Israel's Hebrew Catholics keep the faith

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

With just 400 faithful, the Hebrew-speaking Vicariate is dwarfed by the much larger Palestinian Christian community, estimated at some 180,000 in Israel and the Palestinian territories, which will be the main focus of the pope's eight-day visit starting Friday.

Established in 1955 by a small group which included several converted Jews, some of them Holocaust survivors, the vicariate largely keeps to itself in a country founded as a Jewish state in which Christians are often suspected of being missionaries.

The Hebrew prayers reverberate through the humble Catholic chapel in Jerusalem where whitewashed walls are adorned with a small metal cross and two pictures of Jesus lined with Hebraic inscriptions.

The worshippers are part of a tiny Hebrew-speaking Catholic community, some of them descendants of Holocaust survivors, that has quietly kept the faith in the heart of Jewish state for half a century and will remain in the shadows during the visit by Pope Benedict XVI.
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