Holocaust denier, terrorist, and corrupt politician Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has been called an "angel of peace" by Pope Francis.

This after the Vatican formally recognized the "state" of Palestine earlier in the week.

In other Vatican news, the pope announced that "Satan was just a misunderstood archangel" and shouldn't be judged too harshly.

Voice of America:

Pope Francis praised Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as an "angel of peace'' during a meeting Saturday at the Vatican that underscored the Holy See's warm relations with the Palestinians.
 
Francis made the compliment during the traditional exchange of gifts at the end of an official audience in the Apostolic Palace. He presented Abbas with a medallion and explained that it represented the "angel of peace destroying the bad spirit of war.''

The punchline to the old joke "is the pope Catholic?" is no longer funny.

Francis said he thought the gift was appropriate since "you are an angel of peace.'' During his 2014 visit to Israel and the West Bank, Francis called both Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres men of peace.
 
Abbas is in Rome for the canonization Sunday of two 19th-century nuns from what was then Ottoman-ruled Palestine. The new saints, Mariam Bawardy and Marie Alphonsine Ghattas, are the first from the region to be canonized since the early days of Christianity.
 
Abbas on Saturday offered Francis relics of the two new saints.
 
Church officials are holding up the new saints as a sign of hope and encouragement for Christians in the Middle East at a time when violent persecution from Islamic extremists has driven many Christians from the region of Christ's birth.
 
Abbas' visit also comes days after the Vatican finalized a bilateral treaty with the "state of Palestine'' that made explicit its recognition of Palestinian statehood.
 
The Vatican said it had expressed "great satisfaction'' over the new treaty during the talks with the Palestinian delegation. It said the pope, and later the Vatican secretary of state, also expressed hopes that direct peace talks with Israel would resume.
 
"To this end, the wish was reiterated that with the support of the international community, Israelis and Palestinians may take with determination courageous decisions to promote peace,'' a Vatican statement said.

The only "peace" Abbas is interested in making with the Israelis is the peace of the grave.  Can it be that the pope is ignorant of the fact that Palestinians – both Fatah and Hamas – do not recognize that the state of Israel even exists and that their utlimate goal is to destroy the Jewish state?

This sort of obtuseness about the Palestinians is now the de facto position of most of the left in Europe.  To ignore the serious, fanatical anti-Semitism of Abbas – a man who wrote a dissertation titled "The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism" – is beyond belief for any educated person in the world.  But the pople's warped worldview that praises Holocaust deniers while berating climate change "deniers" expresses the hypocrisy and moral blindness of the left in Europe and elsewhere.