Pope’s potential masterstroke takes charge in the Holy Land (Source cruxnow.com) Nothing any pope ever does, therefore, is as consequential as the people he chooses to put in charge. On Wednesday, one of the more striking picks so far by Pope Francis officially took up his new duties, when Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa formally entered Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate to become the Apostolic Administrator of the Latin Patriarchate, which includes Israel, Palestine and Jordan.

Often when an apostolic administrator is named, it’s seen as an interim move. That’s formally true with Pizzaballa as well, although the perception both in Rome and in the Middle East is that he’s very much Francis’s man, and his “interim” role could go on a while.

The choice of the 51-year-old Italian Franciscan and former Custodian of the Holy Land in June was a head-turning move by Francis. While there’s a long tradition of Italians being named the Patriarch of Jerusalem, for the last thirty years the office was held by Arabs – Michele Sabbah, who served from 1987 to 2008, is a Palestinian born in Nazareth, and Fouad Twal, who led from 2008 until this past June, is a Jordanian. The Patriarch of Jerusalem is, de facto, a primary spokesman and point of reference for Christians all across the Middle East, and therefore a key interlocutor with both the international community and also the important regional players, which obviously includes Israel. For the past thirty years, when many Israelis looked at Sabbah or Twal, no matter what they said or did, it was hard not to regard them at some gut level as the enemy – figures who represent peoples and points of view hostile to Israeli interests.

In general, because most senior churchmen in the region are Arabs, they naturally see the world through Arab eyes, and can at times come off as a bit partisan in their pronouncements on Palestine, on Syria and Iraq, and any number of other matters. Pizzaballa not only doesn’t carry the same baggage, but he’s seen as a friend of both Judaism and Israel – someone who knows Jewish tradition almost as well as the most learned rabbis, and whose long experience of living in Israeli society has given him an insider’s grasp of its dynamics. That’s not to say the new Apostolic Administrator is any kind of apologist for Israel. When a wave of attacks on Christian churches by militant Israeli settlers rolled through the country in 2012, Pizzaballa was pointedly critical of what he saw as a failed security and police response. He’s been outspokenly against the construction of Israel’s security barrier between the West Bank and Jerusalem, denounced by Palestinians as the “apartheid wall,” taking part in protests in 2015. On the other hand, Pizzaballa has been equally critical of what he regards as a tendency by Palestinian leaders on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to scapegoat Israel for all their problems. The fact that Pizzaballa is respected on both sides of the world’s most intractable divide was clear from the fact that Francis entrusted him with organizing his peace prayer in the Vatican gardens in June 2014, which brought together then-Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. In a word, what Pizzaballa brings is balance – a quality sorely lacking in the Middle East generally, and, at times, even in the region’s ecclesiastical leadership. What Francis has done is to give the church in the Holy Land a chance to make a clean start under the leadership of someone who can speak credibly, and sympathetically, to everyone.