The Pope, Palestine and papal politics

The Vatican was silent in face of the Archbishop's partisan antagonism towards - and criticism of - Israel despite the Vatican's supposed non-political stance as expressed in Article 11 (2) of the 1993 Agreement:

The Holy See, while maintaining in every case the right to exercise its moral and spiritual teaching-office, deems it opportune to recall that owing to its own character, it is solemnly committed to remaining a stranger to all merely temporal conflicts, which principle applies specifically to disputed territories and unsettled borders.

Archbishop Twal's appointment serves notice that the Vatican is now ready to honour this agreement.

Mending bridges - not tearing them down - has been the hall mark of Archbishop Twal's career as one of the Vatican's top diplomatic envoys. It started in 1976 with his appointment as chargé d'affaires in Honduras in Central America, thence back to the Vatican between 1982-1985 where he was made responsible for 19 African speaking countries in the Secretariat of State. Egypt, Germany, Peru and Tunis were signposts on the roadmap towards his appointment in 2005 as Coadjutor Archbishop of Jerusalem.

Archbishop Twal told www.cutodia.org in an interview on June 22 that: "If you want to touch Jews, Muslims, Christians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Cypriots, Europeans all together … then you have to consider every comma."

In the same interview he said: "Perhaps I will disappoint journalists in politics."

Yet he is still alive to the need to involve Jordan in the peace process telling Vatican Radio on June 21: "The majority of our priests, nuns, schools families are in Jordan. We need a link to Jordan …"

The Pope, who is visiting Australia this week for World Youth Day, might not be aware that another Catholic with the name Benedict - Australia's 16th Prime Minister Joseph Benedict Chifley - once said: "You don't try to make love to a woman by kicking her in the shins".

The Pope's appointee in Jerusalem has signaled the universality of this message. Regular newspaper columns devoted to Patriarchal criticism of Israel will now become mere historical footnotes.

The last Pope to bear Pope Benedict's name - Benedict XV - enthusiastically endorsed the Jews' right to reconstitute their national home in what was then Palestine when he told Zionist leader Nahum Sokolov at an audience in 1917:

Nineteen hundred years ago Rome destroyed your homeland and when you seek to rebuild it, you seek a path which leads via Rome … Yes this is the will of Divine Providence, this is what the Almighty desires.

This papal message is hopefully what will now permeate relations between Israel and the Vatican. It has been a long time coming but can only be seen as a positive development in a region where bad news is usually the norm.