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Football clubs and religion have features in common; there is belonging to a beloved community, high levels of commitment - capable of generating violence – knowledgeable commentators, rules, regulations and an informed debate about them. But the relative importance of noise and silence is not one of them.
True, singing, hymns or chants and acclamation is part of celebration in both. But there is something distinctive about the roar of the crowd when the ball goes into the net that is different even from a Catholic gathering greeting a Pope. Today listeners get routinely shouted at early in the morning in the sports report by football commentators replaying their reaction to a key goal scored in a critical match. Thought for the Day is measured and gently spoken – like cricket commentary of old, in the words of the late, great sports journalist Frank Keating, in the “confiding countryman burr” of John Arlott. Silence has an entirely different quality in both too. There is the silence of the home crowd as the opposition take a penalty. And the silence of the Tottenham supporter in the pub amongst friends who are Arsenal supporters. There is the silence of vast Cathedrals, the resonant silence of young people in prayer in a crypt permeated by prayer over the centuries. More daunting must be the overwhelming extraterrestrial silence experienced by astronauts. Silence is today predominantly counter-cultural. Digital silence, the loss of recourse to instant chatter when a mobile is lost or stolen, is positively threatening. It is not just the embarrassment of the hiatus when a normal conversation peters out. Noise creates conflict in daily life between those making the noise and those having to put up with it; but that does not mean either side would be comfortable with silence. Modern technology and the market for instantly available music have changed perceptions of the normal. If you stop a passer-by to ask the way, ear-plugs come out and they will usually consult their mobile to reply. Find a hotel without background music or indeed a restaurant. You will have found an unusual venue. I recently asked a senior member of hotel staff on a roof-balcony overlooking a pleasant city, a picture of serenity, why we had to have an accompaniment of wallpaper-music disturbing the natural beauty of the view. “Could it be turned off please”? Other hotel guests on the balcony concurred with the request. Well, no, it couldn’t or rather no he wouldn’t, though he was able to do so. His “other people like it” argument didn’t work. The “ambiance” explanation didn’t work either. The music was irritating and diminished the ambiance of quiet, calm and tranquility. The balcony manager struggled to find a convincing argument to justify his response and began to sound mildly authoritarian. I pointed out that we simply wanted to enjoy the delightful facilities of the hotel. We both got annoyed. He retreated. Five minutes later the music came off. Public support helps. It was the first time I’d got further than the volume of the music in a “hospitality” venue being turned down after I’d complained we couldn’t hear ourselves speak above the noise from animated conversations all around. Maybe it was because the hotel was in Ireland and the island had, what seemed superficially, taken the path of - political - compromise. “True silence is the rest of the mind”, William Penn (1644-1718) Quaker founder of Pennsylvania wrote,” and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment”. Silence has been embedded in Catholic practice from the Egyptian anchorites of the 3rd. and 4th centuries. The Great Silence, Silentium Magnum, after compline until after morning prayers, is still kept by several contemplative Religious Orders such as the Benedictines and Carthusians. Pope Leo has been contributing to this tradition. His teaching on AI, published in full today, appears as a ground-breaking extension to his warnings about the technology of social media and its outcomes, the noise and frantic busyness of modern life contributing to a pervasive anxiety, and incompatible with being “open to Grace”. “All this, dear friends”, he told a large assembly of young people in Monaco on 28 March, “requires prayer, moments of silence and listening, to quiet the frenzy of doing and speaking, of messages, ‘reels’ [videos on for example Instagram and Tik Tok] and chats, and to deepen and savour the beauty of truly being together in a real and concrete way”. He might have added learning from each other. In the history of the Church there is demonstrably no incompatibility between work for social justice and prayer. One can and has informed the other. But each has a different attraction to a contemplative or activist personality. Unfortunately, under pressure from those who benefit from the status quo irrespective of its injustices, ‘activist’ has a pejorative meaning. There are silent marches and sit-downs but the stereotype image of the activist is a chanting protester carrying a banner in a noisy march. And for some reason ‘activist’ does not apply to those who take – quiet – action often behind the scenes, in a lifelong pursuit of incremental improvements in the life of the poor. Think of the effectiveness of Sure Start. There were no significant protest marches when a Conservative-Liberal Democrat government cut funding to local councils after 2010 and limited services for early childhood. The Pope’s advice, of course, is also directed to, amongst others, the multitude of Catholics who take an active option for the poor as a lifetime commitment. He indicates for everyone a good place to start remedial change, to attempt to reduce the digital and ambient noise that increasingly besets the modern world. The next time background music is drivelling out I will argue it is against Catholic teaching. And, incidentally, how counter-cultural is silent prayer during penalty shoot-outs?
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You bump into the past quite often in Berlin. There’s the curated remains of the Wall, the vast architectural hymn to militarism of the Soviet war memorial in Treptow, and the disorientating claustrophobia of Daniel Libeskind’s building housing the Jewish museum. To contemplate the confession of the Nazi horrors and the sufferings of war, spend time in the Kaiser Wilhem Memorial Church, near the Zoological Garden.
Few tourists visit the Bonhoeffer-Haus in the western suburbs of the city. Just an ordinary, prosperous-looking detached, house but full of the memory of an extraordinary German pastor. Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled with Christian ethics finally giving his life in their pursuit. Bonhoeffer encountered Black theology’s biblical themes of liberation while at Union Theological College in New York, 1930-1931, worshipping at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. He lived his own words: “silence in the face of evil is itself evil”; two days after Hitler came to power in 1933 he broadcast a warning against the idolatry of a Fuhrer cult – and was cut off. His condemnation of the Nazi euthanasia programme and persecution of the Jews was no less vocal. He later wrote most of his classic book, “The Cost of Discipleship” (Nachfolge), in an underground Lutheran seminary at Finkenwalde in North Germany. In one of several attempts to assassinate Hitler, a group of German officers in the Wehrmacht High Command Centre (by the Tiergarten) hid a time-bomb in the cellar of Bonhoeffer-Haus. An unsuspecting officer not party to the plot carried it on board a plane carrying Hitler back to Germany from his forward military headquarters in Smolensk on 13 March 1943. The Bonhoeffer family had friends round celebrating their father’s 75th birthday. They nervously awaited the coded phone call indicating all was well. A difficult evening. No phone call came. There was a sadness about Bonhoeffer’s frugal attic bedroom and study with his little desk by the window, and the books around the walls of his friend and confidant, pastor and theologian, Eberhard Bethge,. After publication of Nachfolge in 1937, Bonhoeffer had scant time left at home. By 1938 he had a sizeable Gestapo file and on 11 January was banned from Berlin. He was arrested in April 1943 and executed in Flossenberg concentration camp two years later, a few weeks before the end of the War. His study felt like a memorial to him. “Lest we Forget” is easier said at the Cenotaph than in the partly bomb-damaged Kaiser Wilhem Gedachtniskirche with, today, its cross of nails from Coventry Cathedral. Yet, the church provides a deliberate, and remarkable, contrast between its former worship of power, illustrated by the mosaics on the roof and walls showing a procession of Hohenzollen princes, the Kaiser in glory with his first wife, the Empress Augusta Victoria, and the church’s contents, display cases and peace message. Under the same roof triumphalism versus an informed contrition and a memorial for the millions who died. Next door is the new Evangelical church (the EKD was formed in 1948 by a federation of Lutheran, Reformed and United Churches) which presents a counter, Christian, understanding of power. In memory of Protestant martyrs killed between 1933 and 1945, there is a beautiful 12th century crucifix with a plaque quoting John 1:5.4: “unser glaube ist der sieg der die welt uberwunden hat” (And the victory that conquers the world is our faith”). Alongside is a 1942 charcoal sketch of Madonna and Child drawn at Stalingrad by the Protestant Pastor and military surgeon, Kurt Reuber, a friend of Albert Schweitzer, with on one side the defiant “Licht , Leben, Liebe” (Light, Life, Love), against the darkness, death and hatred of war. A man literally drawing support from his faith in extreme adversity . Berlin remembers martyrs executed locally in Charlottenberg at Plotzenzee prison where 3,000 were killed. They include those sadistically hanged for complicity in the famous 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in the Polish woods using plastic explosive in a briefcase. In subsequent purges some 5,000 were murdered. The bombed remains of Plotzensee prison were converted into a memorial centre attached to the site of the executions. Not far away is the Protestant Church of Atonement, inaugurated in 1964, with its wall in the forecourt inscribed with Hiroshima, Auschwitz and Plotzensee leading into the church’s atrium with its inscription Golgotha. Ecumenical memorial services take place every January. Further west, built in white brutalist style and consecrated in 1963, is the Catholic memorial church, Maria-Regina Martyrum. The crypt contains an inscription to Blessed Bernard Lichtenberg. Like Bonhoeffer, he was outspoken in his condemnation of the Nazi killing of the disabled and mentally ill. “I, as a human being, a Christian, a priest, and a German”, he wrote to the Minister of Health, “demand of you, Chief Physician of the Reich, that you answer for the crimes that have been perpetrated at your bidding, and with your consent, and which will call forth the vengeance of the Lord on the heads of the German people”. Rector of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral from 1938 – from Unter den Linden behind the State Opera House - he prayed daily for persecuted Jews at Vespers, and was arrested on 23 October 1941 dying on 5 November 1943 after falling ill in Gestapo custody. He had just been committed to Dachau. In 2004, he was honoured in the Righteous Amongst Nations at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem for his unyielding opposition to the Nazi regime and support for fleeing Jews. Berlin raises a question: for how many generations, should guilt and shame about the past be encouraged? It is understandable if German youth do not want to be burdened by a past they did not make. For the younger generation the best comparison in the UK might be how distant slavery seems in our own past and in the making of Britain’s wealth. Perhaps an answer lies in the difference between guilt and shame: guilt created by a sense of responsibility for wrongdoing, how we see ourself; shame created by belonging to a community, more a painful sense of how others see us as a result of our wrongdoing. Psychologists seem to approve of guilt and disapprove of shame. But there is crippling survivor guilt. And fear of shame and blame can be a powerful restraint. German young people should not feel guilt about the Holocaust. Though there is something healthy and salutary in a communal sense of shame, at being reminded of the unspeakable events in Europe eighty to ninety years ago. What better approach to the past than spending time in the Bonhoeffer-Haus with its excellent pastor and guide, and absorbing the message in the Kaiser Wilhelm Church in Berlin ? But these are merely the limited experiences of a British bystander who barely remembers the sounds of the sirens and being evacuated from London. The past is another country. Irrespective of nationality, we cross several countries into our present one. And a little history, painful and shocking as it is, should – with emphasis on should - make it easier not to repeat the enormity of the horrors in the years 1933-1945. Since Theodor Herzl encouraged Lord Rothschild and the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, to embrace a Jewish colonization of Sinai, Palestine and Cyprus in the late 1890s, the historical evolution of Jewish settlement in Palestine was marked by the paired imperial concerns, Ethnicity and Land. As Uganda, proposed as a possible land to be settled illustrated, Zionism was a settler-colonial project as far as the British were concerned. The 1917 Balfour declaration was conceived to place a key region of the Middle East in the hands of people who “think like us” over the subordinate Arab population. (1) Apartheid South Africa in 1948 was a natural ally.
The Israeli State also born in 1948, brought Nationalist, and later, Religious identity into the plot with the 2018 Basic Law, challenged but endorsed by a July 2021 Supreme Court ruling. With its critical component of religious fanatics, notably Ben Gvir as Minister of National Security and Smotrich as Finance Minister, after the December 2022 government, misinterpretations of the Old Testament were used to justify ethnic cleansing. Weaponising Antisemitism Hatred of Israel and of Jews became part of the ideology of Islamic violent extremism that draws on a duty of jihad. ISIS identifies both Jews, ‘Crusaders’ (Christians) and Shi’a as the infidel enemy. The events in Gaza the West Bank and Lebanon have fed this hatred. At the same time, antisemitism in Britain has grown. Protection of Jewish communities has become a concern with Britain recently accused of culpable negligence in the face of growing antisemitism. But the statistics for extremist plots and attacks suggests such an accusation is misplaced. Britain for many years successfully countered all such terrorism. It is impossible to quantify the number of young people diverted from the path of violent extremism by the Government’s – much criticized – Prevent programme. But outside the Middle East between late 2017 and 2025, there were 14 terrorist attacks on Jews causing serious injury and death; 6 of these attacks occurred in the USA. In the same period no such attacks succeeded in the UK. The British police and security services stopped 43 late-stage terrorist attacks, targets usually unspecified. In June 2017 an ISIS cell killed eight people and injured 48 under London Bridge. Two weeks later, Darren Osborne drove a car into worshippers outside Finsbury Park Mosque, killing one and injuring nine. In November 2019 an ‘Islamic’ terrorist stabbed five, killing two, on London Bridge and there were three stabbings in Streatham by a “lone wolf” early in 2020. Local Jewish community protection services, such as Shomrin look after Jewish communities including Haredis - whose distinctive dress makes them particularly vulnerable – and Britain seemed, until the terrorist attack and deaths of 2 October 2025, outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Greater Manchester, to be doing a competent job at protecting its Jewish population of some 290,000. There is some suspicion that subsequent – mainly arson - attacks had some connection with Iran which was paying third parties. The number of UK antisemitic incidents per annum fluctuated only a little between 2017 and 2022. One case in 2020 involved three men, an amateur abduction of a Jewish record producer to extort a ransom, the choice motivated partly by antisemitism. In 2023, numbers jumped from 1,662 to 4,103, two-thirds occurring in the last quarter after the Hamas massacre in Israel and the beginnings of the resultant devastating war on the Palestinian population in Gaza. (numbers fell back to 3,258 in 2024). Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, Israel’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, and Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, immediately expressed their anxiety at the attack on the Manchester synagogue. They intimated, or said outright, that the “heat-wave of antisemitism” in Britain was caused by “anti-Israel” attitudes and policies of the Labour Government allowing pro-Palestinian protests which encouraged the perpetrator of the Manchester attack, Jihad-al-Shamie. Almost identical claims were made by a prominent Australian Rabbi about the Australian Labour Government after the 14 December 2025 Bondi beach Jewish killings. Several less lethal attacks on Jewish targets, 2025-2026, were may have been caused by Iran paying petty criminals to commit arson. In the real world, Shamie was an ISIS supporter whose lethal violence was probably triggered by the horrific slaughter and destruction in Gaza. Right-wing reprisal attacks on Muslims and arson followed. And with their horrific gunning down of Jews on Bondi beach, Naveed and Sajid Akram most likely were reacting to the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza under the direction of a Jewish State together with its history of denial of basic human rights to Palestinians, a new version of apartheid. The two terrorists claimed similar affiliations with ISIS. Nothing of course, can ever justify the taking of innocent life. But the extremist mind doesn’t easily make distinctions between perpetrators, innocent bystanders and people of other faiths, nor experience empathy. This was horrifically illustrated in Hamas’ killing of 1,200 and hostage-taking of civilians inside Israel on 7 October 2023. Violent and angry personalities find reasons, religious and otherwise, for acting violently and lethally. Some 40% of those indicted for religious terrorism in UK are known to suffer, or have suffered, from mental illness. One example, in 2020, Munawar Hussain, stabbed two women in the Burnley Marks & Spencer’s believing M&S funded Israel; he received a Section 37 Hospital Order under the Mental Health Act and was detained at a hospital in Merseyside. Gaza & the Genocide Convention In international law genocide has a precise definition. It is no intellectual exercise. Perpetrators can be, and are charged and imprisoned. South Africa’s complaint in late 2023 to the International Court of Justice, ICJ under the 1948 Genocide Convention (2), resulted in an International Criminal Court, ICC, warrant for the arrests, a year later, of Hamas’ Mohammad Dief, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Netanyahu has to watch whose airspace he flies over. Accusations of genocide in Gaza will have fed antisemitism. And, maybe, so have Pro-Palestine marches. The UN Independent International Commission of Enquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory 16 September 2025 provides a detailed, lengthy and evidence-backed legal analysis of the conduct of the Israeli government and armed forces. Their judgement was based on detailed analysis of actus reus, genocidal actions of the IDF, mass killing, withholding the means of life, food, from the Palestinian population in whole or in part, inflicting serious physical and mental harm, and the mens rea, evidence of the Government intention to commit genocide. Both proofs of actions and intention are needed to establish guilt of genocide. The Enquiry’s conclusion was: “the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”. This was put in context. “The events in Gaza since 7 October 2023 have not occurred in isolation... They were preceded by decades of unlawful occupation and repression under an ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and its replacement”. Were Governments to acknowledge that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, under international law they are required to intervene. The Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 were seen as Never Again events. The commission of another genocide is one of the most important moral challenges of our time. The response of Western Governments and many religious leaders has not reflected this reality. Israel passionately rejects the charge of genocide as yet another example of antisemitism in a long history of bias against Israel. There are reasons why the actions of Israel receive particular attention in a world not short of human rights violations. It is an ally, seen as an outpost of Western democracy in the Arab world. Israel’s Haaretz journalists are free to speak out clearly about the horror of Gaza. The framing of a dispute essentially about ownership of land as religious, by both Hamas and Israel’s own fanatics, with the presence of sacred sites, has widened the resonances of the conflict within and far beyond Israel and Palestine. After the 1990s and the failure of the Oslo Accords, Israel gained increased attention politically from the Left. Support for those seeking the right to self-determination in Zimbabwe and South Africa had been successful. After apartheid, achieving a secure, economically and politically sovereign Palestinian State seemed like the unfinished business of dealing with settler-colonialism in the twentieth century. The BBC suffers from accusations of singling out Israel. But the BBC covers Ukraine fully, and intermittently – regularly on the World Service - the Rohingya, Darfur, the Rwanda-DRC border area, Haiti, and South Sudan. The extensive coverage of Gaza brings a - contested - genocide of 2.2 million Palestinians into millions of homes. What else should we expect? Since the expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from some 500 of their villages in 1948, “picking on” Israel was overdetermined, and the Israeli claim has some merit. Used to describe documenting genocide in Gaza, it does not. Israel argued that journalists, for their own safety, must be under military control to enter Gaza. Reports from Gazans over mobile phones, interviews with UN personnel and doctors working in Gaza were the only available sources of information; their testimony was challenged as lies by Israeli government representatives. The role of local journalists, their courage and sacrifice of their lives to reveal the truth has been unprecedented. The numbers killed, like that of health workers, indicated deliberate targeting. Countless Jews around the world also spoke out against Zionist extremism and the slaughter in Gaza. Picking on Jewish communities in the UK, ‘casual’ antisemitism and abuse, creating a sense of insecurity, as well as Islamophobia (arson at a Sussex Mosque followed the Manchester attack) did require action from the Labour Government. The UN Enquiry Israel denounced the Commission’s conclusions as support for Hamas, biased, a “blood libel”; “outrageous” and “baseless”. The “blood libel” was a resonant reference to the mediaeval belief that Jews were killing Christian babies for their blood. The IDF claimed that by dropping leaflets and making phone calls to Palestinians to evacuate their homes -before reducing Gaza to rubble - they always tried to minimise civilian casualties, a regrettable consequence of all wars. Many Gazans were unable to move. There were no “safe areas”. Two years of almost unbroken bombing and shelling, a death toll of over 75,000, countless more buried under collapsed buildings, over 70% of verified deaths women and children, makes nonsense of any claim of restraint. The only choice left to ordinary Palestinians was to choose where they would probably die themselves or lose family members. Israel continued to insist they are fighting in self-defence when in reality only a few thousand Hamas fighters remained conducting guerrilla warfare while tanks and bombers made Gaza uninhabitable. Meanwhile on the West Bank Jewish settlers attacked Palestinians with impunity. Was the UN investigation biased? Of the three members of the September 2025 UN Independent Commission, Navanetham (Navi) Pillay, is a distinguished South African human rights lawyer who, as a judge, presided over the International Tribunal for Rwanda from 1995, and between 1999-2003 was its President. She prosecuted perpetrators of hate speech and genocide against Tutsi. Miloon Kothari, was convener of the Working Group on Human Rights in India and the UN (WGHR) from 2009 to 2014. From 1995-2000, Chris Sidoti served as Australian Human Rights Commissioner, and between 1992-1995 as the Australian Law Reform Commissioner. He co-founded the independent Special Advisory Council for Myanmar after the coup d’etat in 2021. His ongoing research is a study of the military’s genocide of the Rohingya. Within three days of the 7 October attack the UN described Hamas’ actions as war crimes. Navi Pillay’s record, her cluster of awards and honorary degrees from around the world, her successful campaign to make rape in conflicts legally a discrete war crime, speaks for itself. Like any highly experienced senior judge, her only consideration would have been to apply the Genocide Convention to the ascertainable facts coming out of Gaza. As it happens, I learned about the demanding requirements in the legal definition of genocide from Chris Sidoti. He impressed me with his erudition and integrity. Over 70% of Professors of Holocaust studies have joined them – reluctantly – in declaring it genocide in Gaza. A single, off-hand, angry comment by Kothari about Jewish “control” of the media, some time ago, warrants suspicion of potential bias, but, with no legal training of the three he was least likely to determine the Enquiry’s judgement. The Church Response Palestinians now have bitter grief and unimaginable suffering to digest: both genocide and a new form of Middle East apartheid. The road to their future has been obliterated. There is no going back to their past, or, for most, their homes. Jews globally face a sharp rise in antisemitism, and in Israel the loss of 1,200 fellow citizens, and several hundred soldiers at Hamas’ hands, along with their reputation for human rights violations being added to by that of being principal warmonger of the Middle East. Forty years ago, at the height of mobilization against apartheid and repression in South Africa, theologians saw contemporary events as a Kairos, a critical moment, one of great opportunity and great danger (3). For Palestinians now, the opportunity is to build on the weakness of Hamas and Trump’s – fickle – pressure on Israel. The danger is that accountability for genocide will be brushed under the negotiating table, the price for the peace-plan getting beyond phase one, a blow seriously undermining international law, possibly beyond repair. The Vatican responds to human rights violations and conflicts wherever they occur. So what has the Catholic Church said about Gaza - where a tiny Christian population still cling on, made famous by Pope Francis’ daily phone calls to Holy Family Church? On 29 September 2025, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, speaking at the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly, gave an informed global tour d’horizon including Ukraine, the Rohingya, Darfur, the Rwanda-DRC border area, Haiti, and Sudan, plus a clear statement of the ethical norms governing the behaviour of soldiers in battle. He did not use the terms genocide or war crimes. But on Sunday, 17 November 2024, Vatican News and the Italian daily La Stampa had quoted Pope Francis saying that some international experts had declared “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide", and asking for clarification. (4) Papal statements name no names and are traditionally generalised. In a message to the annual Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) conference on 30 June 2025, Pope Leo wrote how he was “ witnessing with despair the iniquitous use of hunger as a weapon of war”. Archbishop Gallagher in his UN speech said “military personnel remain fully responsible for any violation of the rights of individuals and peoples, or of the norms of international humanitarian law. Such actions cannot be justified by obedience to orders from superiors”. The IDF seemed likely to be the un-named military personnel in mind. Caritas Internationalis is the Church's highly experienced official humanitarian body with a presence all round the world. On 25 August 2025 Vatican News carried an article entitled Caritas Internationalis: Famine in Gaza Violates Genocide Convention, an excoriating denunciation of the deliberate starvation of the Gazan population. Yet aside from Independent Catholic News, the Caritas statement has hardly been reported. At the level of Bishops Conferences, engagement with public issues deemed political is tentative except for immigration (though both Francis and Leo put pressure on American bishops to speak out). In the case of Gaza, there is also the Church’s history of antisemitism demanding sensitivity in dealing with extremist Zionism. The Church advocates reconciliation, mediation, thus adopting a position between the contending parties, not taking sides. Its language has to be appropriate to the task. But the experience of the South African Dominican theologian, Albert Nolan OP in the exceptional context of apartheid, challenged this approach. “There is no neutral place between the tortured and the torturer”, he would say. The dilemma of Church leaders in such circumstances grows when there is reluctance to admit there are enemies. Or there is no clear idea of who or what is the enemy. Yet the language of the Magnificat at evening prayer at the Dominican priory in Johannesburg, was uncompromising and clearly took sides. “He pulls down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly”. Reconciliation is hard and complex. Easier to talk about in principle than practice. Reconciliation between, say, family members is different from reconciliation between nations and groups defined by different characteristics, cultures and histories. The other caveat, directly relevant and more often noted, is that the call for reconciliation can seem coercive unless concern for justice is integral to it - as traditionally advocated by the Church. As well as preaching the Gospel and promoting ethical norms, bishops seek to share their feelings: being “deeply shocked”, or “saddened”, with “hearts that go out to the victims”. But, any analysis of root causes, who is responsible and must be made accountable, is rarely shared. Israel and its outsize American-funded military force has the power and wields it. A commitment to, and implementation of, a Christian understanding of power should not be curtailed by inveterate caution. Unfortunately, in today’s world “speaking truth to power” can damage a nation’s economy and future. But not so for the Church. Truth, justice, and peace, we owe to the Palestinian people. Peaceful protest at the plight of Palestinians and at the version of apartheid practised by the Israeli State has to continue. What we immediately owe to the Jewish – and Muslim - community in Britain is effective action to counter hate-speech. March organisers should make it clear that chants that are antisemitic, and slogans such as “globalise the intifada” or “from the river to the sea” open to interpretation as advocating indiscriminate attacks on Jews or ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews, must cease. They distract from a central purpose of the marches: protest against the conduct of the Israeli State. Protest must highlight specific IDF war crimes and genocidal action such as deliberate starvation. Chief Rabbi Mirvis needs to make it absolutely clear that he condemns these actions. His failure to date to do so gives the impression to those who are ignorant of the widespread Jewish condemnation of the genocide that British Jews support the Israeli war. And, of course, the British government must decide whether it cares more about avoiding retribution from Trump or countering the collapse of international law and its conventions. (1) Marwan R. Buheiry ‘The Implications of the Israel-South Africa Alliance MECC Symposium Theology in Situations of Conflict Beirut, 5-8th December 1980 (2) https://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/the-pope-genocide-the-war-in-gaza 3) The Kairos Document: A theological comment on the political crisis in South Africa, Institute of Contextual Theology, September 1985 on behalf of Kairos theologians. 4). Pope Francis Hope never disappoints. Pilgrims towards a better world Hernán Reyes Alcaide, Edizioni Piemme 2025. |
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