The Roman Catholic Apology Beirdd Sun Oct 4 18:39:26 1998 While it has not yet hit the Summerlands boards to a great degree, one of the current hot topics on the pagan and druidic groups is the upcoming “apology” on the part of the Roman Catholic Church for the past persecutions of Jews and pagans. Even before this document has been published, there are those who are claiming that it does not go far enough. In my opinion, this posturing is a serious mistake, betraying a lack of foresight, revealing a significant lack of understanding and showing obstinacy on the part of some whom, I have come to learn, make self-righteousness and a popular prejudice the core and driving force of their identity, if not their spirituality. I would hope that people today would do better. It’s obvious that the Catholic Church is trying, if not anyone else.*p*I have some things to point out that may help to focus the discussion, should it ever occur here, and to bring it to a profitable conclusion.*p*(1) On the subject of Catholic complicity in the Holocaust: This idea did not even exist until 1963, almost 20 years after the fall of the Nazis. In that year, a play by Rolf Hochuth entitled “The Deputy” appeared. “The Diary of Anne Frank” had just been published and Adolf Eichmann and recently been brought to justice in Israel. People needed to vent the horror whose memory these events had caused to resurface. Hochuth’s play, an extreme example of character assassination, presented a mythology in which Pope Pius XII was depicted as a coward, if not a secret Nazi, and that the Church’s failure to speak out against the Nazi’s made them partners in the Holocaust.*p*“The Deputy,” a work of fictional drama, became a resource for newsmen and artists alike: The New York Times decried (20 years after the events) the Pope’s “unctuous silence;” the Bronx Museum of Art displayed a painting called “Nazi Butchers” which included an image of the Pius XII in papal regalia. This mythology grew until it quickly began to be perceived as the truth, an assumption which obviously exists to this day.*p*While a refutation of these images and accusations would fill a book (and have) here are a few main points:*p* a) Under the direction of Pius XII, huge humanitarian efforts were taken by the Catholic Church to protect Jews and alleviate the suffering of all victims of the Nazis. After the fall of Mussolini’s government, which had always been slow to round up its own citizens no matter their religion, the Nazis who filled the power void stepped up the pace of executions and deportations. The Church responded by increasing its own program to protect potential victims.*p* b) Even before Hitler came into power, the Catholic Church in Germany, with the blessing of the Vatican, opposed the Nazi movement. Hermann Goering himself complained in 1935 that “Catholic believers carry away but one impression from attendance at divine services and that is that the Catholic Church rejects the institutions of the Nationalist State...hardly a Sunday passes but that they abuse the so-called religious atmosphere of the divine services in order to read pastoral letters on purely political (anti-government) subjects.” For this, Catholic lay leaders were murdered in their homes, Catholic organizations and schools were closed, and priests and nuns in the hundreds were charged with treason and sent to concentration camps.*p* c) In 1937, the Vatican condemned the theory and practice of Nazism in Pope Pius Xi’s encyclical “Mit brennender Sorge.” This was at a time when Western leaders, including Britain and the U.S., were still trying to appease Hitler.*p* d) When Nazis began rounding up Jews in Germany, the German bishops protested by reiterating their agreement with the papal statement, “Whoever wears a human face owns rights which no power on earth is permitted to take away...We are all spiritual Semites.”*p* e) Pius XII became pope just before the war began. Preferring actions to words in the emergent threat of genocide, the Vatican provide false passports by the thousands (as well as legal Vatican City ones) -- this at a time when Britain and the U.S. were still refusing to accept refugees. Catholic priests, nuns and lay people were organized to hide Jewish refugees and to provide an “underground railroad” to safety, often paying for their efforts with their lives, while the West was still using rumors of death camps to stir up war monies. Vatican diplomats were dealing with occupation leaders to try to prevent people from being put on the death trains; at this time, the Allies were still refusing to bomb the rail lines to the camps.*p* f) In many cases it was easier for the Church to save the lives of “Catholic Jews,” those who had received baptism in places where forged documents were impractical. This did not prevent their continued efforts for all Jews. When the Bishop of Utrecht was ordered by the Nazis to stop speaking out against the deportation of Jews, he refused. In retaliation, the Nazis sent all the Catholic Jews of Holland to their deaths, including Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun and mystic who was a Jewish convert. In any case, it is interesting to note that after the war ended the Chief Rabbi of Rome, who had become a friend of Pius XII, converted to Catholicism as an acknowledgement of the Catholic effort to save the lives of his congregation.*p* g) When, after the war, Pius XII was asked if he thought his efforts were enough, he answered, “No doubt a protest would have gained me the praise of the civilized world, but it would have submitted the poor Jews to an even worse persecution.” He should know. He was spent the last years of the war under virtual house arrest by the Gestapo, who occupied the Vatican as “ambassadors.”*p* h) While Germany was a Christian country at the start of the war (the majority being Lutheran) it soon became evident that traditional religion had no place in the lives and plans of the leaders of Nazism, who are known to have sought to create a “German religion” for themselves which looked back to Germany’s pre-Christian past, as well as into fringe mysticism of many types, including the Jewish Kabbalah! It is abhorrent to think that any religious or even merely human group would be able to consider these monsters among their membership. Yet, for argument’s sake, while most of the German people may have remained Christian in word if not deed, their leaders had certainly decided to cloak themselves as “neo-pagans.” Their insult to humanity really knew no bounds -- they were sacrilegious monsters no matter the belief they claimed.*p*------------------------------*p*(2) On the subject of the sins of the Catholic Church against pagans: that terrible things happened is unquestionable and forgiveness should be sought, given and received, even despite the fact that we are considering events in a very different time and place than that to which we are familiar, in which heresy and treason could be two faces of the same “crime” and ignorance was rampant and, as always, mutual. I do wonder, however (and this is only slightly tongue in cheek), if an apology of the Church to pagans would be followed by an apology from pagans to the Church. After all, there is a Catholic/Christian martyrology that documents the lives of thousands of martyrs who died at the hands of “pagans!”*p*While it is difficult to ascertain exact numbers, since a common practice was to eliminate a community but to note the names of only its leaders (bishops and clergy) there are the following to remember:*p* a) The Roman persecutions (52-312) which took somewhere between 400,000 to 1.8 million lives.*br* *br* b) The persecution under Julian the Apostate, who renounced Christianity and named himself a “born-again pagan” (361-363) in which at least 300 died.*p* c) The Persecution in Persia (339-628) in which as many as 16,000 were killed.*p* d) Persecutions under the Goths (349-370), Visigoths (370-586), Vandals (422-523) and Lombards (568-590) which claimed thousands.*p*Note that this list does not include persecutions by Jews, Mohammedans, Africans, Native Americans, Japanese, Chinese and other Christians, as well as persecutions for purely political motives.*p*-----------------------*p*From what I see, I fear that the great lesson which this upcoming apology can teach to everyone will be missed. This is one of the oldest and largest organized religions in the world trying to focus on its spiritual life, a thing that even small groups of open minded neo-pagans can’t do. Reveling like a bunch of drunken boors over the embarrassment of another never brings about anything positive. In this case, it may bring about the greatest regret in history. The exercise of the Catholic Church should become a springboard for universal self-examination, not in a spate of mutual apologies and admiration, but in a truly spiritual leap into the humility that is the only true source of the greatness of human dignity.*p*--Beirdd