JERUSALEM (CWNews.com) - The Latin-rite Patriarch of Jerusalem issued his annual Christmas message on Tuesday, calling for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to work together to bring peace to the Holy Land in the new millennium.
Patriarch Michel Sabbah also warned Israel that its continued insistence that east Jerusalem belongs to Israel as part of an undivided Jerusalem would not bring peace to the holy city. Israel captured east Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war and the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority has vowed to make the capital of a future Palestinian state there, a major sticking point in peace negotiations for the region. He proposed that Israel and Palestinians share sovereignty over Jerusalem.
The patriarch also addressed a conflict between Christians and Muslims over plans to build a mosque on disputed land next to the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. "As we celebrate the Great Jubilee, we see with pain that the centres of the Jubilee in our land, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, are deprived of peace," he said.
"Jerusalem remains the center of the conflict," he said. "Bethlehem still suffers from instability and diverse limitations to freedom, and Nazareth became in these days the heart of a problem which tore the secular fraternity between its inhabitants, Christians and Muslims alike."
The patriarch's last message of the millennium was also less critical of Israel than in the past and called for a just peace. "Peace will be the fruit of justice. In our context, it should restore to the refugees their dignity and their rights, to the political prisoners their liberty, and to Jerusalem it should guarantee its sacred character," Patriarch Sabbah said.
Catholic World News Service Daily News Briefs