← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 18234 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2005-05-14
2005-05-14 07:33 | User Profile
[URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/14/opinion/14hertzberg.html?th&emc=th]New York Times[/URL] May 14, 2005 The Vatican's Sin of Omission By ARTHUR HERTZBERG
LAST week, Pope Benedict XVI vowed to Rome's former chief rabbi that he would renew the Vatican's commitment to Catholic-Jewish dialogue. The statement, which came at the same time that Germany unveiled its new Holocaust memorial in central Berlin, was but one of several gestures the new pope has extended toward a receptive Jewish community. The Israeli government, the Anti-Defamation League and the European Jewish Congress have welcomed these overtures and urged Benedict to continue his predecessor's work.
But from my own experience as the chairman, more than 30 years ago, of the first international Jewish delegation to meet formally with a comparable delegation from the Vatican, I am far from certain that a new age in the Jewish-Catholic relationship has dawned. At that Paris meeting in 1971, we asked the Vatican to acknowledge that it had remained silent while Europe's Jews were murdered. The Catholic delegation responded that it was not empowered to act.
The delegates were following the instructions of the Vatican's commission on theology, which held that the policies of Pope Pius XII and the church under the Nazis could not be questioned, because the church and its leader are, as the First Vatican Council declared in 1870, free of error on matters of doctrine and morality. When Cardinal Ratzinger became the head of that Vatican commission, he issued the same advice to Pope John Paul II, who pronounced the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis an unspeakable crime, but a crime by some Catholics, not by the church.
This position obscures the fact that in 1930's and 1940's Europe, the Roman Catholic Church was the only institution that possessed the moral stature and strength to denounce and forbid the murder of the Jews. It did not do so. And in all the years since, rather than acknowledging this failure to provide moral leadership in the critical hour, the Vatican has repeatedly claimed that while individual Catholics behaved sinfully or misunderstood what the church taught, the sin of letting the Holocaust happen at its doorstep need not haunt the church as an institution.
This remained the Vatican's view throughout the 1990's, even though both the German and the French bishops' national conferences issued ringing confessions of their wartime sins. In 1995 the German bishops pointed out that the "church community" had "looked too fixedly at the threat to their own institutions" and "remained silent about the crimes committed against Jews and Judaism."
The French bishops, for their part, stirringly concluded their September 1997 statement with the following words: "In the face of so great and utter a tragedy, too many of the church's pastors committed an offense, by their silence, against the church itself and its mission," and added: "This failing of the church of France and of her responsibility toward the Jewish people are part of our history. We confess this sin. We beg God's pardon, and we call upon the Jewish people to hear our words of repentance."
Not only did the Vatican fail to adopt a similar attitude of contrition, but Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Edward Cassidy, who was then in charge of Jewish-Catholic relations, devalued the French and German bishops' statements.
When he was elected, Benedict XVI knew that there were doubts about him within the Jewish community, and he tried to allay them. His supporters could point to some significant achievements from his quarter-century as guardian of Catholic orthodoxy. Under John Paul II, the Vatican forbade the teaching of anti-Semitism, for example, and Cardinal Ratzinger authorized the publication of a 2002 report expressing regret that certain New Testament passages condemning individual Jews had been used to justify anti-Semitism. He added, "It cannot be denied that a certain insufficient resistance by Christians to this atrocity is explained by the anti-Judaism present in the soul of more than a few Christians."
What Cardinal Ratzinger did not do, however, was to question the orthodox Catholic position that though individual Catholics can err morally, the church and the pope cannot. Until the Vatican reconsiders that outlook, one of the Holocaust's greatest wounds will continue to fester - namely, that the major European institution that stood for morality looked away from genocide. No amount of personal outreach toward the Jews and Judaism from the new pope will make the Jews forget that the institution of which he is the monarch has not come to terms with that history.
Arthur Hertzberg, avisiting professor of the humanities at New York University, is the author of "The Fate of Zionism."
2005-05-14 16:09 | User Profile
Walter:
Why post kike-tripe like this without comment? Do you seriously believe such Jewish propoganda? What Hitler said about Jews pales in comparison to what has been said by many Catholic saints over many centuries.
The jews' media fawned over JPII because he promoted their line. He loved to be flattered. They made him a hero, despite the auto-destruction of the Church that continued throughout his pontificate. In return, he catered to their victimology myths.
Maybe we should make Putin pope.
2005-05-16 05:23 | User Profile
namely, that the major European institution that stood for morality looked away from genocide
The Catholic Church came out of the Second World War in good shape [ with regard to the impending revolution from within ]. Even in the defeated countries of Europe the Church had increased its moral stature by resistance and martyrdom. Many bishops and thousands of priests and nuns were imprisoned; many died with their people, giving the Church new names to rejoice in ââ¬â Jozsef Mindszenty, Stefan Wysynski, Titus Brandsma, Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein. The only shadow on the Church's record, the charge that it could have done more to help the Jews, was a canard started in quarters that had done nothing at all.
In fact, the Church saved more than any other agency. Even in Germany, the Church's supposed "silence" about Nazi crimes is a calumny. Before Hitler came to power, the German bishops had condemned Nazi racism in a number of pastoral letters and public denunciations. Nazi party members were forbidden Christian burial. The Catholic Centre Party habitually allied itself with the Social Democrats in opposition to both Nazis and Communists in the pre-Hitler years.
In the election that brought Hitler to power, the traditionally Catholic areas of Germany voted against the Nazis [ Alphonse de Valk, C.S.B. The Canadian Catholic Review May, 1983, pp. 5, 143, correspondence. ] In 1937 Pius XI condemned ;the Nazis' racist philosophy in an encyclical written in German and smuggled into Germany, Mit Brennender Sorge, With Burning Sorrow. In 1941, the "Lion of Munster," the great bishop Clemens von Galen preached sermons so powerful against the Nazi euthanasia program that the Nazis halted the mass killings for a time. The bishop escaped arrest because he was protected by an aroused populace.
Pius XII destroyed his planned follow-up of Mit Brennender Sorge after a strong anti-Nazi statement by the Dutch bishops caused a retaliatory round-up of Dutch Jews during which the Carmelite philosopher Edith Stein was arrested, to die in Auschwitz. When the Church couldn't help the Jews, at least it joined them in prison.
Cardinal Stephan Wyszynski, in his prison memoirs, notes that he was the only member of his ordination class who escaped the concentration camp; seven died in Dachau; of the six who survived concentration camps, several soon died from the results of torture and medical experimentation. It is estimated that well over half of the Polish Catholic clergy were imprisoned by the Nazis. [ Stephan Cardinal Wyszynski, A Freedom Within (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, p.10 ]
After the war there was general goodwill between the Church and the governments of the West. The Church had considered the war against Hitler to have been a just war, and fought it with no qualms. Moreover, it came into the post-war period with a record of unswerving opposition to the other totalitarianism ââ¬â communism. There were, until very lately, few Catholic entries in the shameful history of fellow-travelling by western intellectuals.
Many bishops and priest went, like Cardinal Mindszenty, from Nazi to Communist jails. By 1950, the Church in China, succumbing to Teilhard's "good dose of Marxism" had been crush, its priest murdered or in prison, where some still languish, unsung by the selectively indignant, leftist, Catholic social justice organizations.
In the political arena, the post-war Christian Democratic parties kept Europe from going Communist; in the post-war Italian election, Pius XII used his enormous moral prestige to save Italy from electing a Communist government.
The floods of post-war refugees and immigrants looked to the Church for comfort and assistance in their new countries. Catholic schools, novitiates and seminaries overflowed. The horrors and war and the disillusionments of peace impelled many exceptional converts into the Church. There was an extraordinary flowering of the missionary effort in Africa, Asia and Oceania. The Catholic presence among the suffering and poor was everywhere expanding and effective. Half a century of unrelaxing vigilance had brought the Church to a pitch of discipline and doctrinal unanimity that it had never reached before and perhaps never will again.
It had taken four centuries but the magnificent reform of the Council of Trent was at last fully realized. Catholics treated with condescending amusement the perennial Protestant stories about loose-living priests and nuns and venal bishops. They had not been true for a long time. Now, may God have mercy on His Church, they are true again and those of us who grew up in the reformed Catholic Church find the shock almost unendurable.
Catholic society could not expect to remain immune to the disruption of manners and morals that accompanies major wars, or the general restlessness and impatience with authority in their aftermath. Yet the extent to which Catholics had been alienated by the pressures and disruptions of war and secularization has been exaggerated . . .
Anne Roche Muggeridge The Desolate City
2005-05-16 05:25 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Buster]Walter:
Why post kike-tripe like this without comment? Do you seriously believe such Jewish propoganda? .[/QUOTE] Buster, you know me better than that!
I posted this b/c it's important to know what the enemy is saying.
I provide no comment because you're all plenty smart to provide your own.
2005-05-16 13:38 | User Profile
Walter,
I'm relieved. Thanks.