Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem Offers to Exchange Himself for Hostages

“I am ready for an exchange, anything, if this can lead to freedom, to bring the children home. No problem. There is total willingness on my part,”   Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, has offered to exchange himself for the child hostages Hamas is holding.

Cardinal Pierbattista is the leader of the Latin Rite Catholics in Israel and Gaza. Christians are a minority in Gaza. While many of them are Orthodox and Roman Catholic, there are a number of Christians who are Protestant as well.

These Christians are descendants of the first converts to The Way, dating back to the time of the Apostles. Brother Andrew, who founded Open Doors ministry when he began on his own to smuggle Bibles into what was then the Soviet Union, also worked in both Lebanon and Gaza. He worked to strengthen the Christians there and to bring peace to the area.

His book, The Light Force, is deeply sympathetic to the plight of both Muslim and Christian Palestinians. Most of what I know about the Palestinian situation in the area comes from Brother Andrew and from Palestinian Christians living in America who I have met.

It is easy, listening to them, to form an opinion which ignores the other side of the discussion. Fortunately, I also know and have read discussions by Israelis.

In my not-very-well informed opinion, this whole situation is a tragedy. I honestly believe that the Palestinians could have achieved their aim of a state of their own long ago if they had used tactics like the ones Martin Luther King employed. But a leader like Martin Luther King doesn’t come along very often in any culture, and seems, at least up until now, to be entirely missing from the Muslim world.

I have become increasingly alienated from the leaders of my own faith in recent years because so many of them are behaving more like Ayatollahs than Christians. If the violence we have seen in events like 9/11 and what Hamas did in Israel recently are an aberration of  and a disgrace to Islam — and I feel they are — then how much more of an aberration are these political-whore, right wing “christian” clergy with their hate-filled rhetoric and idolatry of false political gods?

It hurt me when I saw the video of Hamas terrorists, yanking a bleeding young girl around while waving a gun and yelling Allah Akbar. God has nothing to do with that. They defame God and smear His name by linking Him with their heinous sin.

I hope and pray that God will raise up a Muslim leader who is able to lead Palestinians in the way of non-violent, peaceful protest and demonstration. It will be hard, on many levels. but I do not doubt that this is what will work.

As it is, false religious leaders lead their people into the way of murder, which is never of God. And then, violence is answered with even greater violence and the cycle of death and destruction continues.

Israel has to respond with military force to what happened. They have to.

When you compare the size of their population to America’s, what Hamas did is the equivalent of murdering 50,000 Americans, taking at least another 5,000 Americans prisoner, then announcing that the hostages would be murdered one at a time, all while pillaging several of our states. If that had happened to America, we would be willing to melt the sand of the Middle East to glass.

After 9/11 George Bush had a mandate to do just about anything he wanted. He response was measured, if flawed. He did not use that mandate to lay waste to the Middle East, although he had the mandate to do it.

What America did right in all that, and this was Obama rather than Bush who did it, was to hunt down Osama bin Laden, kill him and throw his body into the sea. I think the Israelis need to do the same thing with the leaders of Hamas. I do not believe in killing people, except in self defense of your life or the life of others.  I believe that self defense applies to nations as well as individuals.

Hamas deliberately murdered not only Israelis, but untold numbers of their own people. They knew they were calling down a war on their own people. They brought the humanitarian toll that we are witnessing down on the people they are supposed to govern and care for, and they worked for a long time to get it down.

In combat terms, Hamas called in fire onto their own position. Or, in more prosaic terms, they made a decision to sacrifice the lives of the Palestinian people they govern and who they are responsible for before the God they claim to believe in, to stage a mass attack.

Why? What for? To what end?

In the midst of all this hate — and it seems as if our daily news is a steady diet of insanity and hate — the sanity of Christ has been missing for too long.

Our clergy have betrayed Christ to preach secular values, secular politics, and secular hate. They have, as I said, betrayed Christ and preached the direct opposite of the Gospels. They have also betrayed us, the pew-sitters who rely on them to lead us in the Way. We are drowning, and they keep throwing us anvils of hate, divisiveness, exclusion and political propaganda instead of the life preserver of true Gospel teaching.

That’s why Cardinal Pierbattista’s offer to exchange himself for the Israeli children that Hamas kidnapped and is holding hostage is so astounding and so powerful. It is what Christian clergy are called to do.

Our bishops are fond of claiming that they are in the line of the Apostolic Succession. But the Apostolic Succession is not a line of privilege, wealth, power and overweening arrogance. The Apostles died to preach Christ. They were beaten, imprisoned, hounded, mocked, scorned and ultimately murdered in horrible ways because they told the outlandish truth of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Our Lord.

The were shot with arrows, crucified, skinned alive, because they preached the actual Gospels in all their irreverence for power, position and pious pretense.

A Patriarch who offers himself in exchange for children who are being held hostage is committing an act of Christian leadership. He is, actually, standing in the line of the Apostolic Succession.

Brother Andrew, who is a Protestant, did something similar. He offered to exchange himself for a hostage being held by Hamas.

I’m really grateful in a personal way to both these men. I am humbled by them because I couldn’t do what they have done. I’m not that brave, not that faith-filled.

I am grateful to them because they are being the Light. And we who are wandering in the darkness need that light to find the Way.

From The New Yorker:

Pope Francis’ top representative in the Middle East said Monday he was willing to trade places with Israeli children taken hostage by Hamas terrorists.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, 58, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, proposed the swap in response to a question during a video conference with journalists in Italy.

“I am ready for an exchange, anything, if this can lead to freedom, to bring the children home. No problem. There is total willingness on my part,” he said.