Page 29 - October 7 - Teresa Pirola

‘world peace’ did not cut through as a clear act of compassion for and solidarity with Israelis and with the Jewish people. Buried within comments deploring ‘the cycle of violence’, they exuded a wearied sense of ‘more of the same’ in the Holy Land.
October 7 Was Different
But October 7 wasn’t the same. Over decades, Israelis have suffered intifadas, war, small-scale massacres, and day- to-day isolated terror incidents of knifings, shootings and car rammings by those who will their disappearance. But October 7 took this deplorable violence to another level. Such was the scale and sadistic brutality of what occurred that it rivalled many of the antisemitic atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Within hours of what was meant to be a relaxed Jewish holy day, Jews everywhere were plunged back into their greatest collective trauma in living memory.
October 7 should have been a ‘red alert’ call to action for Catholics. Those traumatic Jewish memories just mentioned include the recall of Christian complicity in the Holocaust and the centuries-long history of anti-Jewish sentiment, including its violent consequences for many Jews dwelling in Christian societies. One might have expected the events of October 7 to cut like a razor through the conscience of the Catholic Church. One might have expected to see inspirational scenes of Catholic bishops, priests, deacons, religious and lay leaders standing shoulder to shoulder with rabbis and their congregations at synagogues, leading their Catholic people in laying wreaths outside Jewish properties, issuing public letters of condolence and condemning the attacks by Hamas.
Instead, in the aftermath of more Jews being murdered in a single terror attack than at any time since the Holocaust, it appears that most Catholic leaders in Australia did not
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