East. \u201cJesus being the Prince of Peace,\u201d the ambassador said, \u201cthe Church has a major role in the potentially new psychology of the whole Israeli-Arab conflict\u201d. The diplomatic initiative on both sides is rooted in and built around Nostra Aetate<\/em>, the shortest, but one of the most far-reaching, of the Second Vatican Council declarations. The fortieth anniversary of the publication of the declaration on 28 October is being used as a handy peg on which to hang a number of important proposals. <\/p>\n

Israel believes that a strong alliance with the Vatican could promote real progress towards ending a conflict that has defeated generations of politicians. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Tablet: THE ANNOUNCEMENT last week that the President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, is to visit the Vatican on 17 November has been widely seen as momentous. After almost 2,000 years of enmity, this is another giant step towards lasting reconciliation between Christians and Jews. It is clear already, after Benedict XVI\u2019s visit to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nIsrael's call to Catholics - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/israels-call-to-catholics.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Israel's call to Catholics - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the Tablet: THE ANNOUNCEMENT last week that the President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, is to visit the Vatican on 17 November has been widely seen as momentous. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}