Pope Francis and Bartholomew enter the church to the sound of chanting from priests, bow and kiss the Stone of Unction, where legend has it Jesus was laid out after his Crucifixion to be washed before burial.
Pope Francis and Bartholomew I kiss the Stone of Unction in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (screen capture: GPO)
Francis and Bartholomew are attending services in the Holy Sepulchre. (Must confess it’s all Greek to me.)
Israel’s Channel 2 News, meanwhile, now gets around to the papal visit 20 minutes into the evening broadcast, preoccupied as it was with covering the shooting in Brussels that killed four, including two Israelis.
The report highlights Abbas’s fairly incendiary Bethlehem speech, in which he accused Israel of seeking to force Christians out of the Holy Land, and the pope’s meeting with Palestinian children, one of whom told him that the Nakba — the catastrophe of Israel’s establishment in 1948 — was “the worst case of ethnic cleansing in human history.”
The Israeli TV report ends with a clip of Francis at the security barrier in Bethlehem and notes that since the pope said nothing as he stood at the wall, “there is no knowing what he was thinking.”
Help us report truthfully on social media
As a multimedia journalist, my job is to take the quality, fact-based journalism produced by The Times of Israel newsroom and make it accessible across every platform — from Instagram posts to podcasts to short-form videos.
This is how many, especially young people, consume news these days. But misinformation is rampant on social media. Our team at ToI produces accurate, responsible short-form reporting on Israel and the Jewish world.
If you believe in the importance of factual social media journalism, please consider joining our reader support group, The Times of Israel Community. Your financial support is essential to sustain responsible multimedia reporting.
We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.
That’s why we started the Times of Israel - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.
So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.
For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.
Thank you, David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel
From the Liveblog of
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on Google
