To try successfully to separate religion and politics in the Middle East is an illusion. You can’t have one without the other. The brief three-day visit of Pope Francis I to the Holy Land in May 2014 is the latest example of the inevitable interaction between the two. His “pilgrimage for prayer” had significant political overtones in his plea for revitalizing the peace process between Israel and Palestinians. The official reason for the visit was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the meeting in Jerusalem in January 1964 of Pope Paul VI and the Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras.  This occasion was a historic one aiming to heal the acrimonious rift and mutual excommunication in the Christian Catholic Church that started with the different theological and geopolitical disputes in the Great Schism of 1054.  The meeting opened the way to reconciliation after 900 years of separation and antagonism between East and West, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the...(Read Full Article)