RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, before embarking on a three-day visit to Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel, Pope Francis stated that his trip would be “strictly religious.” A key reason for his short sojourn, he said, was to “pray for peace in this land that has suffered greatly.”

After arriving, however, he spent less time engaged in prayer than in politics.

This would have been completely appropriate had the bishop of Rome and the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church addressed the religious nature of the Islamist war being waged against Christians and Jews. It would have befitted the head of the Holy See to stand at the believed-to-be sites of Jesus’ birth and baptism and bemoan the fate of his flock at the hands of Muslim fanatics bent on subjugating all “infidels.” It would have been in keeping with his mission to reassure the world’s Christians that good will prevail over evil.

Sadly, this is not how the pope’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land panned out. Though he did mention the plight of his people when in Amman last Saturday, it was to praise Jordan’s “climate of serene coexistence” between Muslims and Christians.

“I thank the authorities of the kingdom for all they are doing,” he said, while meeting with King Abdullah II and Queen Rania at their palace. “And I encourage them to persevere in their efforts to seek lasting peace for the entire region. This goal urgently requires that a peaceful solution be found to the crisis in Syria, as well as a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

On Sunday, the pontiff went to Bethlehem. There he met with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, whom he called “a man of peace.”

As always, Abbas and his cronies put their best lies forward, undoubtedly denying Christian flight in droves from Palestinian-controlled areas on the one hand, while blaming Israel for the phenomenon on the other.

The remaining tiny Christian minority in Bethlehem was then treated to a mass delivered by the pope at Manger Square. But his words were drowned out by the muezzin of the Omar Mosque calling Muslims to prayer and blasting “Allahu akbar” (God is great) into a loudspeaker.

For visual effect, a mural painted in honor of the pope showed the baby Jesus swaddled in a keffiyeh next to his earthly father, Joseph, whose head was covered in the style of late Palestinian Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat. This complemented the dozens of posters placed strategically around the city comparing Palestinian suffering to that of Jesus.

It was all a perfect lead-in to taking the pontiff to see children in the Dheisheh refugee camp. You know, those kept in squalor for decades by the PLO and exploited for international sympathy, fundraising and Israel-bashing purposes.

On the way, his motorcade stopped at the separation barrier, erected by Israel to keep Palestinian suicide bombers at bay. There, against the backdrop of anti-Israel graffiti using Holocaust imagery, the pope put his head against the wall and prayed for peace.

He also prayed for peace at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Monday. As is customary, he wrote a note and placed it in a crack in the Wall. Ignoring the ancient ban on reading other people’s mail, instituted by Jewish legal scholar and Talmudist Rabbeinu Gershom, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation removed the note and released its contents.

As a result, we now know what Francis penned on official papal stationary — the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

It is the height of irony, then, that before returning to Rome, he invited “peacemakers” Abbas and outgoing Israeli President Shimon Peres to the Vatican “to pray with [him].” The three-way session is to take place on June 8.

Peres is the epitome of “forgiving those who trespass against us” before defeating them — an attitude that has had dire consequences. And the only peacemaking in which Abbas has engaged is with Hamas, a terrorist organization that considers the killing of Jews and Christians a religious imperative.

Praying to God to “deliver us from evil” is meaningless if we excuse and court it. Welcoming a perpetrator and his apologist into the Vatican is not only incomprehensible in this context. It constitutes the Catholic Church’s spiritual, moral and political abandonment of the millions of Christians living in perpetual fear of their Muslim persecutors.

In a Vatican Radio broadcast on Wednesday, Francis referred to his trip to the Holy Land as a “great grace.”

I’m no theologian, but I beg to differ.

Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”