Godssecret's Weblog

Pope Benedictus XVI is scheduled to arrive in Israel six weeks from now, and concern is growing over possibly irreversible Israeli concessions to the Church.

For more than ten years, Israel and the Vatican have been negotiating a diplomatic agreement regarding their tax dispute over Catholic Church properties in Israel, as well as other issues over which they disagree. Though public details are sparse to nil, Foreign Ministry officials say major progress has been made – leading many to fear that the Church will be granted a political and religious foothold in the Holy Land.

In recent years, the Vatican – acting on behalf of Catholic theology – signed a series of secret agreements, behind the public’s back, with various elements in the State of Israel, bereft of respect for the spiritual and political essence of the Jewish Nation. The essence of these agreements is the transfer of ownership over national Jewish property in Jerusalem to the hands of foreigners, and the instigation of processes to destabilize the Jewish People’s ownership over its sacred sites – primarily, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and the entire Old City of Jerusalem.

Giving these and other sites to the Vatican and international elements will lead to their detachment from the State’s territorial area.

The State of Israel is bound to the document of acquisition [known as] the Bible, which was the basis for the Jewish People’s claim to its Land when it established the State of Israel. The State must therefore actualize Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem, the City of G-d, the city of kingship, the capital of Israel, the heart of the world. It must guarantee the right of worship for Jews on the Temple Mount…

It should be remembered that the Vatican, as the leading Christian Church, is responsible for the legacy of Rome – the conqueror of Jerusalem, the exiler of its Jews, the destroyer of its land. All the churches that exists today in the Land of Israel are the result of the Jewish destruction 1,900 years ago, the elimination of the Jews from their land, and the exile that Christianity wishes to boast will be eternal. This, in addition to the priceless material and spiritual treasures found in the basements of the Vatican [such as the utensils of the destroyed Holy Temple – ed.], as well as the countless synagogues throughout the world that were confiscated by the Vatican and its representatives and not returned.

Continued flattery to the Church on the basis of illegal agreements is liable to end, Heaven forbid, in destructive religious wars all over the globe. The history to this disbute is long.

At the time of the destruction of the 2^nd Temple the Jews believed God was destroying the temple and exiling them from their land for the sin of not treating each other properly. The early Christians saw something quite different in the events of their day. After all, if the Temple was destroyed in the year 70 of the Common Era could the cause not be attributed to the Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah? Coming so soon one after the other, it was quite tempting to connect a catastrophe with a religious conviction; the Jewish people who refused to accept Jesus as Savior were condemned to be defeated and cast into exile.

It was this very line of reasoning which became the basis of the pejorative, “the wandering Jew”. Throughout history the phrase carried with it both curse and prediction: it is the fate of the Jew to wander evermore over the face of the earth, without permanent residence or homeland, until such a time that he atones for his crime of faithlessness by embracing the truth of the divinity of Jesus.

Accepted as fundamental Christian doctrine, the idea of the wandering Jew represented a very unique and dangerous kind of prophecy. It is after all possible to predict that something will happen at some point in the future and not be threatened by its failure to come to pass. All one needs to say in response is that it has not yet occurred. A request for patience is as valid as the initial pronouncement.

Precisely this is the way in which Christianity has dealt for almost two thousand years with the fact that Jesus, after his death, did not return for the promised second coming. He didn’t, they say, but he will – and there is no possible way to firmly refute their teaching.

But what is so very special about the prediction of the Church involving the Jew is that a doctrine of faith made clear that something – i.e. the return of the Jews to Israel from their decreed lands of dispersion – will never take place unless Jews embrace Jesus. If a religion stakes a claim on credibility by affirming that an event cannot ever happen – and it does – it would appear that the damage is irreparable.

That is indeed what happened to Christian theology in the twentieth century. The birth of modern day Israel may have been threatening to the Arab world as a conflict of homelands. For the Vatican, however, the problem was far more profound: it was a conflict of creeds which clearly crowned one as a victor.

It was my revered teacher, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, ZT”L, who oft pointed out that after 1948 Christian scholars were frantically trying to come to terms with a political reality they had for so long deemed a religious impossibility. In the privacy of scholarly conclaves and in carefully guarded gatherings of theologians, it was decided that aside from the Church not granting recognition to Israel’s existence – perhaps if you say it isn’t really there you can make it go away – the solution to the “refutation of the prediction” was that Israel without Jerusalem did not really represent a return of the holy land to the Jewish people. Without the sanctity of the holiest city, there is no sanctity to the rest of events of 1967. When Israel won the Six Day War, military strategists were dumfounded – but Christian leaders were devastated. How could they explain now a miracle that wasn’t suppose to happen? And how deal with a state that even proclaimed its holiest city once more its capital?

Only one way remained for Rome to deal with this unacceptable reality. Jerusalem could simply not be recognized as the capital city nor could the Jews be accepted as its master. Unspoken aloud is a powerful truth confirmed to me by a leading political figure in Israel. So sensitive is the subject, however, that he has not only forbidden me to quote him but warned me that if I did so he would deny ever having said so. Behind the scenes, he advised me, there is more pressure for the internationalization of Jerusalem coming from the Christian world than from the Arab. It is not hard to understand. A Jewish Jerusalem does not deprive them of territory – it takes from them the validity of a Testament.

Let no one be misled. There is simply no way in which the Church can be accommodating in this matter. Compromise is out of the question. The matter is just too heavily weighted with theological considerations. When Leah Rabin visited with the Pope she thought she heard allusions to “a new approach” to the Jerusalem question. Her naiveté should not be shared by anyone aware of the deeper dimensions of this issue. The Pope, after all, has no choice. As the religious leader of a faith sorely tested by the Divine message of our generation, he can only hope to undo what Jerusalem proclaims to the “wandering Jews” of our times who have at last come home.

For more than ten years, Israel and the Vatican have been negotiating a diplomatic agreement regarding their tax dispute over Catholic Church properties in Israel, as well as other issues over which they disagree. Though public details are sparse to nil, Foreign Ministry officials say major progress has been made – leading many to fear that the Church will be granted a political and religious foothold in the Holy Land. Though Church officials hope the agreement will be completed before the Pope’s arrival in May, this is not certain. Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Bahij Mansour, who heads its religious affairs section, said two weeks ago, “We are 85-90% there.”

Mansour also said that most issues still in dispute would be resolved in a meeting in April. Different reports say the meeting will take place either April 7 or April 23 – before and after Passover, respectively – and is to involve relatively high-level officials from both the Vatican and Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

Back in the mid-1990s, a statement made by Pope John Paul ii during an interview in his native Poland, broadcast in Italian over a Polish radio station, was noted by one of our Italian associates. She sent us a transcript of the interview, which included one particularly startling reference made by the pope regarding the Vatican’s ultimate goal of transferring its headquarters from Rome to Jerusalem. Since the failure of the Crusades, the most obvious of the overt and now very historical attempts by the Vatican to seize control of the Holy City. Those attempts have a long history with strong attachments to the German nation, right up to the past two world wars, and beyond to our present day. Both Vatican and German diplomacy in Israel are linked to a common end: possession of the Old City of Jerusalem, as well as most of the eastern half of the city. The Jews are the pawns in this grand game of international diplomacy, the Palestinians the all-too-willing grunts on the ground eager to facilitate the division of Jerusalem and the annihilation of the State of Israel in the process. The Vatican already has a significant presence in Jerusalem by virtue of free access to its holy sites over which Rome has legal jurisdiction, under Israeli law, including both its institutions and assets in Jerusalem. The consolidation of these arrangements came by virtue of a bilateral agreement termed “The Fundamental Agreement Between the Holy See and the State of Israel,” which the Israeli government signed with the Vatican on Dec. 30, 1993. The terms of this agreement, composed in secret, were subsequently legislated by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. What remains largely unknown is the secret deal done by current Israeli President Shimon Peres and the leftist peacenik, former Meretz party member Yossi Beilin, known widely as “Peres’s poodle.”

The official story of the origins of Israel’s “secret channel contacts” between Beilin’s negotiating team and the Vatican comes about as a result of Shlomo Gur, a personal aide to Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, who knew someone who put him in touch with Father David Jaeger. Father David Jaeger was president of the Catholic Court in Austin, Texas, and was brought up as an Israeli orthodox Jew who then converted to Catholicism and became a Father (not something that has happened to many Israelis who grew up Orthodox). From there, which according to the information on the Israel Foreign Ministry website was in July 1992 right after the new Rabin government took over power, nothing is known about the discussions until the agreement is signed on December 30^th, 1993. Nothing in the Israeli press. The info given on the actual agreement signed was very minimal and general in tone. This is probably one of the most important political contacts Israel has in the world’s “power structure”, yet it isn’t reported on in the press. Thus no Israelis know about it. That is how it remains hidden.

You have to realize that for centuries The Vatican has attempted to obtain control of Jerusalem, which started with the Crusades. For them to convince the world that the Messiah they put on the world’s stage is going to be accepted as genuine, they need to perform this play in the Old City. The story of this production is that this “Messiah” will merge the three monotheistic religions, usher in peace and harmony in the world, and solve the Middle East conflict. The location for this “production” will be in none other than the Old City of Jerusalem.

This so-called “Messiah” that will be proclaimed will be a false one and it will insist that by having a “world government” (i.e., the United Nations) the world peace and harmony will be ushered in. This will be a lie and a fraud, but never mind. In our world, reality isn’t important — public perceptions are. The end result is the stripping of Israel’s sovereignty as an independent nation, giving way to a “regional bloc of nations” in the Middle East. Israel will be pressured to accede to these demands by all world bodies and the superpowers on the claim that “this is the only way to solve the Middle East conflict. In order to (induce) the Jews to go along, they will convince them that with the “Messiah” having appeared for the Jews, it is time to start rebuilding the Third Temple — what they call “Solomon’s Temple”. This version of events is widely available through a simple search on the Internet as there are many Christian groups and organizations (the majority of which are very pro-Israel) who don’t buy into these beliefs and thus are against them. I didn’t come up with the theory — I am just bringing it to the attention of the Israeli public.

Make no mistake about it. The Old City of Jerusalem, as well as most of the eastern half of the city, is what The Vatican is after.

Why?

Because controlling the entire Old City of Jerusalem (and not just Church properties) and being able to build whatever they want on Mount Zion is critical for the program they have planned to put into play in our capital city. The deal that it has signed with Israel via Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres (in secret and without the approval of the Knesset) gives The Church not only extraterritorial status to their properties (which is what the bi-lateral agreement the Israeli government signed with the Vatican on December 30^th, 1993, put in law) but of control over the entire city as “custodians” under UN presence. In this way the Jews will give up control over the Old City. To the Vatican the Israeli people would have a problem with. To the UN, they would say, “we had no choice”.

A Chronology Of The Attempt By The Vatican To Displace Israel From The Old City Of Jerusalem

March 1992
On March 17^th, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek says: “The Israeli government should meet the Vatican’s demand to apply special status for Jerusalem.”

On April 15^th, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, one of the highest ranking diplomats at The Vatican, visits Israel for the first time but only meets with Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek.

April 1994
Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Shmuel Meir announces at a Jerusalem press conference that he had received information that properties promised to the Vatican in Jerusalem would be granted extraterritorial status. (In early 1996 Meir was killed in a very suspicious car crash whereby the driver who drove a UN truck into Meir’s car was not even charged.)

The Roman Catholic Church wants Israel to lose sovereign control over the Old City of Jerusalem so that “the promises to the literal descendents of Abraham will be applied to the ‘New Jerusalem.'” If Israel controls Jerusalem it is evidence that Rome’s claims are not legitimate and that the literal interpretation of Scriptures is correct. There is no place for the restoration of the nation of Israel in its theology. How can the Vatican claim to be “the New Jerusalem” and “rightful heir to the Kingdom of God” if the Jews control Jerusalem? How is the Catholic Church going to convince the world that their version of theology is correct?

The Vatican is going to have everyone believe this “mysterious individual who will “unite the faiths” and appear in Jerusalem which will be under the control of an authority headed by The Vatican. ” That deal to have the Vatican come into Israel and take over these properties and to “control and dominate the Old City of Jerusalem” already exists and has been fully documented and reported in the world’s media.

The end goal of The Vatican is to seize control of the Old City of Jerusalem out of the clutches of the state of Israel. To that end they have a secret agreement with Israel which obliges Israel to respect the “extraterritorial” claim to their physical presence in the city. In short, “we have accepted the Vatican’s rights to have little Vatican sovereign embassies throughout our eternal capital of Jerusalem. That same Vatican has committed itself, in public and in a written agreement, to ensure that the Palestinians have sovereignty in the Old City of Jerusalem.

The public record shows a secret deal has already been conducted behind the backs of the Israeli public whereby the Vatican was promised to take over the Old City. There is ample proof in the public record to prove that a secret deal was done with the Vatican by two Israeli government representatives, Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres. As it was concocted covertly it can’t serve the Israeli public, but someone else. Thus these agreements need to be made void and nullified.

The Vatican has a secret agenda and it includes stealing the Old City of Jerusalem away from the Jews. That is what you need to know and understand.