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27th February 2009 Charles J. Brown
12:34 pm

The Catholic Church’s Struggle with Modernism


A few years ago, my family gathered for my mother’s 85th birthday.   It was a nice get together — my brother, sister, and I don’t have the chance to be in the same zip code very often.  But as is the case with most siblings, we have our differences.  My sister and I tend to be much more progressive and my brother is quite conservative — and an incredibly devout Catholic.

I have no problem with that, though I strongly disagree with him on most (but not all) issues.  But during this particular get-together, we somehow got into a discussion of the Catholic church and World War II.  I had just read Hitler’s Pope, John Cornwell’s history of Pope Pius XII’s relationship with Nazi Germany, and suggested that that Pope had not necessarily acquitted himself well.  To say my brother vehemently disagreed was an understatement.  I’m guessing that, to this day, he would argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and to this day, I continue to believe he is in denial about the dark side of Catholic history.

Unfortunately, he’s not the only one.  Pope Benedict isn’t so good either.

Just to be clear, the Catholic Church has, over the past several decades, played an important role in promoting human rights — it has, particularly under the leadership of Pope John Paul II, who may have done more to end authoritarian rule in Eastern Europe than any other individual.  The Church has, since Vatican II, had a series of popes willing to speak out on behalf of the poor and the dispossed, those victimized by dictatorial rule and those suffering from the horrors of war.

But if it would be incorrect to paint the Church as a negative influence on world events, it would be as profoundly mistaken to suggest that it has been only a force for good.  In some ways, the Vatican continues to reflect the premodern outlook that dominated Church thinking up until the Second Vatican Council — an outlook that brought the world the Inquisition, the blood libel, and complicity in the Spanish and Portugeuse “conquests” of the new world.

The Church’s more recent actions certainly don’t rise to that level of iniquity, but they haven’t exactly reflected an interest in the universality of human rights.  At the UN and other international fora, the Vatican has allied itself with fundamentalist Muslim countries in opposing equality for gays and lesbians, sensible approaches to birth control, and other basic human rights. And the continued drive to make Pius XII a saint has generated considerable outrage among Jewish groups.

In that context, the Vatican’s failure to vet Richard Williamson, the excommunicated Holocaust-denying Bishop, is not a surprise.  The Vatican simply does not understand that its tortured past does not incline those outside the Churge to assume that its intentions are for the best.  In fact, I think it’s fair to say: They. Just. Don’t. Get. It.

I sincerely believe that Benedict did not know about Williamson’s track record, and that his decision was the product of bad advice, not bad intentions.  But I also believe that Benedict was determined to bring the Lefebvre ultra-ultraconservatives back into the fold, and that he wasn’t really interested in the details.

Keep in mind that Lefebvre and his followers argue that the Church lost its way as a result of Vatican II (a view that Benedict does not entirely dispute), so much so that they continue to insist on celebrating the Mass in Latin.  They want to return the Church to its premodern roots — they are quite literally more Catholic than the pope.

To its credit, the Vatican is now demanding a full recantation from Williamson:

The Vatican said on Friday that an apology by a traditionalist bishop who denied the Holocaust fell short of meeting the Holy See’s demand for a full and public recanting of his position.

British Bishop Richard Williamson, whose comments in January caused a worldwide uproar among Jews and Catholics, on Thursday issued a statement in which he said: “To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize.”

But chief Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Williamson’s statement “does not seem to respect the conditions” set forth by the Vatican on February 4, when it ordered Williamson to “in an absolutely unequivocal and public way distance himself from his positions” regarding the Holocaust.

But I still have to wonder why they’re even trying.  Why doesn’t Benedict just come out and say, “Enough already — we’re not going to bring Willilamson back.  He’s still excommunicated, but now it’s for more than just a few minor violations of canon law.  And I want to apologize to all those who have been hurt by our mistaken attempt to return him into the fold.  We are saddened and chastened by our mistakes.”  Instead, the Church keeps saying to Williamson, “Just say the words and everything will be okay.”

I’m sorry, Your Holiness, but it won’t be okay.  Even if Williamson were to recant, the reality is that he will have done so only to get back in your good graces.  And what happens when, sometime down the road, he says equally outrageous things?  What will you do then?

And why in the world would you want to have anyone in the Church who once denied the Holocaust?  When does outrage outweigh forgiveness?  When does the denial historical memory take precedent over the recognition  theological common ground?

Williamson is not merely a sinner.  He’s a relativist (something the current Pope has roundly and repeatedly condemned when it comes from the left) and a scoundrel.  And to paraphrase the Pope’s spiritual Father, he knows exactly what he is doing.

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  1. 1 On February 27th, 2009, KMD said:

    “When does outrage outweigh forgiveness? When does the denial historical memory take precedent over the recognition theological common ground?

    “Williamson is not merely a sinner. He’s a relativist (something the current Pope has roundly and repeatedly condemned when it comes from the left) and a scoundrel. And to paraphrase the Pope’s spiritual Father, he knows exactly what he is doing.”

    Wow. You’d think that forgiveness is one of the core concepts of Christianity….oh wait.

    I’d recommend that Mr. Brown consult a number of works which have corrected the rampant mistakes of “Hitler’s Pope” which even Cornwell has backed off of (Cornwell should have stuck with studies of Coleridge).

    Despite saying all this, I think Mr. Brown is spot on. I think the Holy Father was going all out to extend full communion to the Pius X Society gang.

  2. 2 On February 27th, 2009, Kevin Fraser said:

    I am afraid you are confusing Cornwall’s marketing, which feeds into fashionable anti-Catholicism, with reality. Whatever your reason for this, it makes a powerful statement when held under the light of the historical facts Cornwall failed to mention.

    First point: Your congratulatory agreement with Cornwall, unimpeded by cross-checking of facts. Perhaps you consider Cornwall to be infallible on matters of Papal collusion with Nazis? After all, they published it in a book, so it MUST be true, right?

    No less an authority than Rabbi Dalin has set forth the facts Cornwall missed. If, as you seem to think, Pius XII was such an enemy of Jews, the diplomat Pinchas Lapide’s 1967 book Three Popes and the Jews, must have been full of lies. Lapide was Israeli consul in Milan and an interviewer of Italian Holocaust survivors. In his book, he called Pius XII “instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.”

    Are you prepared to dispute that?

    If you and Cornwall are right, then why in the world — some 14 years after the end of WWII — did Albert Einstein, Moshe Sharett, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, and many other prominent Jews publicly express their gratitude to this Pope upon his death? Gratitude for what? Helping the Nazis?

    You’re prepared to dispute this and all other historical, documented facts about how carefully and skillfully Pius worked to protect and save Jews, in Cornwall’s favor?

    You call yourself a diplomat. You would do well to study the diplomatic record of Roncalli.

    Are you prepared to claim Golda Meir was just a patsy when she said about Pius XII: “When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the pope was raised for its victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out about great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.”

    What do you think of this record observed by Rabbi Dalin?

    =======
    • Of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as papal nuncio between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology.

    • In March 1935, he wrote an open letter to the bishop of Cologne calling the Nazis “false prophets with the pride of Lucifer.”

    • That same year, he assailed ideologies “possessed by the superstition of race and blood” to an enormous crowd of pilgrims at Lourdes. At Notre Dame in Paris two years later, he named Germany “that noble and powerful nation whom bad shepherds would lead astray into an ideology of race.”

    • The Nazis were “diabolical,” he told friends privately. Hitler “is completely obsessed,” he said to his long-time secretary, Sister Pascalina. “All that is not of use to him, he destroys; . . . this man is capable of trampling on corpses.” Meeting in 1935 with the heroic anti-Nazi Dietrich von Hildebrand, he declared, “There can be no possible reconciliation” between Christianity and Nazi racism; they were like “fire and water.”

    • The year after Pacelli became secretary of state in 1930, Vatican Radio was established, essentially under his control. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano had an uneven record, though it would improve as Pacelli gradually took charge (extensively reporting Kristallnacht in 1938, for example). But the radio station was always good—making such controversial broadcasts as the request that listeners pray for the persecuted Jews in Germany after the 1935 Nuremberg Legislation.

    • It was while Pacelli was his predecessor’s chief adviser that Pius XI made the famous statement to a group of Belgian pilgrims in 1938 that “anti-Semitism is inadmissible; spiritually we are all Semites.” And it was Pacelli who drafted Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, “With Burning Concern,” a condemnation of Germany among the harshest ever issued by the Holy See. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, Pacelli was widely lampooned in the Nazi press as Pius XI’s “Jew-loving” cardinal, because of the more than fifty-five protests he sent the Germans as the Vatican secretary of state.

    To these must be added highlights of Pius XII’s actions during the war:

    • His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, rushed out in 1939 to beg for peace, was in part a declaration that the proper role of the papacy was to plead to both warring sides rather than to blame one. But it very pointedly quoted St. Paul—“there is neither Gentile nor Jew”—using the word “Jew” specifically in the context of rejecting racial ideology. The New York Times greeted the encyclical with a front-page headline on October 28, 1939: “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism.” Allied airplanes dropped thousands of copies on Germany in an effort to raise anti-Nazi sentiment.

    • In 1939 and 1940, Pius acted as a secret intermediary between the German plotters against Hitler and the British. He would similarly risk warning the Allies about the impending German invasions of Holland, Belgium, and France.

    • In March 1940, Pius granted an audience to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister and the only high-ranking Nazi to bother visiting the Vatican. The Germans’ understanding of Pius’s position, at least, was clear: Ribbentrop chastised the pope for siding with the Allies. Whereupon Pius began reading from a long list of German atrocities. “In the burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop,” the New York Times reported on March 14, Pius “came to the defense of Jews in Germany and Poland.”

    • When French bishops issued pastoral letters in 1942 attacking deportations, Pius sent his nuncio to protest to the Vichy government against “the inhuman arrests and deportations of Jews from the French-occupied zone to Silesia and parts of Russia.” Vatican Radio commented on the bishops’ letters six days in a row—at a time when listening to Vatican Radio was a crime in Germany and Poland for which some were put to death. (”Pope Is Said to Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France,” the New York Times headline read on August 6, 1942. “Vichy Seizes Jews; Pope Pius Ignored,” the Times reported three weeks later.) In retaliation, in the fall of 1942, Goebbels’s office distributed ten million copies of a pamphlet naming Pius XII as the “pro-Jewish pope” and explicitly citing his interventions in France.

    • In the summer of 1944, after the liberation of Rome but before the war’s end, Pius told a group of Roman Jews who had come to thank him for his protection: “For centuries, Jews have been unjustly treated and despised. It is time they were treated with justice and humanity, God wills it and the Church wills it. St. Paul tells us that the Jews are our brothers. They should also be welcomed as friends.”
    =====

    This little bit of reality clearly shows that you certainly didn’t risk trying a Google search for any possible information opposing your Cornwall-fed views against Pius XII. Anti-Catholicism is every bit as reprehensible as anti-semitism, and it’s a serious drawback in the diplomat business.

    Second point….you wrote:

    Instead, the Church keeps saying to Williamson, “Just say the words and everything will be okay.”

    …followed by your self-righteous fantasy of putting words in a pope’s mouth…

    You are misrepresenting Church teaching on forgiveness. That misrepresentation of course goes hand in hand with your anti-Catholicism. In addition to the words spoken, a genuine contrition and firm purpose of amendment are required to be observed by the priest acting in persona christi for sacramental absolution to be given.

    The distinction you don’t grasp is church teaching vs headline-grabbing. The Church doesn’t need the press, no matter how much you may wish it did.

    You went on:
    “the reality is that he will have done so only to get back in your good graces. ”

    This is strictly specious, speculative, and baseless of you. I don’t pretend to know what Williamson was thinking. You do? What kind of a diplomat are you?

    You have done a great service however, in demonstrating with textbook precision how and why some bloggers won’t risk coming into contact with facts that might interfere with their anti-Catholic axe grinding.

    I believe such transparent and insistent anti-Catholicism as yours amply illustrates the meaning of the word ‘bigotry.’

    I don’t know if you will allow this comment or not, but your brother most definitely knows something you don’t. If you do allow it, then I must concede you are willing to admit your error and learn from it.

  3. 3 On February 28th, 2009, Rev. Ray Dubuque said:

    Kevin Fraser
    “No less an authority than Rabbi Dalin has set forth the facts Cornwall missed. . .
    Are you prepared to dispute that?”
    I challenge anyone who is impressed by “No less an authority than Rabbi Dalin.” to read BOTH Rabbi Dalin’s
    “Myth of Hitler’s Pope” and the two books which he claims to rebut, namely “Hitler’s Pope” by Catholic historian John Cornwell and “A Moral Reckoning” by Jewish historian Daniel Jonah Goldhaggen, and to then swear on the bible that Dalin work compares favorably with that of either Cornwell or Goldhaggen.

    The ONLY thing Dalin has going for him is that he is a “Rabbi”.
    However, considering the fact that he is professor at a CATHOLIC institition and is championing the position that Jews owe the Catholic Church an apology for being disturbed by the fact that 6 million Jews were deliberately murdered under the direction of a nation that was 1/3rd Catholic and 2/3rds other Christians, why shouldn’t he be called a “Catholic Rabbi”?
    See my http://JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/Hitlerspope.html for MORE on this important issue.
    And see http://JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/NaziLeadership.html, where I show that a great many of the worst Nazis leaders were Roman Catholics, not one of whom was ever excommunicated for planning and executing the cruel murders of 10 million innocent people. including millions of Catholics, as well as 6 million members of the rival Jewish faith.

  4. 4 On February 27th, 2010, ThomJude said:

    Bishop Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust was an individual major flaw, but it should not color the entire Society of Saint Pius X movement. Novus Ordo modernists who seek to destroy the Church by making it even more “Protestant” than it has become since Vatican II, have used the Williamson case as a reason to condemn SSPX and traditionalism in general. This is unspeakable and snakelike but oh-so-Novus Ordo! SSPX holds the core of “real” Catholicism. The Novus Ordo Mess has wrecked immense damage, from the destruction of Catholic Church architecture, to the empty seminaries and convents among Newchurch religious orders, while traditionalist seminaries and convents are BOOMING!

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