I made this video — edited into ultra-slow-motion, frame by frame — when I lived on Mount Carmel, over the Cave of Saint Elijah, for a month, upon the invitation of the Discalced Carmelites, even while I was a chaplain at Lourdes, France. The dove showed up on the patio-roof where I was, and stayed with me for the longest time just as I was trying to figure out the most difficult of conundrums. At the time I was working on dialogue with both our Jewish brothers and various Muslims. Pope Francis has a great interest in both. The gorgeous singing that you hear in the video I recorded when, in the cave itself, a pilgrimage group started to sing. There’s a pretty constant flow of pilgrims who sing away at Mount Carmel as they move about Israel and Palestine. [Note that I shut down the blog advertised at the end of the video some four years ago.]
I think that the sorrow our Holy Father, as Cardinal Bergoglio (just a few months before his election as the Bishop of Rome), shared with our Jewish brothers for the events of Kristallnacht in the Catholic Cathedral of Buenos Aires was most appropriate. He was bitterly, horrifically condemned for this by some few. HSH defended the Holy Father.
In fact, I had occasion after that to record the memories of a wonderful Jewish lady some 93 years young about her recollections of surviving the Holocaust era in Europe. I intend to put up that interview, but wanted to wait until after this evening, when she will give a presentation in Western North Carolina. I was told that I absolutely must meet another wonderful Jewish lady who will also be there this evening. Perhaps we will be able to set up an appointment for another interview. Much of her family was put to death in the camps.
One of the first things Pope Francis did in his Pontificate was to re-iterate the main point of Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address on dialogue with Islam, which is that one is to use reason, the very thing that Islamicists absolutely refuse to do. But it has to be insisted upon. He did. In the next days, I’d like to post an analysis I did some years ago on Muslims and Nostra aetate of the Second Vatican Council. Some are afraid of this because, although they know Latin, they won’t do the work on the Latin of Nostra aetate, and rely on translations which are justifiably to be rejected.
Some reject the idea of dialogue altogether, as if they were somehow better than any others in the world just because they call themselves Catholic. But one is not saved because one calls oneself Catholic. One is saved because of sanctifying grace and gift of final perseverance, neither of which we can give ourselves. We’ve all crucified the Son of the Living God, the greatest Jewish Man ever to walk this earth, with our sins. If one does not want to share with others the greatest love of one’s life, one doesn’t know anything about the Son of the Living God, who, not seeing the Holy Spirit within such a one, will say: “I never knew you.” Wanting others to come to know the greatest love of our lives is not an insult to them.
Since the Holy Father wrote this to a Lutheran pastor about the upcoming 27 October meeting, we have hopes, don’t we? Remember when the oversight of the liturgy was taken from the OFM.Conv. at Assisi and handed over to a Cardinal under Pope Benedict? I remember an OFM.Conv. being furious over this. Good sign.
Accompany me, Father George David Byers, S.S.L., S.T.D., as I begin life as a Catholic Priest-Hermit by choice. Holy Souls Hermitage is dedicated to the sanctification of my fellow priests, bishops, deacons & seminarians going through the purgatory of this life or the next. Prayer and sacrifice go up, of course, for both Benedict XVI and the next Successor of Saint Peter. 
