Since 2007, Hamas has increased its rocket attacks on Israel and built new ones that threaten around 860,000 Israeli civilians.

Furthermore, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip has driven the territory’s Christian community into greater hardship, causing them to emigrate in even larger numbers.

Yet these facts are rarely discussed in Church commentaries about the strife in Gaza, even in papal speeches. If Hamas is mentioned by the Holy See, it is usually only after Israel reacts to Hamas aggression.

Veteran Vaticanista Sandro Magister questions this approach in a pithy article this week. The Church was silent, Magister alleges on his chiesa.com website, “when Hamas was tightening its brutal grip on Gaza, massacring the Muslims faithful to [Palestinian] president Abu Mazen, humiliating the tiny Christian communities, and launching dozens of rockets every day against the Israelis in the surrounding area.”

Neither Pope Benedict XVI nor the Holy See, Magister says, have spoken out against Hamas’ “mission” to annihilate the Jewish state or about Hamas’ alliances with Iran, Syria and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. There is no formal condemnation of the organization that, according to Magister, threatens the creation of a Palestinian state more than Israel does.

So why the silence? Magister argues that many in the Church share a view held by most Europeans: that Israel’s existence is “temporary” and that its survival lies in its military superiority.

Additionally, quoting Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Custos to the Holy Land, Magister says that the majority of Christians in the Holy Land are Arab Palestinians who have maintained a “refusal to accept Israel” in common with most of the Arab world. That refusal stems from the injustices and atrocities committed when the Jewish state was established in 1948.

However, the situation in the Vatican is more even-handed than Magister suggests. Speaking last week about the current outbreak of Israeli-Hamas hostilities, Vatican spokesman Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi clearly stated that Hamas was operating from a more hateful basis than was Israel.

“Hamas is a prisoner of a logic of hatred, Israel of a logic of trusting in force as the best response to hatred,” Father Lombardi said Dec. 27 on Vatican Radio, Catholic News Service reported. “They need to keep looking for a different way out, even if it seems impossible.”

Magister himself notes in his article that in recent years, commentary in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano has been more sympathetic to the Jewish position than it was previously.

The Church now officially recognizes Israel’s existence as a matter of fact that cannot be rejected. And as the number of Arab Christians diminishes further in the Holy Land, one possible benefit that might arise from that sad exodus is that the Church is now freer to address the conflict from a wider perspective that stresses Israel is here to stay.

If so, the Church’s much needed voice of reconciliation may actually be heard more clearly in the future by both sides in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

— Edward Pentin

Go here for earlier Daily Blog reporting on the conflict in Gaza.