The Vatican reverses into a darker age

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
25 October '10

One of the most disturbing features of the visceral hostility to Israel displayed by the Anglican Church is its underlying revival of replacement theology, or supersessionism – the ancient Christian calumny that, because of their denial of the divinity of Christ, the Jews have forfeited God’s promises to them which have been transferred to Christians. This pernicious doctrine was the principal motor behind the medieval Christian pogroms against the Jews, and persisted until the Holocaust, after which it went underground until it was revived in recent years and fused with Palestinianism. As a result, some Anglican theologians now claim that God’s promise to the Jews of the land of Israel is forfeit and has passed instead to the Palestinians.

Until now, the Catholic Church seemed to have wanted to bury this doctrine of replacement theology, with the Second Vatican Council showing an awareness of the role of Christianity in the persecution of the Jews and an apparent desire to put an end for ever to the theology that had fuelled it. But now Rome has reversed itself. At a Vatican press conference on Saturday following a communiqué demanding that Israel accept UN resolutions calling for an end to its ‘occupation’ of Arab lands, bishops appeared to jump from the ‘occupation’ to Israel itself and from politics to theology.

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