In a final communiqué at the end of a two-week-long meeting at the Vatican on the plight of Christians in the Middle East, the bishops also urged Israel not to use the Bible “to wrongly justify injustices,” apparently referring to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
But in a news conference Saturday, the archbishop in charge of the committee that drafted the communiqué, Cyrille Salim Bustros, appeared to go further, saying the Bible did not justify a Jewish presence in Israel.
“The concept of the promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians,” he said. “Sacred scripture should not be used to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestine.”
Archbishop Bustros, of Newton, Mass., belongs to the Greek-Melkite church, an Eastern Rite church whose bishops participated in the Vatican’s annual Middle East synod.
Israeli officials called on the Vatican to clarify the comment. “I think this ambiguity should be lifted by authorized voices from the Vatican,” said Yigal Palmor, the spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that the written communiqué was the official message of the meeting, not the remarks of Archbishop Bustros.
The communiqué calls for a two-state solution so that the Palestinians would have “an independent and sovereign homeland where they can live with dignity and security,” and “the State of Israel will be able to enjoy peace and security within internationally recognized borders.”
“If you read the text of the message,” Father Lombardi said, “it’s clear, it talks about the security of Israel and the rights of Palestinians who also have a right to their state.”
The statement also criticized some Zionists who use the Bible to justify the Jewish presence in the occupied territories, saying that “recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable.”
The message said that in a two-state solution, special status should be given to Jerusalem as a city holy to Christians, Jews and Muslims.
The bishops also blamed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for causing tensions that resulted in the exodus of Christians from the region. In recent decades, the number of Christians in the Middle East has declined radically, largely because of war, instability and changing economic conditions.
Mr. Palmor noted that Israel was the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population had risen in recent years, because of immigration.
The bishops called on countries across the region to foster the economic and security conditions for Christians to live securely, and urged Christians not to sell their property if they did emigrate.
The bishops also urged the Vatican to study allowing married priests from some Eastern Rite churches to practice outside of their own dioceses, including in Western rite countries, to help alleviate the shortage of priests.