Gratifying Defence
A German-born pope who, in his youth had joined the Hitler Youth as any good German would do, now professes whole-heartedly his personal, and his Church's allegiance to and sympathy for global Jewry. Declaring it a human disaster of monumental proportions that an event so grievously inhumane as the Nazi Final Solution had been responsible for annihilating the greater portion of world Jews, during the Second World War.Fervently pledging, as did his predecessor, to continue cementing good relations between the Vatican and the State of Israel. Yet being incapable of foreseeing the ramifications of welcoming back into the Roman Catholic Church a man whose determined Holocaust-denial rants mark him as a moral pariah. This is puzzling in the extreme; Pope Benedict XVI prides himself on his intellectualism.
Is his cerebral functioning so limited to matters of the Holy Roman Church that he is functionally incapable of seeing beyond his immediate decision-making to heal a schism and damn the consequences? Apologists from within the Church have sprung up all over, claiming that the pope's initiative to restore the excommunicated branch to the bosom of the Church has been grossly misunderstood.
Yes, yes, of course it has. It's a trial and a tribulation that has been unfairly visited upon the Vatican and the well-meaning Pope. Yet here is German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaking of the extreme unhelpfulness of the Pope's decision toward relations between world Jewry and the Christian world, specifically that of the Catholic Church.
A rebuke from the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. Echoing that poetic rebuke of Nazism from Pastor Martin Niemoller. Wait, there are more, lining up to break ranks with those who support the Pope's injudicious decision. Werner Thissen, the archbishop of Hamburg, who says Bishop Williamson's excommunication should have been lifted only if he recanted his "unspeakable" claims there were no gas chambers.
And Bishop Gebhard Fuerst of Rottenburg-Stuttgart who characterized the rehabilitation as "a betrayal of trust among the Church's Jewish brothers and sisters, in their relationship to the Church". And Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Mueller who presides over Pope Benedict's home city of Regensburg announced that Bishop Williamson would not be welcome in its churches.
The Pope should lend an ear to those more sensitive, compassionate and understanding of world issues than he appears to be. His lamentable lack of wisdom in this matter does him little credit.
Labels: Anti-Semitism, Religion, Traditions
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, February 03, 2009
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