Serpents Blood? Pope Declares Judaism as the Holy Root of Christianity

This news article below casts an interesting slant on some of Bill’s research into a connection between the Popes and Judaism, which will be in his forthcoming book Serpents Blood (not sure of an estimated publication date for this yet).

Pope: Judaism Is the ‘Holy Root’ of Christianity

Pope Francis has praised Jews for keeping their faith despite the Holocaust and other “terrible trials” throughout history, and reaffirmed Judaism as the “holy root” of Christianity.
Francis made the statements in an unprecedented open letter to Eugenio Scalfari, a prominent Italian atheist and founding editor of the liberal newspaper La Repubblica.
The letter, published on the front page of La Repubblica on Wednesday, came in response to editorials written by Scalfari that had directly addressed the pontiff on issues of faith and religion, the Times of Israel reported.
Francis’ reply affirmed the necessity of an open dialogue with nonbelievers that he called “right and proper and precious.”
He also responded to Scalfari’s query about “what we should say to our Jewish brothers about the promise made to them by God: Has it all come to nothing?”
Francis called this “a question that challenges us radically as Christians,” adding that with the help of God, “we have rediscovered that the Jewish people are still for us the holy root from which Jesus germinated.”
The Pope said that, particularly through his close ties with Jews in his native Argentina, he had often, in prayer, “also questioned God, especially when my mind went to the memory of the terrible experience of the Shoah [Holocaust].”
He added that: “What I can say to you, with the Apostle Paul, is that God’s fidelity to the close covenant with Israel never failed and that, through the terrible trials of these centuries, the Jews have kept their faith in God. And for this, we shall never be sufficiently grateful to them.”
By doing so, Francis noted, Jews served as an example for Christians. “Precisely by persevering in the faith of the God of the Covenant,” he said, they “called all, also us Christians, to the fact that we are always waiting, as pilgrims, for the Lord’s return.”
Francis has repeatedly emphasized that “a Christian cannot be an anti-Semite,” and that to be a good Christian, “it is necessary to understand Jewish history and traditions.”

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G.d'Annunzio

A noble race is not one that creates a God in its own image but one that creates also the song wherewith to do Him homage. Every rebirth of a noble race is a lyric force, every sentiment that is common to the whole race, a potential lyric; music, the language of ritual, has power, above all else, to exalt the achievement and the life of man. Does it not seem that great music has power to bring spiritual peace to the strained and anxious multitude? The reign of the human spirit is not yet. ‘When matter acting on matter shall be able to replace man’s physical strength, then will the spirit of man begin to see the dawn of liberty’: so said a man of Dalmatia of our own Adriatic, the blind seer of Sebenico.